I'm with CCR. The last 2 seasons were awfully paced and clearly the weakest of the bunch, but the story was fine.
The entire concept -- the actual game of thrones -- was always going to dwindle as pieces came off the board. The key characters in the show are the puppeteers like Littlefinger and Vaerys. The puppets that were made to feel like the center of the show -- Daenerys, Jon Snow, Cersei, Ned Stark, etc. -- were all morons.
So Danny seeming like an idiot after Khal Drago died, just underscored the truth about her character throughout -- that she did exactly what the smartest person whispering in her ear told her to do for the whole show, until the very end when she was on her own and ultimately proved to be a wackjob. Same exact thing with Cersei; real shrewd early when her reduced position required her to be, but the second she got ultimate power and answered to no one her idiocy consumed her. Jon Snow, ever the loyal servant, kept doing what he felt was expected of him until just before the credits rolled on the final episode.
So the show was always going to shift from scheming brilliance to all out war with little intelligence to it at all as more and more of the string-pullers were killed off or made powerless. Left to their own devices, the puppets all quickly destroyed themselves. In the end, the right people survived because they were mostly the honorable ones that weren't out to rule the world. All the egomaniacal powermongers were gone. So those that remained came up with a simple solution the public would swallow and rode off into their respective sunsets.
The story was fine and came to a pretty natural conclusion that was true to most of its characters (I can't think of any glaring misfires there). And the rushed pace had way more to do with poor planning from Season 1 than any of the nonsense about Star Wars contracts.
Early on, the showrunners said they were plotting by season because they were hopeful that Martin would either finish the books or at least plotting (and sharing with them) the rest of the story. That was really stucking fupid. Martin would have been an idiot to write any books while the show was so popular. Let the show come up with a satisfying ending and you can basically just write a more fleshed out adaptation. If the show fails, you have the benefit of seeing what failed, endless online diatribes about what the fans really wanted, and thus a simple roadmap to finish.
So they should have just plotted the show out from the beginning, or at least by season 3 or 4 when it was clear that Martin was just riding the wave and not writing. Actors are typically made to commit to 7 or 8 seasons of a TV show, so they knew from the jump that if the show was successful, that's all the time they'd have. The show would make their cast famous, and famous actors weren't going to keep freezing their asses off playing in the mud in the worst parts of northern Europe for any longer than they had to.
Instead, they slow-played the source material they DID have for way too long. And while the show they made up to that point was really great, it was WAY too big to resolve in a satisfying way in the 15 or so episodes they had left. So the show went into hyperspeed, the pacing sucked out loud, and we got the rushed ending we got. If they'd been realistic and plotted properly, they had plenty of time to tell a fantastic story in the time they had.
So that rushed feeling is the only terrible part about it. The story was always going to go that way. The third act was always going to be total war with no winners because that was the very simple point of the story from the beginning -- that absolute power corrupts absolutely. It's clear by the end of Season 1 that the Starks and Tyrion were the only ones learning that lesson.
How's that for a novel? I've now officially written more GoT than Martin has since the show started. (Sorry.)
