Idiot Boxing, HBO Finales Edition: Game of Thrones, season 8 (2019); Veep, season 8 (2019); Crashing, season 3 (2019)

The dour faces depicted here match what many viewers felt
about this final season of the titanically popular series.

Game of Thrones, season 8

Spoilers Coming (which frankly, you deserve if you haven't caught up and watched the show by now)

Well, that was a bit of a letdown.

Not that we couldn't see it coming, but the final season of the insanely popular fantasy TV show maintained the high-gloss, rather puzzling mediocrity that had been set up during the previous season.

The end of season 7 of the show saw Daenerys joining her forces with Jon Snow and several northern factions, including wildlings from beyond The Wall and other assorted motley bands. These uneasy and unlikely alliances gather at Winterfell to try and fend off the Night King and his ever-growing army of White Walkers, including a zombie ice dragon. Meanwhile, Cersei is down south in King's Landing. Though she had promised to send soldiers to the north to assist the presumptive Targaryen queen, it is all a sham, as Cersei plans to wait for the Night King's forces to, if not defeat, then at least weaken the northern forces before they attempt to wrest the Iron Throne from the domineering Queen Lannister.

Season 8, further winnowing down the established 10-episode pattern of the first 6 seasons, restricted itself to 6 episodes, the last four of which clocked in at nearly 90 minutes each. Despite having about the same running length as most previous seasons, this final season featured the sloppiest, choppiest hacking and slashing away of nearly every subtle, nuanced plot and character point built up during the show's first five or six seasons. There was evidence of this in the penultimate season, but it is often painfully obvious in this one. I needn't go through them all, as more dedicated and sensitive GoT geeks have done all of that legwork for me and unleashed their ire upon every social media outlet known to man. For my part, I agree with much of the frustration felt, though I hardly take it as personally as many seem to have. I'll stick to just a few major points.

One of a few cringe-worthy moments of romantic cheese in
this season. In hindsight, it may have been a clumsy attempt
to throw viewers off the scent of where the story was going.

Firstly, the idea of Daenerys "breaking bad" was very poorly executed. I don't think it's a terrible idea to run with the notion of "power corrupting," and even throw the audience a curve-ball by having a beloved character get warped into a dark version of themselves. But Daenerys's turn into a murderous, egomaniacal tyrant is barely organic in any way. Like so many things about this season, it felt as if the writers started with a contrived concept, and then worked backwards to shoehorn a "they'll never see this coming" notion into an incredibly undersized time allotment. I think Daenerys's arc could have worked, if it had been set up and alluded to more delicately along the way. As it is, it felt like it was tacked onto the end for shock value more than anything that served genuine character development.

Then there's Bran ending up on the Iron Throne. Again, this perhaps could have been an intriguing and satisfying story element had Bran done anything more than sit around in a wheelchair, staring blankly into space for 99% of the last two seasons. While his powers are intriguing, they were never explored or much explained, and Tyrion's grand speech about Bran "having the greatest story of them all" is baldly insulting. For me, this was yet another idea that seemed to be included for the sole purpose of keeping us viewers off balance. Having surprises in a story is great, but they have to feel logical within the story. Bran ending up on the throne felt far from that. You want a great story, Tyrion? How about your wife Sansa, who matured and survived the machinations of several of the most devious and evil bastards in all of Westeros? Or how about Jon Snow, the guy who was literally brought back from the dead and saved everyone from the savior-turned-psycho Danaerys? That's a pretty good story, eh? But no, let's wheel out the catatonic weirdo that barely anyone knows and have him rule the joint. Makes sense.

There were moments and elements of this eighth season that I did enjoy. The quieter second episode had some strong moments of interpersonal dialogue in it, and some of the battle scenes and fights were quite memorable. On the whole, though, I have to say that this was easily the weakest season of the entire series. Now granted, for a show that set such an incredibly high bar, this was almost inevitable. But the dropoff was more precipitous than I had expected.

