Game of Thrones

For Whom ‘The Bells’ Toll

M.G. Siegler
500ish
Published in
5 min readMay 15, 2019

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Warning: This should go without saying, but SPOILER ALERTS BELOW. If you are not caught up on Game of Thrones, do not read this post. Yet. Read it later!

I swear this isn’t going to turn into a Game of Thrones fan blog. That would be dumb anyway, with the show about to end. But having just watched the penultimate episode, The Bells, it’s top of mind once again, so I wanted to jot down some thoughts. Less about the episode itself, and more about what has become clear at a macro level: the showrunners have vastly underestimated the amount of time it would take to wrap up the series.

If you look at the complaints online — and there are a lot of them — they can seemingly all be boiled down to this point. The writers are doing far too much to cut corners in order to wrap things up with a nice bow. But it now seems safe to say that we all would have preferred that they threw out the bow and opted for a bigger box.

This is both easier said than done and easier said in hindsight, of course. The reality is that they had to make a call a few years ago in terms of how to land this massive undertaking. Throughout the years, you’ve heard David Benioff and D.B. Weiss say time and…

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Writer turned investor turned investor who writes. General Partner at GV. I blog to think.