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But here, within the 'bell to bell,' this mega-quest felt crammed. Normally, this expedition would have been spread out over two, or even three, episodes. Most of the major complaints regarding Season 7 can be found within the penultimate adventure episode, 'Beyond the Wall' (which even sounds flat as a title). Weiss and Benioff have a near-impossible task and a near-impossible audience to satiate. It's possible that we've all now reached a point, given everyone's varied favorite characters/favorite pairings/theories/predictions, that the show cannot unify us the way it once did, even if that unity came via mortification. Their demise didn't crush our spirits and make us want to rage-quit the series. We wanted people to die, and they surely did but - oh - they weren't important enough to count. It's a very slim Venn Diagram here for this tricky balancing act of tenderizing and terrorizing.

Thrones can no longer be too depressing and cutthroat, nor can everything play out too close to the way people expect. Now various gripes about the show have reached a bridge too far in the other direction. The show's seasonal budget was, assumedly the same, but now more money was being put into the episodes. The silver lining to only having seven episodes was the increased frequency of massive battle sequences, which used to only come once a season. Longer episodes sure (most by 10 minutes, the finale by 30), but fewer chapters overall to tell a story that would usually be spread out over 10. Enter Season 7, which not only continued to feel more 'TV,' but also ramped up the fast travel (to a degree where the only way to get past the geographical gaps was to ignore them completely) because there were now fewer episodes.

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Thrones was now more of a traditional TV show than the celebration of audience contempt that we'd all grown to love (despite its knack for traumatizing us). David Benioff and Dan Weiss were now finishing the story in a markedly different fashion than Martin would - despite some overall plot beats being the same.

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That vibe, plus some lingering complaints about 'fast travel,' made Season 6 land in a much different way than other Thrones seasons. It was the happiest season of Thrones to date, capped off by the exceptional episodes 'Battle of the Bastards' and 'The Winds of Winter.' Still though, the run almost felt too rewarding given what the show, and story, had been up until that point.

Fully untethered from GRRM's pages, Season 6 would proceed to hand out happy moments and payoffs like they were pocket candy. This would be the first time that a major fan theory had the possibility of being confirmed, one way or another.