Game of Thrones - anyone else feel like this season is the show on fast-forward? They should’ve stuck with two 10-episode seasons to even out the pacing instead of this weird 7- and 6-episode final seasons business.
Unfortunately that wasn’t possible given the technical and proficiency aspects of filming due to the stories told this season (20+ locations in 5 countries with several units) - plus the contractual aspects of the cast and crew (mainly time available)…
They had little option but to reduce the number of episodes - yet lengthen those episode run-times so in essence it is an eight episode season (fewer scenes apparently ended up on the cutting room floor for this season than previous helps).
I’m skeptical of this explanation. In previous seasons that’s kept them to the 10 maximum but there’s nothing new this season about the various locations and scheduling headaches that would require 3 less episodes. Only thing I can think of is their weather excuse (Winter being here and all) but that’s kinda silly because A) we haven’t seen much sign of winter outside of the North, and B) rarely are shows/films shot during the proper season (movie magic and all).
I think the real thing that happened was the show runners only wanted to do seven seasons, which meant that they had to jam pack the final/seventh season with a bunch of wrap up stuff. However two problems arose in that they had a 13 episode final season mapped out, but it was not feasible to shoot a 13 episode single season, and HBO wanted to stretch it out another year. So the season was split in two, and instead of taking the chance to look at how they could further flesh out their planned, rushed final 13 episodes and expand them into 20 (or hell, even 18 or 16), they probably got a bit cocky and thought “nope our plan is perfect, we don’t need anymore than that.”
Speculation but it seems to me to be the case.