Forget Season 8, This Moment Is Where Game of Thrones Really Fell Apart

Most fans agree that the last two seasons of Game of Thrones were the weakest. This is particularly obvious as they should have been the seasons that tied everything together and provided a satisfying ending. But things started to fall apart for the show long before that.

Think back to the end of season 4 and the myriad questions it raised about how season 5 would play out:

• Tyrion had killed Tywin and Shea and was being smuggled off to an undisclosed location
• Arya left the Hound for dead
• Cersei ordered Qyburn to rescue Ser Gregor
• Dany was presented with the charred remains of a child and had no choice but to chain Rhaegal and Viserion
• No one knew where Drogon was
• Mance Rayder had been captured

It was unclear where any of this would lead. But viewers were gripped.

Then came season 5, when the writers began to rush through the remainder of the source material and make poor choices.

That's not to say that Season 5 was all bad. There were still some good storylines being played out. The High Sparrow in King's Landing and the Sons of the Harpy made things difficult for Cersei and Dany, respectively.

And let's not forget that sadistic bastard Ramsay Bolton was becoming more and more influential.

But season 5 was the first time we saw major plot holes forming. It's not entirely impossible that Tyrion would have sided with Daenerys Targaryen in the end. After all, he gave up everything when he killed his father. But his journey to meet Dany felt contrived.

Arya's time in Braavos was just boring - apart from when she killed Meryn Trant. And Dany's character development pretty much stalled.

Likewise, there was an opportunity to tell a real story in Dorne, which is far more prominent in the books. But Jaime and Bronn's venture there felt almost like a spin-off series. It was somewhat disconnected from the main storyline and felt like an afterthought.

This season also included the underwhelming deaths of Ser Barristan Selmy and Stannis Baratheon. This was by no means the end of the series. At this point, the showrunners could have reflected on their mistakes and changed course. They chose not to. So in the end, the beginning of season 5 was the moment when GoT fell apart.

Character development became secondary, and the writers tried to force the story in a way that contradicted everything that had been so good about the first four seasons. But surely the biggest mistake was the gradual diminishing of George R.R. Martin's influence on the world and characters he had created. From that point on, it became more about what the network wanted than the author's vision.