Game of Thrones’ Pacing Problem
As characters proliferate and story-lines diverge, Game of Thrones is stuck in an awkward situation
I first got into Game of Thrones when stuck at home with mumps, with nothing else to do. I quickly blasted through all three seasons that had been released, and soon after transferred over to the books.
Having read the books has made me slightly prone, as many others are, to picking out trivial problems with the show and making an unnecessarily big deal of them. I recognise that this is just nit-picking though, and any frustrations I feel against the show because of these things, I tend to discount.
There is, however, a wider problem with the TV series which has led me to enjoy the most recent seasons less than the first three.
Game of Thrones has always had a wide range of characters, so many that it’s something of a running joke among show fans that most people’s names get forgotten. The show has also always has multiple sub-plots running alongside each other at once; in the first season we had stories set in King’s Landing, Winterfell, Castle Black and wherever Daenerys happened to be, as well as other areas as characters moved around.
However, there was overall more cohesiveness to the show. Season 1 had Ned Stark acting as a central character, tying multiple sub-plots together, and characters tended to be grouped up in a small number of settings. There was generally a lot of crossover between sub-plots as well, a good example being Tyrion’s story, which takes him from Winterfell to the wall with Jon, then back to Winterfell with Bran and Robb, then to an encounter with Catelyn which takes him to the Eyrie, before finally meeting his father in the Riverlands and eventually back to King’s Landing.
Nowadays, there are arguably even more main characters (though this is offset by the number who have died), and more importantly, these characters are much more split up into smaller sub-plots. The most recent episode was notable for a couple of reunions (Brienne, Pod and Sansa with Jon; Jorah and Daario with Daenerys) which simplifies things a little, but before this we had:
- Bran and co beyond the wall
- Jon, the Night’s Watch, Melisandre, Davos and the wildlings at Castle Black
- Sansa, Brienne and Podrick heading North
- Ramsay and Roose in Winterfell
- The Dorne lot in Dorne
- Cersei, Jaime, Tommen, The Faith Militant, Margaery and a bunch of others at King’s Landing
- Arya and Jaqen in Braavos
- Jorah and Daario out looking for Daenerys
- Daenerys out with the Dothraki
- Tyrion, Varys, Missandei and Grey Worm in Meereen
- Sam and Gilly on a boat
- Yara and Euron (and now Theon) on the Iron Islands
- Littlefinger out on his jet-pack, heading towards the Vale
- Whoever else I’ve forgotten about
As I mentioned, some of these plots have converged, and some are expected to soon (Jon and Sansa heading to Winterfell to face Ramsay, Daenerys and co heading back to Meereen.)
The problem for me, though, is that the way that the plot has sprawled out has resulted in the show’s progression feeling both too slow, and too quick.
Since there are so many areas to cover, individual sub-plots only tend to get around 5–10 minutes each episode, and often will only feature every other episode. This means that we at times have to wait a few weeks to see the next ten minutes of Sam and Gilly’s story, making progress feel slow. At the same time, so much has to happen in each segment that when characters actually get some screen time, their story is rushed along.
A good example of the problems this causes comes from Dorne plot. Oberyn Martell’s popularity in season four should have excited audiences for our first look at Dorne in season five, but Dorne has been pretty universally hated by fans of the show. This is partially due to dissatisfaction with the slightly strange plot and the writing, but part of the problem can be ascribed to a lack of screen time. Since we see so little of Dorne or its characters, it’s hard to care much about them.
George R.R. Martin accounted for this problem in the novels by splitting the narrative between two books whose plots run concurrently: A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons. By having only around half of the POV characters featured in each book, we avoid long stretches between chapters focusing on a certain plot line, and the pacing is better off for it.
The show did a touch of this by leaving out Bran from season 5, but otherwise all story-lines go on running parallel to each other, and the show is not quite what it once was because of this. There is little time now for interesting expansion of lore or character development.
This is not really a problem for the show, since Game of Thrones is a juggernaut which looks unlikely to stop; audiences are already hooked on the story, and viewing figures will stay high so long as the fast moving plot keeps us interested. It is a shame, though, that that’s really mostly what it is now; a frenetic series of plot points strung together one after the other, without the extra detail and world building that we bought into in the first place.
