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The core problem with the Game of Thrones finale was the lack of dramatic tension. It's something the series had in spades at first, but in the books it began to bleed away as the narrative became unfocused. The TV show lost whatever still remained at the Battle of Winterfell.
Dramatic tension can be built in many different ways, from surprising plot twists to internal conflicts. Basically, you want the audience to feel a sense of discovery as it encounters the unexpected.
You're in a bad place as a storyteller when the last five hours of your massive epic tale has audience members nodding their heads and saying, "Yeah, well, I guess that had to happen. Pretty much what I expected. Nowhere else for the story to go."
Dramatic tension bleeds away when the plot twists are silly, relying heavily on absurd coincidences, smart people repeatedly doing stupid things, or people acting out of character. Big surprises should make sense in retrospect. Character changes should feel earned.
For all of its spectacle, the Battle of Winterfell is the moment GoT became a very conventional epic fantasy story with the usual tropes: a few characters at the end of their storyline die, the invincible Big Bad is defeated with a moment of heroism.
Thematically, it might have made sense for the implacable, wordless Night King to be swept off the board before the final act, but in practice it blew all the dramatic tension out of GoT like a balloon deflating. Everything done afterward to juice the story up felt random.
And the thematic strength of GoT was largely frittered away by the end anyway. The central ideas of how power works in feudal societies, the notion of good people losing because they played the game badly... all gone, and almost mocked in the final episode.
In the end, the "game of thrones" became more like tic-tac-toe, a simple linear progression through moves everyone either saw coming, or were mildly suspenseful only because they were made to seem artificially abrupt, like Dany's heel turn.
Half of the final episode was basically the audience tapping its foot and waiting for Jon to do the patently obvious thing. It lacked dramatic tension because (as with the Star Wars prequels) the doomed romance at the heart of his story wasn't convincing.
It hurt the show that its writers could handle funny stuff (anything with Bronn or Tormund, the final council meeting) but could never approach Martin's gift for character development or memorable expression of their internal struggles.
Dany came off as an eye-rolling lunatic when she might have offered a convincing defense of her actions and vision for the future that legitimately made Jon waver. What we got contained only a dollop of dramatic tension based on Jon's weakness as an indecisive clod.
Good dramatic tension comes from character strengths as well as weaknesses, from the strong features of a setting as well as its horrors and failures. Absent that, we got a final season of GoT that began with promise but ended up feeling like a train chugging into the station.
And for a story whose great early twists made perfect sense no matter how shocking - the death of Ned, the Red Wedding, you name it - much of what happened in the end defied sense and reason. It felt arbitrary, both in terms of character decisions and how the world works.
There are ways the same basic plot might have been spun out with more dramatic tension, and that's what the show really needed - not just more episodes for a badly rushed final two seasons but investing that time wisely to make the conclusion both dramatic and satisfying. /end
