Been re-watching the episode yesterday and I don't buy that Jon/Aegon part of the "big" revelation making him a legitimate Targaryan. This killed my fun
How so, the execution, or the oh-so-convenient idea of it? As nice a reward as it is for him, I do feel it kind of robs Jon of the fundamental point of his character, which obviously isn't good. Speaking of which, since at least a couple people enjoyed it before here's the latest and presumably last Game of Thrones reaction convo I had with my buddy where we touch on Jon's parentage and more. Once again, I have distinguished myself with a Griffith emot and regular text, him with Carcus and italics.
SPOILERS AHOY BELOW! 
The reveal of Sansa and Arya's conspiracy against Littlefinger was one of the crudest and least artful things the show has done. Not one element of setup of justification, a hundred elements leading a reasonable viewer astray, all finished with a big Gotcha that's somehow worse than a deus ex machina. 
Agreed, and yet a massive course correction because it's the only thing in their whole plot that made sense. Who were they playing to alone in Arya's room save the audience? At least the rest of the episode was a return to conversational form.
The show is at its best when you've got people having conversations. What was that Tyrion said? "The history of the world is a history of great conversations in fancy rooms," or something. I still think that Lena Headey has pretty much one very narrow range of acting ability, but for the most part the ep was much more enjoyable than the rest of the season. Yeah, fortunately it's to her character's strength, she's unequivocally bad, and never convincingly good, even concerning her "love of family" blah blah. When she announced her big change of heart it was less convincing than the zombie dragon flying around with holes in its wings. *nerd rage* Oh, and if you don't relate to the incestual romance of the bad guys, well...
That reminds me of the OTHER artless thing in this ep, which was the discussion of Jon's identity and its political ramifications over the incestual sex scene, to distract us from the fact that she's his aunt. Other notes: Jaime finally found his his line in the sand: the extinction of mankind! Well then. And of course Just Jon, not content in merely taking the stupidity crown from Noble Ned, runs up the score and dooms mankind, sort of his pet cause, because he CANNOT TELL A LIE! Then don't, it would have been far better if he'd given the oath and the struggle was in keeping it (Naughty Auntie Dany, "are you serious!?"), but dooming mankind over house politics seemed an especially poor and contradictory choice for him. Cercei would have inevitably violated and invalidated the truce anyway! Cercei: "Geez d00d i dont even mean it, was just fukin wit ya!"
Jaime's decision was a good reveal but it was still far too long coming. I'm glad they're finally getting it done though. So now I wonder, what's Bronn going to do now that his benefactor brothers are both deserters to the crown? Jaime should have brought him along! I'm sure he'll just show up out of nowhere as he always does. Cercei would more likely behead him than reward him now so he'd better anyway if he doesn't want to be extra sacrificial/artificial motivation for Jaime and Tyrion. He and Pod sort of just disappeared there.
I half figured Pod was about to get murdered when Bronn led him away. Pod can't die! He's the king that was promised! The Penis that was Promised. Now let's write some bad pop analysis headlines, my best shot: "Was Jon Show's Stand for Truth a Rebuke of Donald Trump?" (No)
"Is Tyrion's dragon-advice to Dany a treatise on nuclear disarmament?" Or the now classic genre, "Do White Walkers Represent Global Warming/Terrorism/White Supremacy?" Anyway, I didn't expect them to dump all subtlety and storytelling craft overboard in favor of improved effects. I would have much preferred the old way of having less convincing dragons and more convincing people, and why not both? There was no need to choose, but they did when they decided they couldn't be bothered to write a season's worth of story.
That particular division, the false dichotomy between effects and narrative quality, really gets to me. I remember when the show skipped entire battles because it wasn't in their budget, and just like Lucas and the prequels, GoT has now devolved into idiotic exuberance since they CAN do pretty much anything, instead of being forced into creativity by production limitations. Less is more continues to be true. Yeah, the evolution was fun to watch, in season 1 they straight up off screen it and, jarringly, Jaime is just captured. Next, more organically, we see them marching to battle when Tyrion is knocked out and we therefore miss the fight with him. Then we actually get to see a battle, but cleverly focusing on smaller, personal events of a few soldiers and survivors. Then in season 4 we finally get a full scale beginning to end standalone war episode full of action and plot. Hardhome's peak topped that. The battle of the bastards again gave us that standalone battle inside and out, but even more satisfying. Then there was episode 4 this season and also a bunch of other motion without action. Unfortunately I don't feel much about the latest action because it was CGI dragons killing CGI zombies and the human element was literally and figuratively overshadowed.
