Once upon a time, about a century or two ago, there was a TV show called Game Of Thrones. It’s okay if you’ve never heard of it. It was, ultimately, not worth all the fuss. Though it started off really good, it ended in a lavishly produced whimper that managed to squander years of widespread praise with rushed character turns and a bunch of really stupid moments.
Though it’s hard to recount each of the many ways the series disappointed on a holistic level, YouTube channel Supercuts Delight has put together a video focused on something more manageable: The various plot lines Game Of Thrones introduced in earlier seasons and then decided weren’t worth figuring out how to follow through on.
The video describes a whole lot of these abandoned ideas, which range from fairly insignificant to substantial. There’s the mysterious masked lady, never seen again after her appearance in an early season, who speaks important prophecies and is hinted to be an important character. There are the spooky symbols the White Walkers create all over the place, mostly by arranging dead bodies, that the show continuously lingers on as an ominous sign but don’t end up meaning anything. There’s Stannis’ magic fire sword, which is meant to mark a reborn god, but ends up being forgotten after his death and revisited only as something Melisandre does for other peoples’ weapons as a party trick. These sorts of things might seem petty, but they also end up standing in for larger narrative concerns—like, say, the sword’s place in a religious struggle between polytheism and a newly-arrived monotheistic faith—that end up getting dropped entirely.
The list goes on and on, including stuff like Bran being able to see through time, the White Walkers’ baby sacrifices, and the fact that Dorne, a powerful kingdom involved in the fictional world’s political struggle, is barely mentioned as the show comes to an end. Most of these stem from the fact that the show’s first few seasons followed George R.R. Martin’s books pretty closely, incorporating plot points that are obviously important but haven’t been concluded in the source material.
That said, they’re a good reminder that Martin’s books are still worth looking forward to for anyone hoping for a more satisfying ending to the story. The only catch, of course, is that we’re probably going to get more TV Game Of Thrones, and maybe a fresh batch of open-ended plot ideas, before the books complete the original story.
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