Service Interrupted?

The end of the next-to-last season of HBO's Game of Thrones series brought forth a number of analysis pieces suggesting that the show has degraded in quality even while it's skyrocketed in popularity. Some suggest that since the showrunners are now out ahead of George R.R. Martin's book series they lack his directing mind and are simply unable to produce work of the quality that Martin himself produced.

Different writers offer several reasons, but the main one seems to be the idea that the showrunners spent a lot of time in season seven on what's called "fan service," where they directed narrative strands towards what the show's fan base wants to see. Characters pair up, characters die, events happen, and all of it rests less on narrative logic and more on giving people what they want.

Of course, that's certainly possible. But most of those making the complaint suggest that the storyline should have gone different ways than it did. In other words, the problem isn't the idea of fan service itself so much as it's which fans got their service. I've never watched the show, but I have watched the clip of young Bella Ramsey kicking some major behind with her speech as Lyanna Mormont in season six, episode 10. Since I'm not a fan I won't ask for service, but if I did it would be to give her the dragons and the throne and everyone else get the heck out of her way. Which would also make the show over with quicker, and I can't complain about that.

Either way, the current loose schedule has the show wrapping up sometime in late 2018 or early 2019 (they need winter weather in order to have enough snow for the wintertime setting of the current episodes, and so won't start shooting until late this year). It may finish before Martin releases Winds of Winter, currently projected as the second-to-last of the "Song of Ice and Fire" series. It'll certainly end before he publishes A Dream of Spring, which he -- for now -- says will be the final SOIAF novel.

So every day is one day closer to not having to hear about this show anymore, and even if it won't get finished at a Lyanna Mormont pace that's not bad at all, I guess.