Press Reset is an Admirable, But Repetitive, Look at Death and Resurrection in the Videogame Industry

 Jason Schreier probably doesn't see it as his job to convince people that they shouldn't work in videogames, but his work does serve as a pretty good argument for that point. As a reporter, first at Kotaku and then at Bloomberg, Schreier has specialized in stories exposing the dark side of the staggeringly wealthy videogame industry. He's reported extensively on the practice of "crunch" (extended periods of long hours while working on a game) and other troubling labor practices. Gaming journalism has mostly been dominated by previews of the next big game and reviews of the next big game once it hits shelves. Schreier has carved out a niche for himself as a reporter who does actual, factual reporting of the sort that sparks real conversation and even results in real change within the industry.

Schreier's journalism has always been marked by an unapologetic moral urgency, an admirable call for attention to issues and people long ignored by credulous coverage of the industry. He brings that same approach and philosophy to Press Reset, his second book about the videogame industry. 

But while Schreier uses the book to make a compelling moral argument, he falters at the basic task of crafting a similarly compelling narrative. It's a book that makes its point on about page 20, only to continue making that same point for another 280 pages. 

The core problem with Schreier's narrative is repetition (it's hell, if you remember your Stephen King). Press Reset is broken down into nine chapters, eight of which tell the story of the death of a particular studio or studios (the ninth is the stereotypical "solutions" chapter that every non-fiction book must finish on). The problem is that Schreier isn't really telling eight different stories -- he's telling the same story eight times, with only the names and some of the peripheral details changing from chapter to chapter.

The reader will pick up on the pattern immediately. Idealistic, videogame-loving people join a studio or start one from scratch with an eye toward making the game of their dreams. They crunch themselves half to death to make it happen, only to be undermined by poor business decisions, creative mistakes, the excesses of their own ambitions or some combination thereof. Sometimes the resulting game is great (BioShock Infinite). Sometimes it's terrible (The Bureau: XCOM Declassified). Regardless, a lot of good people lose their jobs and have to move across the country to find work at another studio, only to repeat that same process again once the new studio shuts down.

It's not exactly Schreier's fault that the videogame industry keeps living out these same cycles time and again, and the fact that it can't stop the capitalistic equivalent of Reapers from devouring the lives and idealism of good people is a point worth emphasizing. But it feels like a story that could be told more effectively with a longform piece of journalism and not a 300-page book that struggles to find a new angle with each chapter.

There is an amusingly Marvel Cinematic Universe quality to Schreier's book in the way that companies and characters profiled early on turn up later in cameo roles (Warren Spector, the creative force behind beloved roleplaying game Deus Ex and the subject of Press Reset's first chapter, is something like the Nick Fury of Schreier's narrative). But it doesn't take long before the reader's eyes start glazing over at the exhaustive accounts of rank-and-file industry employees flying back and forth across the country to join different studios.

A failure common to boring stories, whether they're fictional or true to life, is a boring cast of characters, and Press Reset suffers from exactly that problem. This isn't meant as a criticism of the employees Schreier centers in the book, who universally come off as admirable, sympathetic, hard-working men and women who deeply love videogames and constantly find themselves victimized by much wealthier and much more famous executives. But the harsh reality is that every industry is stocked with admirable, sympathetic, hard-working men and women, and most of those people wouldn't make for particularly interesting or compelling protagonists either.

Schreier has a massive cast of characters, but few of them are particularly well-drawn, and Schreier mostly fails to elicit interest in them beyond the usual sympathy decent people feel upon seeing other decent people lose their jobs. You will be hard pressed to remember any of these people once you finish their chapters, and the overall effect is a blur of names and job titles and short-lived company affiliations that resembles nothing so much as half-heartedly reviewing a set of resumes for a role you don't particularly care about filling. 

The irony is that the two most interesting characters in the book are probably Curt Schilling and Ken Levine, neither of whom are meant to be protagonists. Levine was the creative director for BioShock and BioShock Infinite, two stone cold classic games, while Schilling is the star pitcher turned failed videogame executive turned right-wing Twitter troll.

