Featured TV on DVD Review: Game of Thrones: Season Seven
December 18, 2017
Game of Thrones: Season Seven - Buy from Amazon: DVD or Blu-ray
Game of Thrones is one of the biggest TV shows of all time. It was considered a hit right away with an average viewership of just over 2.5 million during its fourth season. Its most recent season had an average viewership over four times that. It holds the record for most Emmy wins by a scripted show at 38. (This past season wasn’t eligible for this year’s Emmys because it started too late in the year, but I suspect it will earn a ton of nominations next year.) However, there is bad news, as season eight, the final season, won’t begin airing until 2019. Will season seven leave viewers aching for more? Or has the show finally started to show its age?
As always, Game of Thrones is a show you can’t review chronologically, because you will get to major spoilers before all of the major characters are introduced. Last season, there were eight major plot threads to deal with, plus a few minor ones. At the beginning of this season, that number had been cut down to four or five due to deaths and alliances. Spoiler alert: by the end of the season, it is down to three. Because of this issue, for the last couple of seasons, we’ve been reviewing the show geographically. And we will start things off with...
North of the Wall: Not much to say here, as all of the human characters have fled south of the wall leaving the Night King free to march his army of the undead south.
Winterfell: A lot of people have converged on Winterfell, either by the end of last season or early this season. This includes Jon Snow and Sansa, the latter of whom is the reason Petyr Baelish and Brienne of Tarth are there. The other remaining Stark children, Arya and Bran, also return, but not before Jon Snow is called by Daenerys to Dragonstone. At first, he doesn’t want to go, but when he gets a message from Sam Tully that Dragonstone is built on a mountain of dragonglass, the material needed to defeat the Night King, he races south. Because of this, there is not full Stark Family reunion, yet.
Additionally, the partial Stark Family reunion we do get is troubling. Bran is not the person Sansa and Arya knew. He lost what made him Bran, when he became the three-eyed raven. He has so much knowledge that he can’t connect with people on a human level anymore, not even his siblings. Furthermore, Jon and Sansa get into an argument over how to run Winterfell and later when Arya shows up, her combat prowess (There’s an amazing training session with her and Brienne of Tarth.) combined with her cold demeanor scares Sansa. Petyr Baelish seizes on both rifts as an opportunity to try and turn the Starks against each other, because chaos is a ladder.
On a side note, I was actually fooled by the opening of the season, for a little bit. At first, I thought it was a flashback, until Walder Frey says he brought all of the Freys that mean a damn together. Then I realized it wasn’t a flashback.
Cersei Lannister is now undisputed ruler of King’s Landing, but that came at a cost, the life of her last remaining child. This is a price that her brother, and father of those children, Jaime Lannister, thinks was too high. Furthermore, she managed to do what she usually does, make enemies out of allies and is now surrounded by enemies. She does get an ally when Euron Greyjoy arrives and offers his fleet, the largest fleet in Westeros, in exchange for her hand in marriage. After initially refusing, Cersie accepts, much to the dismay of Jamie. Can she turn the tide with just one ally? More on that in the review down below.
Meanwhile, Daenerys arrives at her ancestral homeland, Dragonstone, to begin the conquest of Westeros. With her are the Dothraki, the Unsullied, Yara and Theon and their Ironborn fleet, Ellaria Sand and the army of Dorne, and finally Olenna Tyrell and the army of Tyrell. She only arrives at the end of the first episode, but quickly suffers three military setbacks and the loss of three of those allies. At this point, she’s starting to think Tyrion Lannister is working with his siblings. By this time, Jon Snow has arrived and offers some advice. Use her dragons in battle. Tyrion had advised against this, because a single lucky shot by a single archer in the Lannister army would have the potential to end her life and end the war.
There are two minor groups to deal with. Firstly, Sam and Gilly are at Oldtown where Sam is training to be a maester. Since he’s the new guy, he gets all of the crappy jobs. He does risk his life to save a character we haven’t seen for a while, but for the most part, his role in the season is to find exposition in old books to help move the plot along. Finally, there is the Hound and the Brothers Without Banners. We only meet them briefly in the first episode, when they go to the farmstead the Hound stole from back when he was guarding Arya. When we meet them next, it is too far into spoiler territory to get into.
