As ever with this season – and even more so as we approach the conclusion next week – you are warned that there are spoilers within this review… Right from the start!

Daenerys marshals her forces and makes for Kings Landing, where the Iron Fleet and the myriad Scorpions on the walls await her and her remaining dragon. But first, she must sort out her ‘enemies’ closer to home.

What concerned me last week was – in spite of lots of parts of the episode feeling like they were taking too much time – the abrupt turn in both the manner of Daenerys and the perception of her by various people within her camp, not least Tyrion, who went from steadfast belief to ‘Oh dear, she might be a wrong ’un’ quicker than armies seem sometimes to teleport themselves across the Seven Kingdoms. With two episodes left, it felt like we would be engaging in a mad dash to the finish that would sacrifice a lot of the nuance and intrigue the show has cultivated over its previous seven seasons in favour of wrapping things up neatly.

Amazingly, this episode manages the same trick, dragging out certain things way beyond where they needed to be, while simultaneously managing to rush all the stuff that needed time to be taken. It’s also an episode with a pretty respectable body count, even by the standards of the show, both in terms of people we have come to know and in the more general sense of casualties of war.

It’s an irritating dissonance, and makes this viewer feel like the writers have literally got their interpretation of what the viewers want to see completely backwards. One character, who has been of pivotal importance to the show since its inception, doesn’t even appear onscreen until half an hour into proceedings, for example. Conclusions happen to various players which feel either frustratingly brief or just plain wrong. And it all plays out against a backdrop which drags on too long, is framed in such a way as to rob a key instigator of any semblance of agency or motivation, and leaves other characters to draw conclusions far more slowly than they have any right to do.

There is good stuff here too. There are some moments we have waited to come to pass and which adequately satisfy without necessarily really landing the way they might have. In terms of action, it delivers in terms of sheer spectacle, even of that spectacle does start to wear a little as a certain Michael Bay-ish sensibility creeps into proceedings. But mostly, what I felt as I watched the penultimate episode of a show in which I have invested a lot of time and energy was disappointment. It’s a mystery why Benioff and Weiss chose to shorten these last two seasons as they have, given that everyone, HBO included, was more than happy to keep the show going for many more seasons, but that self-imposed deadline is really starting to show its limitations as this final season comes to a close. With one episode to go, my hopes aren’t high that this one will stick the landing at all.

Verdict: Jarringly oddly paced, with emphasis in all the wrong places for this viewer. What good it manages can’t help but be swamped in all the many mistakes it makes. How sad to see, this close to the end of what has been a titan of the genre. 5/10

Greg D. Smith