The good news for people like me, who had been avidly reading the source books for many years before the show existed, is that there are still two more novels to come (if the George R.R. Martin eventually gets around to them). And I feel confident that they will be far more satisfying in their conclusions than the show was. Perhaps the saddest thing about the HBO adaptation is that, despite how incredibly strong the first five seasons are, I doubt that I'll ever bother re-watching the series due to the knowledge that it all ends with a bit of a "thud."

Selena Meyer, along with a few of her brutally incompetent
staff. In the finale season, Selena tries one more shot at
winning the presidency.

Veep, season 7 (final season)

In a fortunate contrast to the far more famous Game of Thrones, the scathing HBO comedy series Veep went out on a hilarious high note.

After what I found to be relatively more mean-spirited and narratively scattershot 6th and 7th seasons, the final season of the political parody show found that great groove that it had in its stronger earlier seasons. Despite every sign in the world telling Selena Myer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) not to make yet another run at the presidency, her unfailing ego and narcissism saw her once again ignore any sense of reality or what might be best for the country as she kicks off her campaign at the beginning of Season 8.

This season made full use of the political realities at work in the United States over the last several years, featuring thinly-veiled references to Russian interference in elections, the frighteningly broad appeal of ignorant bigots like the current Commander in Chief, and the crippling identity politics of the far left. Many characters who had previously been smaller players become concentrated versions of figures who we know all too well in reality. The moronic Jonah Ryan actually finds a support base for his platform of toxic idiocy. The oblivious Jordan Spleth finds himself backing up the political ladder through a series of gaffs and accidents on the parts of leaders above him. And plenty of others with no business making public policy are whipped around by the vortex of their own reckless ambitions within the maelstrom of U.S. politics. I’ll have to go back and watch the earlier seasons again, but my initial reaction was that this last season may have been the show’s best, which is really saying something.

The humor was fully back on point here, too. As stated, I found some of the humor in the previous two seasons a bit dark and disturbing to be terribly funny. While season eight certainly keeps things cynical, I felt that it rediscovered the right balance in order to keep things humorous rather than downright upsetting. In this final season, the political and social commentary and the vicious insults come as fast, furious, and hilarious as any of the best seasons earlier in the show's run.

I'm not sure what can be said about the cast that one wouldn't have already seen in any of the previous seven seasons. Nearly a decade ago, virtually the entire cast came into this series as well-seasoned comedy acting pros, so it was no surprise that they finished the run just as strongly as they all started. One could spend multiple paragraphs breaking down the hilarity behind the various characters and the actors' portrayal of them, but I'll reserve it for the star Julia Louis Dreyfus, who is arguably on the Mount Rushmore of modern era TV comedy. Just between her turn as Elaine on Seinfeld and Selina Meyer on Veep, she's a living legend in the field, never mind some of her great turns on lesser-known shows and movies. It was great to see her end such a great series on top.

There is no doubt that before long, my wife and I will go back and do a steady rewatch of this show over several weeks or a couple of months. From the very first moments we began watching years ago, we knew that we were missing certain moments because we were laughing so hard and the jokes were coming so fast. That's a mark of great comedy, and I'm already looking forward to the time when we work out way through the over-the-top madness of this show again.


Crashing, season 3 (2019)

Pete's new girlfriend, Kat. Pete may be getting his professional
comedy feet under him, but his relationships can still be messy.

Unlike the previous two HBO shows reviewed, this season was not expected to be the show's final one, with it being officially cancelled shortly before the end of this third season. This is unfortunate, as both my wife and I highly enjoyed all three seasons of this stand-up comedy-focused series.

This third season sees Pete Holmes continue to make a more serious living out of stand-up comedy. At the start of the season, he has wrapped up the lucrative-but-limiting college comedy tour that he netted at the end of the previous season. Through this season, he keeps trying to find a bigger break at more noted comedy clubs. This doesn't immediately go very well, but Pete finds romance with a strong, free-spirited woman, Kat (Madeline Wise). Pete has some successes and failures, both professionally and personally, and by season's end, he does find himself in a better place than at season's start. He's certainly not "big time" yet, but he is a solid, professional stand-up.

