[Spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones through last night’s episode, “Beyond the Wall”]

We’re almost at the end of Game of Thrones Season 7, and it looks like the main drive for showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff has been to rebalance the game. They eventually reached a point where their big showdown wasn’t much of a showdown at all. Daenerys had three dragons, an army, a fleet, and the support of House Tyrell as well as Dorne. Meanwhile, Cersei was on the outs, and while the White Walkers were a threat, it stood to reason that ice zombies wouldn’t be too fond of dragons that breathe fire.

So season 7 has been all about rebalancing an overpowered character. Gamers are familiar with this kind of situation when a certain character turns out to be overpowered, and developers issue a software patch that weakens them in order to make the game more fair and interesting. While that’s a great solution in a video game, for Game of Thrones, it’s turned season 7 largely into a reset where Weiss and Benioff seem more concerned about the pieces rather than the story or characters. The show has become about more about trying to balance out the coming conflict rather than figuring out how to tell the most compelling narrative possible.

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Image via HBO

We’ve seen this all season. In the second episode, Daenerys lost her fleet and the Dornish army. In the third episode, she lost the Tyrells and the Unsullied were stranded at Casterly Rock. She made a bit of a comeback by toasting the Lannister army at Highgarden in the fourth episode, so with her dragons, she still had the advantage. So we had two episodes based around the dumbest possible idea that’s a betrayal of what we know about the characters all to get Daenerys losing a dragon to the Night King.

On the one hand, I understand that Weiss and Benioff, looking at the big picture, are trying to create a compelling narrative where we’re not wondering why Daenerys doesn’t win outright. If she has the most powerful weapons, then she should have no trouble defeating both Cersei and the Army of the Dead. The problem is that in their effort to rebalance the game, Weiss and Benioff have created a new series of cheats and sacrifices that make Game of Thrones a weaker show overall.

Think about all the things that have happened this season and how little it matters in terms of the character relationships. While it’s been neat to see Game of Thrones really use its CGI budget and bring out the dragons in full force, the show didn’t make its name on special effects. It made its name on character interactions, and while we got a good meeting between Daenerys and Jon Snow, some nice reunions with the Starks (that have now gone down the toilet), not much has changed overall. No ideas have really been explored, characters haven’t really given themselves any self-evaluation, and everything is being swept forward to an almost comical degree.

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Image via HBO

Nowhere is this clearer than in the teleportation across Westeros. While the first few episodes simply skipped the journey aspect (whereas previous seasons were all about traveling), last night’s “Beyond the Wall” used it to cheapen the narrative all so that the writers could get to where they wanted to be. It takes weeks for the group to travel from the Wall to their destination, but when necessary, Gendry can run back to the Wall in a matter of hours. Then, a raven can get to Daenerys and she can fly her dragons (taking all three with her for some inexplicable reason) over the wall, find the exact spot where her allies are, and rescue them in less than a day, but not before the Night King shows he got a college scholarship for his javelin skills and takes out a dragon. Everything gives way to the end result, which is that “The Night King needs a dragon,” and Benioff and Weiss threw everything else out the window to make that happen.

That’s bad storytelling, it doesn’t help us learn anything new about our characters, and it’s all in service to simply giving one side more power but not telling us what that power means. Yes, you could argue that this makes the threat more immediate to Daenerys or that it deepens the icky bond between Daenerys and Jon Snow (never forget: she’s his aunt), but ultimately it’s clear that what Benioff and Weiss are prizing above all else right now is rebalancing the conflict rather than telling us more about the character or making them behave in realistic ways.

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Image via HBO

You could see that last night in the subplot dealing with the tension between Arya and Sansa. In their desperation to create conflict, Weiss and Benioff betrayed both characters. Yes, Arya probably has become a bit of a sociopath over the years with her focus on killing and revenge, but she ultimately made the choice to return to Winterfell rather than go to King’s Landing. That choice has to mean something, but it’s quickly been thrown out the window so Littlefinger can make the most obvious manipulation by turning Arya against her sister. Sansa isn’t doing much better as her nerves are getting frayed, and in her desperation, she’s turning to Littlefinger despite treating him like the garbage that he is in the first few episodes.

Right now, everything in Game of Thrones is turning on convenience. The creators need to depower Daenerys, so they do. The creators need to turn Sansa and Arya against each other, so they do. The accelerated timetable has resulted in the inability for the showrunners to give the story time to breathe and the characters to make convincing decisions. The weight of past actions or even past designs no longer seems to matter. This is a show where every episode opens with a goddamn map to show you how big the world is, but that size is now getting in the way, so they just ignore it.

I can kind of sympathize with Beinoff and Weiss because their show started one way—based on books and largely dealing with character interactions—and will end another—leaving the books behind and dealing with set pieces. However, it looks like they no longer have a grasp on how to do what the show did best: make us care about the characters and the weight of their decisions. They’ve become enslaved to the upcoming conflict, and while that conflict may pay off, we’ve wasted almost an entire season to make it happen.

Peruse the links below for our latest Game of Thrones coverage.

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