Game of Thrones has returned, but did the season eight premiere live up to expectations?
“Nothing so freighted with expectation could possibly live up to it, and the first episode of season eight doesn’t,” writes Ed Cumming for The Independent in a three-star review.
“We have been promised a series of finales, six bumper episodes of Hollywood-scale ambition, where stories that have been drawn out over 70 hours will finally reach their conclusions. There will be love, death, enormous battles.
“This episode doesn’t do much of that at all. In most respects, it is a classic opening throat-clearer, clocking in at just 50 minutes without adverts and bringing us up to speed.”
Other critics were slightly more positive about the reunion-heavy first episode, with both The Telegraph and The Times awarding four stars.
The latter publication’s critic Ed Potton wrote: “Season openers in Game of Thrones are traditionally slow burners, and this one followed suit, until exploding the template with two showstoppers, one epic, the other intimate.
“Both you might have expected to come later in the season; both were exhilarating. It vindicated the decision to limit the final season to six episodes.”
The Guardian’s Sarah Hughes called the opener ”a thrilling start, with reunions we’ve waited years for, a shocking new kill list – and even a homage to the show’s own ‘sexposition’”.
Meanwhile, The Sun called the episode “largely satisfying” and it had “lived up to the weighty expectation upon it”.
Variety commented on how the show has moved on from its leisurely pace, “hitting the accelerator and delivering major plot developments, hurriedly, in its home stretch.”
The episode featured a hilarious reference to last season’s controversial Ed Sheeran cameo as well as a terrifying death at the hands of the Night King.
The final season of Game of Thrones continues every Sunday. You can watch the trailer for season two here.
The show will be available on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV in the UK.
