Winter is coming; join my rewatch of ‘Game of Thrones’
Winter is coming; join my rewatch of ‘Game of Thrones’
The series premiere of the fantasy series is my best stream of the week — but will the series finale rate so well when I get there?
Did you happen to catch the new trailer for the latest series set in Westeros? “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” set one hundred years before the events of “Game of Thrones,” will tell the tale of Ser Duncan the Tall and his little squire Egg as they earn names for themselves that will soon echo across the land.
The trailer was released on Thursday, and it whetted my appetite for a rewatch of “Game of Thrones.” It’s been several years since I put the series down, and I’ve never actually finished a rewatch all the way through, so bad was the taste left in my mouth by the series finale way back in 2019.
Since then, HBO and HBO Max have released two seasons of the prequel series “House of the Dragon,” which has problems of its own but is also a worthy successor. When diving back into Season 1 of “Game of Thrones” this week, I confess I was simply stunned by how good the show is in its first season.
“Game of Thrones” takes place in the fantasy world of Westeros, where men and women vie for control of the Seven Kingdoms by fighting for the right to claim the Iron Throne. Alliances are made and broken, heroes and villains emerge, and noble houses are plunged into war as the deadly game of thrones goes on, and as the characters don’t mind reminding the audience, you either win or you die.
Part of what made “Game of Thrones” such a good title to adapt from page to screen was that it uses deep, highly developed characters but places them in a captivating fantasy setting. The issues dealt with by the characters are not dealt with in the high-handed fashion of a Tolkien novel; the characters of “Game of Thrones” are usually capable of just about anything, including murder and any other manner of violence, theft, or other misdeeds, on average.
That isn’t to suggest that there are no nuances to the characters, or to the ways those characters’ actions affect the others. Take Ned Stark (Sean Bean), for example; as most fans know, heroic old Ned was the one we all rooted for in our first run-through of the show. But a rewatch creates plenty of questions in the mind of the viewer about Ned’s course of action. In doing the honest, honorable, and “right” thing that audiences of fantasy have always come to expect from protagonists, Ned condemns himself to death and most of his family to a similar fate.
It forces the viewer to think about what’s really right and wrong, and forcing the audience to think and feel is what good TV does. “Game of Thrones” never fails to do this, thanks to an ensemble cast of characters whose actors completely inhabit them from head to toe. To single anyone out would be a disservice to the rest, especially in Season 1.
To be sure, there are areas where the show falls uncomfortably short. The repeated use of sexual violence against women as a plot device is just as apparent in 2025 as it was when the show first came out, and there’s no real attempt to make any commentary about it other than to point out that life for medieval women was tough. While that’s true, all too often “Game of Thrones” tries to remind us in this fashion for seemingly no reason.
Still, the first season of “Game of Thrones” is a master class in subversion of the tropes that fans know so well from their favorite classic fantasy novels. The good guy loses, the bad guys win, but in a world almost bereft of magic, dragons are born again to portend a much more consequential future. And far to the north, beyond a wall of ice hundreds of feet tall, the cold winds rise…
I don’t know if I’ll revisit every season of “Game of Thrones” for this article series, or just the first and last. But I can safely say that Season 1 of the show was my favorite stream of the week, and I’m looking forward to picking up more of the show’s subtle details as I work through it.
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