WARNING: Contains some minor spoilers for Game of Thrones Season Eight plot points.
With just one more episode to go, and after eight seasons, Game of Thrones is finally coming to an end. In general, fans have been less than impressed with the writing this season, with characters doing things that it just doesn’t feel like they should be doing. Tyrion is making dumb decisions. Arya was easily convinced not to try to kill someone (come on, Arya?).
Jon Snow barely waved goodbye at giant good boy Ghost before sending him north. A fight sequence that took 55 nights to film was barely visible onscreen. A coffee cup made an accidental cameo. And even though the audience has seen it coming, the show’s attempt to turn Daenerys Targaryen into a revenge-crazed psychopath in the vein of her father, the Mad King, seems forced.
Since the show has had such an epic run, the expectations for the last season were high, perhaps unreasonably so. But it’s not just the audience that seems underwhelmed; interviews with some of the show’s actors give the distinct impression that they, too, are dissatisfied.
When asked about the show’s ending on various red carpet events, the cast kind of let us know the biggest spoiler of all—it wasn’t going to be very good.
https://twitter.com/wildtargaryen/status/1125884083127582721
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime Lannister, revealed that he wasn’t a huge fan of the show’s decision to have him hook up with Brienne and then just abandon her.
But if Jaime’s decision to have sex with Brienne and then leave her feels like such a swift reversal your head is still spinning, Coster-Waldau is sympathetic: “We’re used to having a whole season to get to a point. Now suddenly, a lot of things happen very quickly.” The actor says he has to fill in a lot of the details for himself.
When Conleth Hill, who plays Lord Varys, was asked by EW if he was disappointed not to have a final scene with Littlefinger, he said:
I was very bummed to not have a final scene with him. I was bummed not to have any reaction to him dying, if he was my nemesis. That’s been my feeling the last couple seasons, that my character became more peripheral, that they concentrated on others more. That’s fine. It’s the nature of a multi-character show. It was kind of frustrating. As a whole it’s been overwhelmingly positive and brilliant but I suppose the last couple seasons weren’t my favorite.
And when they asked how viewers would feel about the final episode, Hill admitted, “I have no idea. I don’t know how I feel.”
On top of those interviews, a three-minute video of various interviews with Game of Thrones actors talking about the ending of the show in which they all come off as decidedly unimpressed.
A clip with Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen), Jacob Anderson (Grey Worm), and Nathalie Emmanuel (Missandei) shows them all laughing when Clarke doesn’t say “yes” to the question of whether they were happy with what happened to their characters. “Best season ever!” she says, in a joking attempt to cover.
Another part of the video shows Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister) talking about what a dumb idea it was to put people in the crypts to keep them safe during the Battle of Winterfell—the Night King was reanimating the dead, and the dead of Winterfell were buried, hello, in the crypts.
There’s also a part where Dinklage is being asked about the show, and his answer truly does make him seem like he’s being held hostage by the show’s producers.
Is it just me or does this clip of Peter Dinklage talking about the Game of Thrones finale look like a hostage video? pic.twitter.com/vQXZnqKWaA
— Ellie Hall (@ellievhall) May 13, 2019
And when an interviewer asks Kit Harington (Jon Snow) if he could sum up the ending in one word, he went with “disappointing.”
At which point the interviewer’s face looked like this:
OUCH.
Well, they’ve had a good run, at least there’s that much. The ending might not be ideal, but what’s done is done and soon it’ll be time to move on from obsessing about the show. In the meantime, you can check out the whole video of the Game of Thrones actors making faces about the last season below.
h/t: Vice, Boing Boing, Vanity Fair, EW