Schreier deserves credit for his nuanced portraits of these two men. That's especially true when it comes to Schilling -- Schreier, an unabashedly left-wing journalist, passes on the opportunity to demonize the already self-demonizing Schilling, and instead tells the story of a charismatic, enthusiastic, earnest videogame fan whose optimism and self-regard is both understandable and, ultimately, fatal.

The problem here is two-fold. First, Schilling and Levine are already famous -- Schilling in a broader sense, to be sure, but Levine is a well-known figure to the kind of people who buy books about the economy of the videogame industry. Schreier's portrayals of Levine and Schilling are interesting, but ultimately don't break any new ground.

Second, the fact that the two most famous figures in the book are also the two most interesting characters threatens to undermine Schreier's message. Press Reset tries to focus on the men and women who make the industry work without getting a fraction of the money or attention showered on the Ken Levines of the world. Schreier several times pushes back against an auteur-driven view of videogames, and makes clear that neither of the classic BioShock games sprung fully formed from Levine's magic forehead. And yet, even after reading Press Reset, the rank-and-file employees and their struggles fade into the background, because Schreier never succeeds in rendering them as individuals.

Schreier writes like a great reporter, which is to say clearly, but with no particular grace or distinction. When combined with Press Reset's deficiencies in narrative structure and character, the end result is a book that's meaningful, important and not even a little interesting to read. 

And maybe that's OK. There are surely plenty of readers who will appreciate the importance of Schreier's message without too much concern for the book's failure to tell a compelling story. But it's worth acknowledging that important stories can still be interesting, finding an interesting way to tell an important story is at the heart of the author's responsibilities. 

Answering Your Game of Thrones Questions That Obviously Aren't Questions

We are a few months out from the series finale of Game of Thrones, and "The Iron Throne" still inspires rage on the internet whenever it's mentioned. The script for the episode was recently released, and people were furious to discover... that it contained a handful of jokes that would only have been seen by the people reading the script.

Stubborn in my fandom, I continue to insist that "The Iron Throne" (and, indeed, the entire final season of Game of Thrones) was quite good. It's an unpopular opinion - I write this while huddled in a fortified bunker with the three or four other people on Earth who feel the same way.

But I like to be helpful! And I recognize that many of the show's critics have some questions about the way Game of Thrones ended. They have some mistakes or plot holes or logical failings that they believe they have identified and they would like those concerns to be addressed.

Totally fair. So here are answers to a few of the questions I've seen bandied about since "The Iron Throne" aired in May.

Why is there still a Night's Watch?

There are many, many, many reasons there is still a Night's Watch for Jon to be exiled to at the end of the show.

First: tradition. Or call it inertia, if you prefer. The Night's Watch is more than 8,000 years old, which is functionally indistinguishable from "been around literally forever." So far as anyone in Westeros can tell, there has always been a Night's Watch. An 8,000-year-old institution has staying power above and beyond its actual usefulness. The Senate filibuster has been around for a little more than 200 years, came about in a completely accidental fashion, has been altered repeatedly over the years and there are still people who believe that eliminating it is the legislative equivalent of desecrating Thomas Jefferson's grave. Institutions endure, is the point.

Second, there's the practical argument Tyrion makes to Jon: the Night's Watch is where the lords of Westeros send their "cripples, bastards and broken things." The Watch is an exceptionally useful escape hatch for leaders who want to dispose of inconvenient people but who, for whatever reason, can't kill them - how many times in the books and in the show did we see characters forced to "take the black?" The Wall is the only safe place in the world to send the criminals, lunatics, dissenters, extraneous children and political prisoners who populate any kingdom. The Night's Watch is, in essence, the Australia of Westeros, and that makes it indispensable as a governing tool.

Third...there's no more Wall, guys. That 700-foot-tall wall of ice did a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to protecting the realms of man, and now it's gone. Westeros is more vulnerable than ever to an invasion from the north. There might not be any more White Walkers, but eventually the wildlings are going to build their numbers back up. Are they on friendly terms with Jon Snow when the show ends? Sure, but Jon Snow isn't going to live forever, and neither is Tormund Giantsbane. It won't be long before you have an entirely new generation of wildlings who weren't around for that whole "Jon saved us and helped save the entire world" thing. And there will be no Wall to hold them back. Which means...you need the Night's Watch.

