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Jul 14, 2019willpell rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
I tend to disagree with those who have said that the show is diminishing in quality at about this point; I found this season to be pretty consistently excellent with only a few exceptions, most of which were more like "a line" or "a scene" rather than "half of the episode", as was often the case earlier. This was the first season in which I felt like they had enough budget to make the battle scenes look truly monumental; I also found the sex scenes in this season to be some of the hottest, though that is of course pure subjectivity. The overall plot stumbles a bit, but part of that is based on the fact that this season corresponds to the weakest of the five original books, and another part on the inevitable losses when you cram an 800-page book into one TV season (a problem seasons 1 and 2 also had, though this one does better than those, since seasons 3-6 effectively combine books 3-5 with substantial reordering). In general, the changes from book to screen have seldom been more "for the best" than in this season, and the fact that this is my main framework for analyzing the show is another big part of why I like this season so much; it's both more faithful to the source and more purposeful about its divergences.