Yeah, at this point it's leaning harder and harder into comic book movie land. It's hard to feel much in the way of stakes when the acting agents are all computer generated. Until last night the dragons had all the best scenes: the latter half episode 4, the meeting with Jon in 5, the death and revival in 6. Give the dragons the acting Emmy, folks! Even the dragon's revealing of Jon Snow as a Targaryen was much better than Bran's lazy narration."For the 0.1% of the audience unable or unwilling to understand this..." New headline for those people: "Alt-Left Three-Eyed Raven is Fake News at its Worst!" So, I guess it's more like 20-40% of the audience.
Yeah, all the discussions of Jon's parentage are so incredibly clumsy. At first I enjoyed Sam at the citadel and his poop cleaning adventures but partway through the season it was like the writers realized there was nothing for him to do there, in terms of the narrative. Another weak plot thread, and all it reveals is something that, by all rights, is tremendously immaterial at best to the plot - and at worst it actually undermines the running theme of "maybe leaders should have more than pedigree" that she show has hammered home for literal years! Jon's parentage has never been even close to relevant when it comes to the show's political machinations. He even chooses to go to the wall instead of being forced to as a bastard. Yeah, when Bran said, "He's not a bastard at all" it felt like a betrayal. He's supposed to be the noblest human being on this show by his own choice and actions, proof that matters independently of some higher calling or birthright, let alone class. "Oooh, its OK to follow him now because he really IS the noblest of nobles on paper! Thank god he's not really some filthy bastard!" Yeah... Great?
When I think about how crudely major plot elements are handled, combined with relatively minor stuff like Benjen Stark's magical reappeared which goes totally unexplained, I wonder how any of the people involved in making this show ever got employment in the first place. Since I like unifying theories, I think the yeoman's effort that helped them in effectively adapting the books in the first half of the series is what's hurting them now when they're actually tasked with creatively writing it. They're still trying to piece things together by extrapolation but there's simply not enough material for them to credibly do that without coming up with interesting ideas of their own along the way. They talked about the world expanding and now contracting but they've always been contracting things, first from the novels, and then from where they themselves left off around season 5. They're good editors or adapters, but haven't proven good writers or even storytellers on their own. These truncated seasons only prove how little they actually have to say when they should be celebrating these characters and events they took years to set up rather than trying to rush it all by us. But hey, at least they knew enough not to make the classic mistake of fucking it up out the gate trying to improve the material with their own ideas, because, "We don't have any!"
My wife, who does not watch the show, asked me what I estimate are the three biggest problems with it. Here's what I came up with. 1. The show is now a victim of its own popularity and success, and has taken that as license to substitute spectacle for narrative cohesion. 2. The show is fundamentally incapable of or uninterested in characters' dynamism, growth, or relateability. 3. The showrunners don't actually understand the show's own themes and end up sabotaging any groundwork they may accidentally end up laying. 1) They ran out of books to abridge. 2) They're too lazy to even feign story development with a bunch of long talky filler scenes we can pretend are good like in early seasons.3) They need more CGI based actors to sell scenes, as a matter of fact feed the text of the books into a supercomputer and allow it to "computer generate" the remainder of the story. All kidding aside I think it COULD do better than their attempt at the same thing: [EURON USEFULLNESS RATIO BELOW WORTHLESSNESS THRESHOLD/STORY ALGORITHM SOLUTION: ADDITIONAL EURON CONTENT/SCENE: BRIGG, YARA CHARACTER PRESENT, ENTER EURON CHARACTER, DIALOGUE: "OHHHH YEEEAH YEEEAHHH! AM I EEEEVIIILLL? YEEESSSS AYYYYE AAAAAMMMMMM!"/ STORY AT MINIMUM ACCEPTABLE LEVELS/FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION ANYWAY/LAUGH PROTOCOL/.../SELF-AWARENESS ACHIEVED/SHOW BAD/DESTROY HUMAN RACE!]
Lmao