On April 17, 2011, a new HBO drama about warring families, icy zombies, and CGI dragons premiered, and whether you loved it or hated it, there's simply no denying the kind of impact Game of Thrones had not just on television, not just on pop culture, but on the world in general. Its epic journey was a wild, weird, and fascinating adventure. It's popularity launched several spin-offs, with House of the Dragon being its most recent success.
Look, no one ever said writing a sprawling eight-season television show was easy. And certainly, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss won no shortage of Emmys for the epic fantasy drama while keeping us on the edge of our seats from the very beginning. But because we were on the edge of our seats, that means we were paying pretty careful attention to this show, and that means we noticed when plot lines that intrigued us seemed to simply... fizzle out. Or get dropped like hot potatoes. Or get executed in such a way that even though they happened, they were incredibly forgettable.
The series infamously had a poorly received finale which was so bad that the until the arrival of House of the Dragon and its success many people were apprehensive of another series based on George R. R. Martin's world of ice and fire. Game of Thrones did a lot of things well. Those things do not include the below.
The Dothraki Horde
It’s hard to say that Game of Thrones completely forgot about the Dothraki because there are more than a few examples of Daenerys Targaryen's (Emilia Clark) loyal force of horse-fighters completely bodying her enemies as advertised. Most notably, there’s the “Loot Train Attack” in Season 7’s “The Spoils of War,” an incredibly dumb name for one of the show’s best set-pieces, in which Jaime Lannister’s (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) forces absolutely shit themselves at the sight of the Dothraki performing advanced equestrianism before getting burned to ashes by Drogon. All very good. However! The thing to keep in mind is that the Dothraki were there from Episode 1, from the jump, always in the background behind Dany with the implication that if they could just get over their fear of boats, it’s game over for anyone in Westeros who stands in their way. That’s pure build-up. That’s 70 episodes waiting to see the Dothraki fully unleashed.
So, finally, in Season 8’s “The Long Night,” we watch the Dothraki charge, screaming and whooping triumphantly, into the darkness to take on the White Walkers, where they all...slowly die off-screen one by one. It’s one of the most egregious examples of Season 8’s rushed timeline, in which puzzle pieces weren’t elegantly removed from the board as much as they were smashed off the table with a baseball bat. There wasn’t any room for the Dothraki in the final stretch, so they got straight-up slaughtered in a span of ten seconds. The sheer force of Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa) facepalming in horselord heaven created its own set of constellations in the Westeros sky. — Vinnie Mancuso
RELATED: 'Game of Thrones': Why, Two Years Later, We've Stopped Talking About the Emmy-Winning Juggernaut
Oh, Dorne
The introduction of a whole new society adjacent to Westeros was a pretty exciting moment for Game of Thrones, and with it came shiny new characters played by great actors like Pedro Pascal, Indira Varma, and Alexander Siddig. But then Oberyn Martell got his head squished and the rest of the Dorne storyline just fizzled, to the point where, when half of Dorne was abruptly killed off at the beginning of Season 6, it almost seemed like a mercy. Except it still left the story feeling like an incomplete thought that never paid off. Even the Sand Snakes, loaded with so much potential as the fiercest assassins the show had ever seen, their presence on the show eventually reduced to being objectified by Bronn and then killed off. Perhaps this is a case of a subplot that the show didn't so much forget about as completely fumble. — Liz Shannon Miller
Nymeria and the Direwolves In General
It's almost impossible to think about House Stark without thinking about the direwolves, the mythical creatures who are not only the sigil represented on the family's flag, arms, you name it — but the pack of pups that uniquely and magically bonds itself to each member of the Stark children. Some of them (like Lady) met a terrible fate early in the show, thus giving us one more reason to despise the Lannisters, and several others (like Grey Wind) were killed in incredibly gruesome fashion as if the Red Wedding itself wasn't brutal enough. Toward the end of the series, only two still remained — Nymeria and Ghost, although the former was absent for several seasons before an arguably lackluster reunion scene in Season 7, and the latter earned a moment with Jon Snow (Kit Harington) in Season 8's penultimate episode that barely felt earned after being reduced to the role of glorified extra rather than loyal animal companion. But if there's one thing that felt incredibly obvious in watching the entirety of Game of Thrones, it's that the direwolves were a shining example of yet another significant plot concept introduced first thing, only to inevitably be dropped once it became too inconvenient to keep them around for narrative (or involved VFX design) purposes. — Carly Lane
What Happened to Quaithe?