Once again, the show was hilarious from start to finish. From the jump, Crashing had the built-in humor of having an aspiring comedian interacting with well-known, well-established, extremely funny stand-up comedians. This season is no different, although at this point, the show relied less on famous guests and allowed Pete and a few other, lesser-known characters take more center stage. We also continue to get a bit more insight into the world of stand-up comedy, where success or failure can sometimes be infuriatingly out of one's control, even if a person is genuinely funny. I also found the fourth episode engaging, as it focused on the changing perception of offensive, Andrew Dice Clay-type "shock comics" who were big in the 1990s but who have lost nearly all favor in the wake of social movement such as #MeToo.

Although the creators of the show were planning on further seasons and HBO's cancellation was a surprise for them, this season did actually have some sense of closure to it. For a show whose plug was unexpectedly pulled, this is about all one could ask for. I'll be grateful to Pete Holmes and everyone involved for putting together such a fun show and introducing my wife and I to several comics whom we hadn't heard of before but whom we are now fans of. I still highly recommend this show to anyone who digs stand-up comedy. In a very manageable twenty-seven episodes at about 30 minutes each, it's easy to dive into the whole series and get plenty of great laughs.

Idiot Boxing: Castlevania, season 1 (2017); Game of Thrones, season 7 (2017)

Classic series protagonist, Trevor Belmont. We initially meet
Trevor while he's drunk in a bar, getting into a scuffle with
local morons over his family's misunderstood history as
monster-slayers.

Castlevania, season 1 (2017)

So this was the Netflix equivalent of an impulse buy of a package of Reese's Peanut Butter cups while waiting in line at the drugstore. I'm not a massive devotee of either anime or the Castlevania video game series, but both offered me more than a little entertainment in my younger days. So when I saw that Netflix had a tidy little four-episode series, I decided to give it a shot. To my surprise, it was good.

I wouldn't have been so surprised had I realized that the show was written by Warren Ellis, the wonderfully creative author of varieties of mature comic books since the early 1990s. In Castlevania, he imbues his dark wit into the deep mythology of the video game series to give us an incredibly violent and often pretty funny story pitting the forces of good against those of the arch-nemesis of the entire series, Vlad Tepec "The Impaler," also known as Dracula. The tale kicks off in a different fashion, as a young aspiring scholar approaches Dracula's castle seeking scientific knowledge that will allow her to become a healer to her village. Not only does the Count agree, being impressed by this woman's courage, but he eventually marries her and lives with her in as human a way as possible. A few years later, however, while Vlad is away on a journey, his wife is labeled a witch by the local clergy and burned at the stake. When Vlad finds out, he is none too pleased and promises to unleash his hordes of dark creatures upon the land. When this inevitably happens, the drunken former vampire-hunter Trevor Belmont is forced to shake himself out of an inebriated haze and get to work rediscovering his purpose as one of humankind's last defenses against the forces of evil.

One of the attacking demons confronts The Bishop - a zealot
whose black-and-white approach to good and evil makes
things worse. These initial episodes are a bit heavy on the
religious commentary, but I didn't mind it much at all.

This short little series serves mostly as an introduction to what promises to be a longer series of tales. In that sense, the resolution can be somewhat unsatisfying, as it merely sets up the larger confrontations promised in these initial episodes. There is also an odd arrhythmia to the pacing, which will shift from some rousing fight scenes to some overly long and wordy exchanges or even extended action sequences that are animated well but add little to the story. This latter aspect is rather strange for a season that has only four twenty-five minute episodes to it.

Still, the good outweighs the bad. The story, characters, and dialogue are quite strong. Ellis clearly wrote this for mature viewers, as he treats the Catholic church as an anti-science, anti-progressive force, and has certain characters allude to the deeper war of philosophies surrounding good and evil. The show is also quite literally violent as hell. There is more than a little imagery that is quite graphic, making this a show that I do not recommend letting your 10-year old nephew or niece watch - I don't care how much they like playing the video games. Fortunately, there is also some legitimately funny humor, thanks in no small part to a lack of language restriction. Ellis doesn't go crazy with blue language, but he uses it effectively when it punctuates a funny line here and there.

