Hopefully next year sends the show out on a high note worthy of its legacy. It made for a year with some amazing moments, but some frustrating segments in between them. The show, which used to pride itself on letting its characters breathe, interact and just experience the journey from point-A to point-B was forced this year to just hit the high points.

Even with the extra-long finale this year, the seventh season only ran about 450 minutes, and it was obvious that the writers were in crunch-time, racing from one plot point to the next in order to get everything in place for the finale. That adds up to about 540 minutes of screentime, coming in just under a standard ten-episode, sixty-minute each season like we had for the first six years of the show. HBO promises a massive final season, where each episode will be РІР‚Сљaround feature lengthРІР‚Сњ similar to the ninety-minute season-seven finale last week. The show is taking a year off, presumably to justify the massive budget HBO is giving the final few hours of its biggest show the finale reached a record twelve-million viewers (the number bumps up to sixteen when you count those who streamed it legally), not to mention the millions more who viewed it throughРІР‚В¦shall we say РІР‚Сљless than officialРІР‚Сњ means? Yeah, that. Only one season remains, a six-episode race to the finish-line due out sometime in 2019.

And with that, Game of Thrones season seven is finished.

Game of thrones s03e01 youtube