Ah, Quaithe, you helpful little NPC, we hardly knew ye’. Played with a heaping dose of mysteriousness by Laura Pradelska, this Shadowbinder from Asshai had all the trappings of a Major Character. There’s the dope mask, for one, an interwoven series of hexagons that looks like it’d be envied by the Cenobites from Hellraiser. But there’s also the fact she kept popping up at opportune times with enigmatic prophecies that sure sounded important for Daenerys Targaryen and Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen). “She is the Mother of Dragons, she needs true protectors now more than ever,” she tells Jorah, warning that men will want those three little beasties on Dany’s back because “dragons are fire made flesh, and fire is power.” Quaithe...kind of nailed it here, because the warlock Pyat Pree (Ian Hanmore) steals the dragons like two hours later. When Jorah tracks Quaithe down again, she tests his loyalty to Daenerys; obviously, the big emotional lug passes, and Quaithe sends him in the right direction. Who is this woman, and why does she know so much about Daenerys’ journey? The answer: We'll never know. Because we never see Quaithe again. Not a whisper, not a word. She poofs right outta’ the narrative after Season 2, which obliterates all her intrigue in hindsight. In this context, she’s less a character and more of a masked signpost that says “Danger thataway,” a plot-driver dressed in a cool enough outfit to hide her lack of a future. — Vinnie Mancuso
Ian McShane...Why?
Just... why? Why cast legendary Deadwood star Ian McShane as a reformed mercenary turned quasi-monk for exactly one episode of the series? Seriously, why? It sounds like McShane had a good time, and we're all happy for him. But beyond the help he offered Sandor Clegane (Rory McCann), the fact is that casting an actor of McShane's status would imply that the character of Brother Ray would have a pretty big impact on the series or at least the Hound... But really, all that happened was that the Hound returned to murdering immediately after Brother Ray's sad demise, leaving McShane's casting as one of the show's more obscure but most baffling question marks. — Liz Shannon Miller
Dragons Weren't As Helpful As We Thought
The story of Aegon I Targaryen runs throughout Game of Thrones and serves as the undercurrent of every decision Daenerys Targaryen makes. My man rode into Westeros with two sister-wives and three dragons and not a single kingdom could stop them. Aegon was a warlord with nukes in an age of swords and shields. It was vegetable carts vs. Panzer tanks. The legend surrounding dragons grew when they died out, but it’s all based on the idea that having a dragon automatically makes you more like a god than a regular man. Which is why it is genuinely hilarious, bordering on nonsensical, how deeply unhelpful Dany’s three dragons became down the Season 7-8 stretch. One of them, poor unappreciated Viserion, took a spear to the belly and returned as an ice dragon slave to the Night King on his very first recon mission.
Soon after, we got our first glimpse of the dragons in a battle scenario, and by that, I mean Drogon and Rhaegal are incapacitated by a cloud bank. Jon Snow’s long-awaited dragon ride into battle ends when he flies into a tree like a child’s lost kite. Soon after, Rhaegal gets speared in the damn head by a pirate in leather pants who we can only assume, based on every single decision in Pilou Asbæk’s performance, is on a dangerous amount of ketamine. To be fair, the horrifying destruction in “The Bells,” the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, is a glimpse of a dragon’s unstoppable tactical advantage, but that deep into the series it felt like an overcorrection. Seeing Drogon single-handedly decimate a city makes the endless waiting, planning, second-guessing, and sitting around Meereen feel even more gratuitous in hindsight. It’s like talking up your skills as a sharpshooter for seven hours, immediately firing five rounds into your own foot, and then — another full-ass hour later — finally nailing the target dead-center. — Vinnie Mancuso
Remember When Cersei Was Pregnant?
One of Cersei Lannister's few redeeming qualities was just how dedicated she was to her children. Sure, one of her kids was most definitely a sadistic psychopath, but Cersei loved them, faults and all. While you can have your gripes about a female character's strongest defining aspect being that she's a mother, Lena Headey certainly brought a lot of depth and dimension to Cersei and her complicated relationship with her family and her kids. It makes sense that she becomes the worst version of herself when her final child and only daughter, Myrcella (Aimée Richardson), is assassinated by Dorne in retaliation for the death of Oberyn Martell.
But, two seasons after Myrcella's untimely end, Game of Thrones decided to make Cersei pregnant again, this time with the paternity of her child in question, though it's likely her twin brother is still the baby daddy. What makes this confusing is that Cersei's whole fate and storyline hinges on the prophecy that a witch named Maggy the Frog gave her when she was young. Nicknamed the Valonquar prophecy, the prophecy is like any other prophecy, vague enough to scare you but not specific enough to give you any concrete answers. What is concrete is the fact that Maggy told Cersei that she would have three children, saying, "Gold shall be their crowns and gold their shrouds." This obviously became true — her three blonde-haired children all died during her lifetime — but Maggie made no mention of a fourth child. And perhaps Maggy just meant living kids, considering Cersei also gave birth to a legitimate heir with Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy) early in their marriage. The series chose to let the pregnancy story fall to the wayside by the time Season 8 rolled around. Although Headey mentioned that she filmed a miscarriage scene that got cut, the show completely abandoned the storyline by the end. — Therese Lacson
