Well shit you guys, the season’s halfway over. Traditionally, this would be the time where instead of offering reflections on this week’s episodes, I rank the overall field of everything I’ve watching. However, once I started cutting down my seasonal watch schedule to only the shows I was genuinely loving, that became a pretty meaningless exercise. I could rank my viewing schedule, but everything I’m watching is something I’d highly recommend, so what would be the point? In light of that, I instead started to simply summarize my overall impressions of each show so far – but as one commenter pointed out, you can already get a pretty clear view of my overall feelings on a show from my weekly commentary. Given all that, today I’ll be offering… an entirely normal installment of the Week in Review! Yes, that’s right folks, we’ll be celebrating the seasonal halfway point by doing exactly what we always do. I can tell your excitement is already at a fever pitch, so I’ll wrap this intro up now, as we dive into one more extremely normal Week in Review!

This week’s Carole & Tuesday was the closest thing the show’s had to a transition episode, which in Carole’s case still meant we had a clear episodic conceit and brilliant performance highlights, but also there was a bit more talking and exposition than usual. Watching Carole, Tuesday, and Angela’s managers and producers all negotiate for their stars’ big breaks certainly gave the episode a sense of narrative coherence, but was less inherently engaging of a concept than something like “the gang makes a beautiful, terrible music video.” That said, I did enjoy getting a bit more insight into Tao’s character, and both of this episode’s music sequences were a treat.

Carole and Tuesday’s first official performance in particular might have been their best song yet, with the smoky, familiar tone of the music perfectly echoing the golden lighting and their cozy club environment. When they played their first song, I sorta assumed these girls would be sticking to pretty mundane pop tunes, the kind of songs I could actually imagine two talented but not truly brilliant teens would cook up. Instead, the show seems to demonstrating their propulsive evolution as songwriters and collaborators one song after another, with their melodies, structures, and vocal interplay improving all series long. It is a unique and incredibly rewarding thing to see these young protagonists quantifiably “level up” in terms of something as complex and personal as songwriting, and I can’t wait to see their talents continue to grow.

Demon Slayer at last escaped the strict template of its Shonen Jump forebears, as Tanjiro’s first job lent the narrative some mystery and thriller undertones. The process of hunting down his first demon reminded me a little of Inuyasha, of all things, while the show’s insistence on foregrounding Tanjiro’s local contact once again gave this episode some immediate emotional bite, like with the testing grounds battle. Demon Slayer’s character writing isn’t so deft that I’d call its focus on the human consequences of these demon attacks a genuine “strength” yet, but it’s still something that sets Demon Slayer apart, and which could bloom into a real dramatic asset over time.

As for this episode’s battle, both the pluses and minuses of ufotable’s digital animation approach were in full display. On the positive side, the clarity of framing and sturdy CG mapping of this village meant there was a clear sense of physical space and consequence to Tanjiro’s fight; you could really relate to Tanjiro’s awareness of his surroundings, and understand the consequences of his active range. On the minus side, the largely digitally designed backgrounds of this village possessed almost no sense of lived-in texture or detailed visual embellishment; everything looked like a pretty low-budget movie lot. Ufotable have been good about balancing their digital work with beautifully detailed background art in Demon Slayer’s wilderness settings, so I hope they eventually bring that same sense of beauty to its towns and cities.

Meanwhile, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure offered an actual transition episode, with both Doppio and Bucciaratti’s party spending most of it in transit to what will presumably be this arc’s natural endpoint, the Roman Colosseum. In the meantime, we received an explanation I never actually expected – the extraterrestrial origin of Stand powers. To be honest, I’m not really sure why Araki offered this explanation in the first place; Stands are an inherently absurd and explanation-averse concept, and their origins will never feel any more substantive than the standard “a wizard did it.” Still, the franchise has been building on the lore of the Stand-awakening arrows each season, so I suppose moving a step back and learning their own origin was going to happen eventually. Meanwhile, Doppio continues to be a brilliant addition to Golden Wind’s cast, coming off as simultaneously humorously ridiculous, menacing, and vulnerable enough to actually feel emotionally invested in. Not a highlight, but a perfectly reasonable episode, and one that’s set us up for a uniquely compelling Stand battle next week.

Finally, Sarazanmai offered some desperately needed narrative progression this week, while still being somewhat hampered by its usual structural issues. At this point, I feel confident saying that I’d like this show a lot more without all the kappa and otter stuff – their contributions are incredibly repetitive, and their only purpose in the narrative is to clumsily reveal new secrets that would probably land with more impact if they cropped up during natural conversation. That said, I was very happy to see Kazuki’s Sara ruse finally get revealed, as well to learn exactly how Haruka got his injury. Basically all of Ikuhara’s stories are obsessed with families and finding a place where you belong, and Kazuki slots neatly into a lineage formerly embodied by great characters like Penguindrum’s Ringo. Frankly, my favorite thing about this episode was the real Sara’s very silly “sarararara” chant as she turned into a kappa and melted her way out of a variety of improbable containers. More strong personal drama and creatively goofy nonsense, less bank footage please.

