The moments in which the film’s blockbuster stars play memorably against type are quickly subsumed by the ugly chaos of the action.
As David Benioff and D.B. Weiss show with this masterful rebuttal of an episode, it’s never too late to choose a different narrative.
There’s no shortage of empty gestures throughout the latest episode of the series.
The episode gives the audience exactly what it expects, and absolutely nothing else.
The episode has the good sense to respect our familiarity with these characters, and as such it doesn’t beat around the bush.
Violence is teased, but tantalizingly withheld, throughout the season-seven finale of Game of Thrones.
The episode offers up a battle between CGI dragons and CGI zombies, to pulpy effect but no moral consequence.
The episode that dials back from the epic confrontations that have filled out the majority of this season.
Even after six seasons, Game of Thrones still doesn’t know what’s most important to its own story.
Death is momentarily thrilling, but the struggles of those who live on are what sustain the series.
The depressing truth to the episode’s title may be that no one can get what they want without violence.
A pageantry of pseudo-art poses, a self-consciously cool reorientation of the western as silly symphony.
Game of Thrones tends to peak with its penultimate episode, leaving finales open to operate as a form of self-summary.
The episode’s saving grace lies in the contrast that the series continues to develop between the two young women of the Stark family.
The Sansa/Cersei contrast sets the tone of the episode, which focuses on women more than any other hour of the series to date.
The inter-scene cutting here slightly lingers on every place the camera visits, now searching for someone who appears to know where to go next.
Game of Thrones finally feels liberated from its own extensive mythology and now moves with thrilling fury and purpose.
Game of Thrones’s best season yet comes with a typically great transfer and enough extras to please devotees for days.
The series feels like it has some firm footing and a newfound sense of certain direction that was lacking intermittently in the second season.
After last week’s thematically spastic episode, it’s refreshing to see that a simple and direct, albeit unambitious, theme unites the various plot strands here.