“Mhysa” S03E10 Game of Thrones Review

Oh Game of Thrones, how you are underwhelming us with your finale.  Series 1: dragons.  Series 2: whitewalkers.  Series 3: er, some grateful slaves?  Ok, so you probably timed the Red Wedding well by putting it at the end of the last episode, seeing as you don’t like to leave us hanging with specific characters.  And the source material you are working from literally has nothing left to shock us except for about two or three events that you are very wise to leave for series 4.  But come on!!  A 5 minute scene with Dany who we’ve barely seen for several episodes?  After she’s freed another slave colony?  Who cares?  We all love Dany, but she’s already had a go, couldn’t you think of something a little bit more exciting?  I feel the last scene was a style over substance decision, as it was the only scene you could engineer to have a ‘ooh, look at all those people’ reaction.  Why not save the wolf head bit til last and show us it properly?  I had to keep rewinding and rewinding to see it clearly, and even then I couldn’t tell if Robb still had his head on or not.  Plus it wasn’t sewn on, just stuck on with spikes from what I could tell, which wasn’t very much.  Have some balls HBO, you normally do and I know this as you usually aren’t afraid to wave them about in my face – literally.

If fact, the whole thing for me was pretty dull.  Although I was expecting there to be a lack of content, I was at least hoping that the producers would jazz it up a bit.  Perhaps a stellar scene with Olenna Tyrell or a battle of wills between Tyrion and Cersei (we got a bit of a limp handshake on that one) or Jaime and Brienne speaking to each other whilst walking through a gate for 12 seconds.  Maybe they could have Westeros invent the internet and Varys and Littlefinger could have done some bitching over Skype.  Anything but Bran and his band of miserable men, Jon and Ygritte’s increasingly corny love story and Tyrion putting the imp into impotent.

Everyone is so miserable!  The only person who seems to be having any fun is The Boy, now revealed to be Ramsay Snow, the legitimised bastard son of Roose Bolton, the new shitface on the northern block.  The sausage was wonderfully cruel, but I wish they had devoted more time to that scene, as Iwan Rheon didn’t get the chance to go fully mental.  The box and letter to Balon was a wonderfully wicked twist though.

There were some highlights, though few and far between.  Joffrey is starting to emerge not only as a sociopath, but one who still needs to hold his mother’s hand when going to beddy byes.  Tyrion’s defense of his wife and plain decency has resulted in a threat against the king’s life, so it should be interesting to see how that will play out.  It was also nice to see Castle Black again after all this time, albeit it very briefly as has become a theme in this series.  Arya and the hound teaming up to inflict some cold bloodied vengeance on some passing goons.  Arya is one of the few Starks that does killing for necessity, reaction or just plain emotion and it’s a quality that makes her seem more human than the rest of the honourable clan.  Gendry delivered as ever, being one of the few normal people we can relate to, who unfortunately has had this chaos thrust upon him.  He even makes Davos more bearable when they’re together.  Sadly he’s gone off again, so I do hope we get to see what’s happened to him in the next series.

One of the main issues with this episode, and with the series so far is one that I’ve touched upon before.  The characters are so spread across the map, or kept apart by circumstance, that there are too many stories to follow.  Instead of following the action at Kings Landing, Winterfell, Castle Black and wherever Dany is as we did in the first series, they are now trying to squeeze in so many people that no one gets any proper coverage.  This episode was the worst for that, as they tried to wrap up, or in some cases literally just show, everyone’s story so you weren’t left wondering over the break.  I’d rather carry on not knowing, or had the order moved around a bit so they were wrapped up a few episodes ago, than have only a few minutes with each person as we did here.

I can’t knock the quality of the episode, as everyone was on top form and the dialogue was as good as ever, but with nothing for anyone to get their teeth into, there was nothing for me to get excited about.  And you should never end a series on ‘meh’.

6/10 – only as a series finale should have more