Actually, you know what? Even more finally, let’s talk Game of Thrones. People have been asking for some GoT reflections here on my curiouscat, and considering my reaction to this last season seems pretty different from the internet at large, I suppose it’s worth breaking down my position.

On the whole, I’ve been loving season eight, and have found it to be the most satisfying season since the show was genuinely in its prime. My perception of “in its prime” might account for some of my current enjoyment, though – in my opinion, Game of Thrones lost any aspirations to being genuinely “great media” somewhere around when Ramsay entered the scene. That was the point where it started to go dramatically off-books, and to be honest, that’s also the point where the books themselves started to lose focus. As a result, every season since has operated on a much lower level of narrative invention and poetry of dialogue. What crimes this season presents in terms of narrative feel like crimes I accepted and forgave around five years ago – I never expected GoT’s conclusion to somehow return the series to greatness, and have instead been greatly enjoying all the long-awaited payoffs that this season can’t really help but indulge in.

Of course, there are glaring issues with this season, though I don’t see as many as others seem to. Pacing is definitely a problem; for the last two seasons, there hasn’t been enough time for any character turn to feel first seeded and then earned, making narrative shifts like the Dany-Jon romance, Dany’s descent as a leader, and Varys’ death feeling rushed and unsatisfying. Additionally, the show never found a satisfying counter to the dragons, and never found a good use for Euron – the scorpions have always been an arbitrary dramatic device, and Euron basically only existed to act as their emotionally inert master.

All that said, in terms of both broad narrative strokes and execution, I feel this season has been doing a tremendous number of things right. The Long Night stunned me; I thought its color work, composition, pacing, and narrative progression were all truly phenomenal, and have no patience for complaints about the tactically preferred response to fighting an ocean of zombies. Game of Thrones has never been about nitty-gritty battle tactics – that’s the stuff Tywin cares about, while Game of Thrones itself cares about the human cost of battle. The battle was meant to feel like being swept over by a horrifying elemental force, and it did; focusing on tactics would have made it the kind of punchy, dramatically energetic battle that it was absolutely not intended to be.

This goes double for The Bells, which felt like the only way for both Daenerys and the show’s final battle overall to end. I feel like many people have been viewing this show’s drama in terms of the show’s title quote – “when you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die.” It’s a Cersei line, and it’s a belief both her and Daenerys have absolutely internalized, but it’s not really the show’s own thesis. The show’s actual thesis comes from the book’s other use of that phrase, courtesy of Jorah: “The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends. It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace. They never are.”

Game of Thrones has always understood that war is ugly and senseless, and so it ended on the most ugly, senseless war possible. If this battle had come down to a fevered, desperate contest between Daenerys and Cersei, it would have been betraying everything this story stands for – instead, it was ugly and brutish and utterly one-sided. Neither Daenerys nor Cersei were operating from positions of strength; they are both women who have been forced by circumstance to fight furiously back against all those who would challenge them, and who have at last come to a point where one of them must utterly crush the other, or be crushed themselves. The show has made it easy at times to root for Dany, but she’s always been incredibly proud, headstrong, vindictive, rash, and convinced of her own heroic destiny – this is just the final result of all those qualities, at last aimed at an “enemy” that we haven’t been dramatically framed to dehumanize, and with the human cost actually depicted. To end on either compromise or heroic combat would be a betrayal; instead the show ended where it must, on brutal slaughter that makes us question what it was all for.

I feel similarly about complaints regarding some specific character arcs. I don’t think Cersei needed to demonstrate some new strength or personality in this season; she is the cumulative result of all her choices, she has dragged herself up to the highest point she possibly can, and the hollowness of that victory was absolutely the point. We’ve been getting a lot of dramatic vindication through all of this season’s reunions, but Game of Thrones is in large part about inevitable tragedy, and so choices like Jaime returning to Cersei didn’t feel like a “betrayal” to me – it felt like a statement that in spite of all our growth, we can still in some ways never escape ourselves. These children of horrors have witnessed terrible things, and been changed by the process, but not all growth is good, and even positive growth won’t necessarily save us. The show’s execution of these choices might be clumsy at times, but the choices themselves all feel right to me.

When you couple that with my generally lowered expectations in terms of dialogue and narrative twistiness, you end up with a season that’s offering me pretty much everything I could have asked from it, while also being stuffed with incredibly fan-pleasing character moments and stunning visual setpieces. All in all, I’m having a pretty great time.