It's nice to come across a fun little show like this, which offers some fantasy/horror fun while not insulting an older viewers' intelligence. It created a the feeling like I was watching a savvy, respectful update of the classic 1985 anime Vampire Hunter D. I'm on board for upcoming seasons, especially if Ellis is penning them.

One of these "Stark" kids ain't a Stark - just one of several
long-running questions that is finally answered during this
season. 

Game of Thrones, season 7 (2017) [Spoiler-Free]

These show runners are quite simply not messing around. With this abbreviated, penultimate season of one of the most popular shows in recent TV history, we get plenty of the fireworks that have been teased and implied for the last several seasons.

The previous season ended with more than a few literal and figurative bangs. Jon is in the north, forming and leading alliances to help fend off the encroaching, undead White Walkers. Cersei has blown up all rivals in King's Landing and is ready to go on a revenge tour to end all revenge tours. Daenerys is finally on her way across the Narrow Sea with her army of Dothraki horsemen, Unsullied, and her three fully-grown dragons. It looked like we were finally heading towards the convergence of all of the most powerful figures who have emerged victorious through all of the bloody battles and secretive back-stabbings. And converge, things have.

This season had already been announced as the penultimate season of this insanely popular series. And it is abundantly clear that the show runners are steering all of the show's many moving parts towards the inevitable final clashes and ultimate conclusion in its final season. No longer are we seeing long, slow journeys across the plains of Westeros or Essos. And seemingly long gone are the more relaxed heart-to-heart conversations between various characters, both great and small. No, with this season, it is very much about trimming away any fat and getting to the business of putting Daenerys's army and dragons in position to square off against the Night King and his massive force of White Walkers. Many long-awaited reunions take place; many long-standing grudges are settled with extreme prejudice; and more than a few tertiary and secondary players in "The Game" are taken off the board, permanently.

One could raise the complaint that the storytelling rhythm picks up to an overly brisk pace, but I was never much bothered by the pace, per se. Yes, the questions about "fast travel" are legitimate, with characters appearing in far-off locales in the blink of a quick cut, but this was hardly any kind of deal-breaker for me. The only thing that irked me is that several potentially intriguing characters and plotlines have been completely jettisoned (usually in the form of a good slaying) in the name of streamlining the greater tale. Honestly, though, a show that had teased audiences for six seasons about the great showdowns needed to finally get to it. Fans of television shows have seen far too many great premises devolve into unfocused, bloated messes with too many characters, too many dangling plotlines, and a frustrating lack of focus on a primary story. Game of Thrones seems to trying to avoid all of that and get back to the relative simplicity of the very first season - Starks, Lannisters, Targaryens, and those zombies north of The Wall. At the end of this seventh season, all lesser characters and concerns have fallen in line with one of those four primary players, or they've been put six feet under ground.

Lena Headey wears the proverbial black hat of a villain as
well as any actor ever has. In this season, she starts picking
many of the bones that have accumulated around her.

I suppose it is worthwhile to address the celebrity cameos that so many people have griped about. I have to say that, on principal, I don't like the idea of using non-actor celebrities on shows, especially escapist fantasies like Game of Thrones. There's just too great a chance of it breaking the spell of suspending disbelief when I see a famous person whom I know and start thinking, "Oh hey! That's so-and-so!" The show did actually have quite a number of them this season, but I must say that most of them were extremely stealthy. The most controversial was only so because it was also the most in-your-face - the instantly-infamous Ed Sheeran appearance. Honestly, I didn't know what the singer/songwriter looked like, so it didn't bother me one whit when I watched the episode. Once I heard about it, though, I was bothered by how obvious it was. That aside, one would be hard-pressed to locate and identify the several other celebs who appear for a few brief moments here and there during the season. Hopefully the show runners learned a bit of a lesson here, and season eight doesn't give us LeBron James throwing a boulder down through a hoop and onto an enemy's head.

It now appears that we fans have quite a wait on our hands, with early reports suggesting that the eighth and final season may not appear until early 2019. For some, this may seem like an eternity. For those of us who have been longtime fans of the source novels, though, waiting a little under two years is child's play. We waited from 2001 to 2005 for the fourth book to be published, and and then until 2011 for the fifth book. It's now been over six years and still no solid word on when the next installment might arrive. Waiting is, for us, a part of the long-term "GoT" experience. But from the way that the seventh season of the show went, the relatively short two-year wait will have a solid payoff.

