The argument that things were "rushed" is an interesting one to me. The Night King gains a dragon and the wall comes down. There are 8 90-minute episodes left. That's more than the entirety of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Two thirds of Harry Potter. It's as many episodes as the last "season" of The Sopranos, except each episode is half again as long. It's more episodes than the last season of Mad Men, more episodes than the last season of Breaking Bad. The final season of Game of Thrones is twelve hours. All four Avengers movies is ten hours.

So - in more time the ENTIRE AVENGERS SERIES we have to kill the night king - who is either killable or not - and defeat Cersei. That's the show. We go from "undead dragon marching on Winterfell" and "Barbarian hordes landing at Hastings" to "final, inevitable battles" in eight. Ninety minute. Episodes.

If you keep in mind that George "RR" Martin worships John "RR" Tolkien, Frodo throws the ring into Mount Doom at Part 2, Chapter 3. That's 2/3rds of the way through Return of the King. Arya kills the Night King at the end of Episode 3. The rest of LoTR is all mop-up. We could have had four episodes of "Who will Sansa marry" and "what book will Samwell write" and "will the Unsullied sail off to chickless Club Med" but instead we had "and also Danerys is Hitler" which, as above, she's been raised in a revenge plot environment since she was a mewling babe. The Starks wanna be left alone in a world free of White Walkers. Danerys wants to wipe out everyone who doesn't bend the knee. We got six hours of "how do you solve a problem like Maria" and yes. We got to watch two minutes of shuffling chairs.

Because in the end? We had 73 episodes to show us it's nothing but shuffling chairs.

Just had my teeth cleaned. The dental hygenist was mad because she doesn't know what the dragon is gonna do with the dead queen. You're not supposed to know. Some ends are supposed to be loose.

Although someone on Twitter did quip "behind every king there's a woman who dragged him around for three years never to be heard from again." I appreciated that one.