Game Of Thrones director says final season was "really rushed"
One director of the HBO hit agrees with the backlash aimed at the fantasy series final episodes
Think the last season of Game of Thrones suffered from some serious pacing problems? You’re not the only one. Turns out that Neil Marshall, the man who directed the show’s epic Blackwater battle episode in season two, also thinks the finale felt hurried.
Answering criticism of the show’s eighth and final season – which saw Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen rapidly turn from slave liberator to genocidal maniac – Marshall said the episodes were “rushed”.
“I kind of agree with a lot of the criticism that it was really rushed,” he told Metro. “Everyone ended up where they were meant to end up but they got there in a little bit of a rush in the end.”
But Marshall also said that, if he worked on the final season, he would have struggled to question the decisions of showrunner David Benioff and DB Weiss.
"It’s very difficult to second guess those guys because they are geniuses and they have done such an amazing job," he admitted.
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Marshall’s comments come after George RR Martin – the author of the Song of Ice and Fire book series which the TV was based on – said the show wasn’t “completely faithful” to the saga's final two yet-to-be-published novels.
“The [final] series has been… not completely faithful,” he said to Fast Company. “Otherwise, it would have to run another five seasons.”
Referring to his relationship with Benioff and Weiss, Martin added: “Sometimes their creative vision and your creative vision don’t match, and you get the famous creative differences thing – that leads to a lot of conflict.”
Although the final season of Game of Thrones was met by major criticism – including a petition signed by 1.3 million people demanding that the season be re-done – HBO are currently working on three spin-off shows also set in Westeros. While two of these series are still in the development stage, a pilot has been greenlit for a show starring Naomi Watts and John Simm.
Whilst the plot of the series is being a closely guarded secret, you find our speculative musings here.
