Game Of Thrones: 12 Ups And 5 Downs From Season 7

Downs...

5. Characters Pushed To The Side

I've already spoken about how the show handled some of its big supporting characters, and did so extremely well. There is a flip side of that, though, and for every favourite done right, there were those underserved by the plot this year.

Varys, for so long one of the game's biggest and most brilliant players, was no longer spinning his webs or listening to little birds (who are now in the service of Qyburn). Instead he was mostly sitting around at Dragonstone, being directly threatened by Daenerys and having his death foreshadowed by Melisandre. He had a couple of good scenes, sure, but his role and importance dwindled massively, a real sign of how the game is changing (see also: Littlefinger dying).

Brienne, too, was mostly just left kicking her heels and sharpening her sword. She had one excellent scene with Arya, but aside from that and brief (but fun) exchanges with the Hound and Jaime, did pretty much nothing in the entire season. The same could be said for Pod too, although that's more typically been his role anyway.

The most egregious, though, has to be Ghost. The show has rarely handled direwolves particularly well anyway - in part because of the financial cost to end quality ratio - but Ghost was completely MIA this year. It's strange that Jon, who is supposed to be so close to his wolf, wouldn't take him to Dragonstone, and even stranger he wouldn't take him beyond the Wall. Maybe he left him at Winterfell as protection, but since we didn't see that (we just hear a passing mention of him), it really just feels like Ghost was forgotten about, and not included because of the budget. That's a real shame, because Ghost is an essential part of who Jon is, and one of the last remaining emblems of the North.

It is, of course, an almost impossible task to fit all of these characters into a season, especially a shortened one when we're so close to the endgame, and storylines are coalescing. Nonetheless, it's still frustrating to have some great characters pushed so far to the sidelines.