Something isn’t right here
It’s not unfair to say that the final season of Game of Thrones has been something of a mixed bag. Reviews for the latest episode, ‘The Last of the Starks’, have been equally mixed with many viewers increasingly feeling that the show’s creators are attempting to wrap everything up far, far too quickly.
We’ve seen evidence of this, as well as some clear examples of a lack of attention, in a number of areas: the Night King being killed in third episode of a six-episode season, Daenerys having virtually everyone (bar Jon Snow and her remaining dragon) she loves taken from her in the past two episodes, a Starbucks cup being left in shot during a scene at Winterfell and – as many viewers noticed last night – the fact that the geography of King’s Landing appears to have been changed to suit the logistics of an episode.
In Monday night’s episode, Dany and her cohorts travel with the Unsullied to King’s Landing to offer Queen Cersei one last chance to surrender before the fighting begins.
Cersei rejects this opportunity and instead suggests Dany surrender or be forced to watch her captured assistant/advisor Missandei be executed on the walls of King’s Landing.
Dany obviously says ‘fuck off’ and Missandei is killed in an admittedly powerful scene, but one couldn’t help but notice that the scene appeared to take place in a desert, as you can see below.
It’s very dry, there’s some dry shrubbery, it looks pretty dank to be honest, and not in a good way.
That’s all fine, King’s Landing is in a warm area far to the south of, well, the North, so being warm is understandable.
But take a second if you will to use your eyes to peer at this still depicting the setting of King’s Landing from a previous episode.
That is one pretty lush place. It’s essentially a city on a peninsula, surrounded by water on three sides, and the side connected to the land leading directly to a vibrant forested area.
There is not a single desert in sight. There isn’t even a fucking area of flat land in sight. It is one sloping hill/mountain from the second you reach land.
So what is supposed to have happened? Did Cersei literally salt the earth to create a barren wasteland that would give her a greater view of her enemies? Perhaps, but she would have also needed a digger – which doesn’t seem to exist in Thrones – to excavate and flatten the land, which no suspension of disbelief will allow me to consider actually happening.
Instead, the greatest and most obvious answer is that maybe, just maybe, the show runners of Game of Thrones decided that the third to last episode was a good time to change the basic geography of one of the show’s key locations.
Which is fine and all, but it does look a bit stupid.
https://twitter.com/thelionsheir/status/1125729549554266112?s=20
The many faces of King's Landing… pic.twitter.com/xeGxfgA5z3
— Travis (@wannlund) May 7, 2019