Season seven was supposed to be the last season, but HBO convinced the showrunners to have two slightly shorter seasons instead. This proved to be a mistake, but not in the direction I was expecting. I was expecting the show to feel padded, as they had to have two extra episodes to get to the same point they were expected to get to. Instead, it feels rushed, especially in the beginning. They really could have used a full ten episodes to give us more of Daenerys’s allies, before that goes to hell. Daenerys returns to Westeros with five allies and in just two episodes, loses three of them due to overwhelming defeats. The plot moves way too fast. For that matter, so do the people. I made fun of people who thought Varys teleported at the end of season six. “How did he get from Dorne back to Meereen in time for Daenerys to leave on her fleet?!” He didn’t. The fleet had Dornish ships, so clearly Daenerys picked him up in Dorne, or they met in the middle and this could have taken months. However, we don’t have that freedom when it comes to the attack on Highgarden. Cersei tells the Iron bank that she will have their money in 14 days. Jaime then travels from King’s Landing to sack Highgarden and take their gold and food. We are told in the show that the Ice Wall is 500 miles long, while the road from King’s Landing to Highgarden is nearly three times as long as the wall, according to official maps. Even a mounted rider can only travel about 40 miles a day before they risk killing the horse, so it would take at minimum, a month for Jaime to get there. Even if the fight lasted a single day, it would still take more than a month to get the gold back, because now you don’t have just horses, you have horses pulling loaded wagons. Why am I harping on what seems like a minor nitpick? Two reasons. Firstly, because it is emblematic of the major issue this season. Too much happens too quickly early on and it strains suspension of disbelief. (Furthermore, later in the season, a very similar event happens involving Daenerys rescuing Jon Snow and others from north of the wall, only the distance it much longer and the time frame is much, much shorter. It reeks of bad writing.) Secondly, it’s the only main complaint I have for this season.
Granted, there are some minor issues. I think it was too easy for Petyr Baelish to put a wedge between Sansa and Arya. Sansa and Arya were clearly shown to be smart enough to understand Petyr’s game, but still fell for it for too long. Furthermore, in Oldtown, there was not enough Gilly, and Sam was in full exposition mode for nearly all of his time on screen. He did have some nice character moments, especially with Jorah Mormont. We do get a lot more of these character moments later in the series, especially at the Dragonpit reunion (Details are spoilers). However, I still would have preferred more of these character moments. The season would have also been better if the early setbacks Daenerys suffered had more room to breathe. Frankly, I would have preferred if there were 10 episodes this season. Instead of being padded out, it felt rushed.
Each episode has an In Episode Guide, which is a what it sounds like. There are three sections, Characters, Locations, and History, and you can select from those options and read information about what it happening in the current scene. Some of this information is just backstory, but other information could help you catch up if it has been a while since you watched earlier episodes. There are also audio commentary tracks on every episode; in fact, of the seven episodes, four of them have two tracks.
The rest of the extras are on the third disc, starting with a two-part, 46-minute long look at the massive art department the show uses. Fire and Steel is a 30-minute featurette that looks at the major battles in the season. Histories and Lore have eight short animated segments about various aspects of the show, some of which were touched on this season. At least one of which sounds like a spoiler for season eight, so I’m avoiding that one. (The Golden Company, for those who are wondering.)
That’s a lot of extras, but it is something we’ve come to expect with this show. If this were all the extras on the Blu-ray, it would be Pick of the Week for sure. However, it’s not.
There is a bonus disc on the Blu-ray called Game of Thrones: Conquest and Rebellion, which is a 45-minute “motion comic” that details the history of of Westeros from the time House Targaryen first arrived there. If you are not big into the books, there’s a lot to learn here. Even if you are into the history, this is still interesting to watch.
Game of Thrones: Season Seven started out a bit too rushed, but it did find its footing around episode three or four and did a great job setting up season eight. The DVD and Blu-ray are loaded with extras. It’s easily the Pick of the Week.
Video on Demand
The Show
The Extras
The Verdict
Filed under: Video Review, David Bradley, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Peter Dinklage, Aidan Gillen, Iain Glen, Lena Headey, Diana Rigg, Rory McCann, Furdik Vladimir, Pilou Asbaek, Hannah Murray, Kit Harington, Isaac Hempstead-Wright, Gwendoline Christie, Emilia Clarke, Indira Varma, Maisie Williams, Sophie Turner, Alfie Allen, John Bradley, Conleth Hill, Gemma Whelan