【White Skin Black Thighs】

Game of Thrones is bad,White Skin Black Thighs actually?

What other explanation is there for Season 8's fourth episode? It confusingly bears the title "The Last of the Starks" even though the A-plots, such as they were, focused very little on Winterfell's children. Even if we're still calling Jon a Stark -- a generous designation at this point -- the title fails.

No one really mattered in the third-to-last Game of Thronesepisode ever. Multiple characters betrayed everything we've come to know about them, apparently for no other reason than to shove the lumbering plot one step closer to the can't-come-soon-enough finish line.

You know it was a bad night when your best MVP candidate is Euron Greyjoy, an underbaked character whose sole purpose is spearing dragons and Cerseis. Euron's dragon-slaying sneak attack delivered one of the episode's few "holy shit!" moments, but to call that moment unearned is an understatement.

Remember the Red Wedding. That festival of slaughter was the product of a season-long build-up. Yes it came out of nowhere, but it tracked. Anyone who paid attention to the show could understand the motivations and machinations that led to blood being spilled. It was a shocking affair that made complete and total narrative sense in hindsight.

Euron's attack, on the other hand, is the opposite. Sure, we know why he did it. The world is rendered in simple terms for Euron Greyjoy. Cersei, good; Dany, bad. He did it because he wants to hop in bed with Cersei. Theon's dead and Yara's busy doing her own stuff, so Euron doesn't really have a personal stake in attacking Dany and her forces. He just wants to get laid.

But how is a giant fleet of ships ambushing a pair of dragons flying recon for another fleet of ships on a clear, sunny day? Why didn't Drogon breathe fire and end Euron? Hell, where was the battle at all? Did our heroes from the north (and beyond) just not fight back? And did Euron just decide to show mercy after he neutralized the dragon threat?

Cersei had a chance to steal the MVP crown when her ostensibly-clever-but-actually-a-dumbass brother Tyrion strolled right up to the gates of King's Landing to appeal to his sister's emotions. Did he really think that would work? Has he not been watching the past seven seasons of Game of Thrones?

The moment passed and he walked away unscathed. But Cersei could have given the order to have her archers turn him into a Tyrion-shaped pincushion. It would have fit her profile as a vengeance-hungry and cornered queen gone mad. Instead, she let her brother -- one of two that she's already marked for death -- walk away and had her zombie strongman fridge Missandei.

There's no MVP because Game of Thrones' final season seems to be more focused on plot than character. There's only a couple hours of story left to tell, so we're expected to buy everyone's bad decision-making because we've lived with them for seven previous seasons.

That's horseshit. People like Game of Thronesbecause after you strip away the fantasy trappings, it's a story about a cast of believable, (sometimes) relatable human beings. But the focus on big payoffs comes at a cost.

We've spent seasons rooting for a Jaime/Brienne ship, and we finally got it on Sunday. But maybe 10 minutes later, we saw that happy union fall apart when Brienne caught Jaime attempting to ghost her. He's still obsessed with Cersei, he says. His actual arc on the show says otherwise, but that doesn't matter anymore. We're in the endgame.

I don't see how Game of Thronescan right this ship with only two episodes left. There's surely lots of blood and plenty of big moments coming for our heroes and villains both. But if we're abandoning the carefully plotted motivations that have driven these characters for eight whole season just in the name of those big payoffs, is it really worth it?