Idiot Boxing: Game of Thrones Season 5 (2015)

Lady Melissandre about to put yet another infidel (or six) to
the torch. This and other doings around the Wall get plenty of
screen time in season 5. This is a good thing. 

If you're curious about my reviews of the first 4 seasons, I posted them here.

Season 5 of this immensely popular series seems to have garnered mixed opinions. I found it to be nearly as strong as any previous season, though a bit different in the mix of tones.

As an avid reader of the novels from long ago, this was the first season which I was hesitant to watch. I had read and heard that there are things which take place in the TV series which delve into the as-yet-unpublished sixth book in the Song of Ice and Fire series. All the same, I went ahead with it. For others who may be holding off for this reason, I can assure you not to worry. Though there may be a few little tidbits that may spoil events yet to be described in the books, I can tell you that a good 90%-95% of the material is from already-published books in the series.

The most obvious change from the book is how streamlined the tale is. The most recent novel, A Dance with Dragons, expanded the character perspectives to include a rather dizzying amount of new and somewhat marginal points of view. The show did excellent work keeping the focus on the most appealing characters from the books, rather than get hung up trying to tell the tales of characters like Asha Greyjoy and other tertiary types. While we may not get quite as much Danaerys or Tyrion as we might like, the scenes which we do get are entertaining, to be sure. Jon is the focus of several lengthy scenes and episodes, as well, which is always compelling.

I heard and read many gripes from viewers who found this season rather slow, especially through the middle episodes. While it's true that there was less action and more dialogue through these episodes, I found these scenes nearly always engaging. Due to plenty of strong writing and acting, there was plenty of tension and character exploration through many of the verbal exchanges involving Tyrion, Jon, Brienne, Arya, Cersei, and others. I particularly enjoyed many of the scenes involving Cersei and the zealots involved with the Faith Militant. We get to see Lena Headey's impressive range as an actress here, which only enhances the series further. This season also made it abundantly clear that when you give a capable writer the chance to write passages in which Tyrion is forced to travel with another character, his biting wit can carry scene after scene. Whether it was with Varys or Jorah, every exchange had at least one great line from "The Imp."

The introduction of the Sand Snakes. I found theirs to be easily
the most poorly-written and poorly-acted little gaggle of
characters in the entire series. It didn't help that their little
vendetta storyline was rather dull. 

I count only two personal weaknesses with this season. One is that I am, frankly, weary of Sansa being the punching bag of the show. I understood how she has always meant to represent the utter destruction of any romantic notion of Middle Aged chivalry. This is a commendable and engaging concept. Still, do we need to see her get married to and horrifically abused by one of the arch-sadists of the series? Enough already. I am beyond ready to see her truly toughen up or be given the mercy of death. The other glaring weakness is nearly everything about the plot line involving the "Sand Snakes" in Dorne. For whatever reason, their entire story of revenge comes off cheap, half-baked, poorly written, and badly acted. To both my wife and I, it almost seemed as if the writing duties for this particular plot thread was handed off to an aspiring intern. The result was something that paled in comparison to the rest of the season. The only redeeming aspect of the Sand Snakes thread was that my absolute favorite secondary character, Bronn, got to fire off an amazing amount of classic dialogue amidst what was otherwise a weak chapter in the story.

Of course, no season of Game of Thrones would be complete without a shocking event near its end which leaves viewers traumatized enough to swear off the series for all time. I won't ruin it for those yet to catch up, but suffice it to say that it is something which readers of the novels have known about for years. For me, this event sets up some curious possibilities, so I have no trouble accepting where things will head next season.

One could argue that this season may not be quite as strong as those previous. Even if you concede this point, I feel that nearly all would agree that the show has maintained its standard of excellence, and there is no reason to expect any less next year. My only hope now is that the next novel, The Winds of Winter, is released before the next season kicks off in spring of 2016.