Entertainment
Warning: this article contains massive spoilers for season eight, episode five of Game of Thrones.
They say that all good things come to an end, and the HBO series Game of Thrones is definitely one of those great things we'll miss, once the final episode cuts to black and we know definitively who sits on the Iron Throne (or at least, the pile of ash and rubble where the Iron Throne would've been). But not everyone may agree with me on that front.
While the first three seasons of the show were unlike anything the world had seen before, the program's latter run left a lot to be desired, especially once the plot deviated from the novels they were based on.
Here's what we can expect from the very last episode of Game of Thrones:
Episodes three and four of the season split opinion, to say the least, but it's episode five that's caused some people to give up on Game of Thrones entirely. The writing has certainly not been as good since DB Weiss and David Benioff took the reins full-time, but for some people, The Bells was the episode where things took a huge nosedive.
Having spent several years crafting intricate character arcs and little hints and teasers, Game of Thrones seemed to throw that all away in the latest episode, and yeah - people weren't thrilled about this.
Uhhh... pretty much that. Let's get a lot more fan reaction, shall we?
Yeah, people are not happy. Not one bit. While it's fair to say that the show had been foreshadowing Dany's descent into madness and it was obvious that Jaime and Cersei Lannister would die by each other's side, in the context of the show's journey over the past eight years, this felt like four years' worth of development in about three episodes.
Ahead of the final episode of Game of Thrones next week, the feeling is a lot more subdued than we perhaps expected, and it remains to be seen if showrunners DB Weiss and David Benioff will be able to subvert our expectations one last time.
And if they do manage that, will we be able to enjoy it?