When Game of Thrones jumped the shark

SPOILER ALERT: if you haven't yet watched Game of Thrones Season 6, Episode 5, titled "The Door," and you don't want to know any plot spoilers (yet), don't read any further. In the opinion of a majority of the show's audience, Happy Days became unwatchable when Fonzie jumped over a shark on water skis, taking the tough-guy persona from being somewhat difficult-to-believe well into the theater of the absurd. The idiom "jumping the shark" became famous soon thereafter, and was used to describe the point in any television series when far-fetched plot twists began being included merely for the sake of novelty, which tended to mark the beginning of a sharp decline in the show's quality of writing. To be brutally honest, I'm afraid that Game of Thrones jumped the shark in last night's episode. For whatever reason, I was reminded of that approximate point when Twin Peaks stopped being interesting, and started getting stupid. Now I suppose I'll eventually watch "Blood of my Blood" (the next installment in Game of Thrones) out of morbid curiosity, and the hope Ramsey Bolton might be killed off, but the plot twists in last night's episode pretty much ruined the plot line for the entire series, in my opinion. I don't know how the writers can fix it. In essence, Bran Stark learned that the Children had created the either the first White Walker or the Night's King by shoving what looked like a wooden blade deep into a captive human's chest. But then asked to explain why they had created the first White Walker, the spokesperson for the Children claimed that their reason … [Read more...]