Finally, no one in Westeros actually knows that the White Walkers are gone for good. Sure, Arya killed the Night King and all the other Walkers disintegrated as a result, so folks probably feel pretty good about the situation, but that's different than simply assuming the threat is permanently eliminated. Bran is one of the few people in that world who knows the origin story of the Walkers, and we know he's inclined to a silence both mysterious and dickish in equal measure. For all the people of Westeros know, the Walkers could come back at any time - it's hard to rule anything out when you're talking about a race of ice vampires who can raise an army of zombies at will. So it's probably a good idea to keep the Night's Watch around, especially considering the whole "no more Wall" situation.

Why wasn't anyone trying to find Drogon? Just decided not to worry about the massive dragon with no master and a taste for human flesh flying around?

It's unfathomably rude to answer a question with another question, but still: who would have given this order? Who was arranging a dragon hunt?

Westeros doesn't have a ruler after Daenerys' death. It's probably safe to guess that some council or ad-hoc committee was running things - Davos was likely making a lot of the calls. But it was a tenuous, chaotic situation. The only people with the intellectual (Tyrion) or military (Jon) credibility to organize a dragon hunt were sitting in jail.

More importantly, whoever was running things in the interregnum between Daenerys' death and Bran's ascension had some pretty serious issues on their plate. King's Landing is a smoking ruin, which means the political, military and economic capital of the realm is a smoking ruin. The royal fleet is, say it with me now, a smoking ruin, and it's hard to cross oceans in pursuit of a dragon without ships. And the entire country is recovering from years of brutal, scorched earth civil war. Everyone is exhausted and there are no resources to spare on a dragon hunt.

Also: King's Landing is a powder keg. The Unsullied are one harsh word away from killing everyone in the wake of Daenerys' murder, and the Dothraki are hanging around King's Landing being very Dothraki-like. Yes, the flying, 747-sized fire-breathing reptile with a surprisingly firm grasp of metaphor is a concern, but "making sure the nation doesn't destroy itself again" is a more immediate one.

Which is why the issue comes up just as soon as Westeros has a king, things have settled down and a small council has been seated.

So Jon's Targaryen heritage was completely meaningless, huh?

People keep saying this and it's utterly baffling. Jon's royal blood plays a huge role in the story's endgame.

The revelation that Jon Snow is actually Aegon Targaryen, the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, drives a wedge between Jon and Daenerys. If Jon was actually just "Jon Snow," bastard son of Eddard Stark, then there would be no conflict between Jon and Daenerys - he wouldn't be a threat to her, he wouldn't have a terrible secret he'd feel compelled to share with his sisters and there wouldn't be that whole "incest" thing to keep tripping him up when the beautiful queen with the dragons tried to sleep with him.

If Jon isn't a Targaryen and the rightful heir to the Iron Throne, Sansa (probably) stays loyal to Daenerys and (definitely) doesn't have any damaging information to feed to Tyrion. Tyrion, in turn, doesn't have information to share with Varys. And Varys is less inclined to betray Daenerys, as there's no obvious heir to turn to in her stead.

The alienation between Jon and Daenerys plays a significant role in her decision to bathe King's Landing in dragon fire instead of accepting the garrison's surrender. In the run-up to "The Bells," Game of Thrones goes to great lengths to showcase Daenerys' isolation. She left Daario back in Mereen. Jorah is dead. Missandei is dead, killed in front of Daenerys' eyes. Varys is a traitor. Tyrion is either a traitor or, in Daenerys' eyes, so profoundly incompetent that she can't trust him.

Daenerys is utterly alone - Grey Worm is still alive, but he's a soldier, not a diplomat or a deep thinker, and he's so angry and distraught about the loss of Missandei that he's no help. He's certainly not a moderating influence. And when Daenerys, in the depths of her grief, reaches out to Jon for love and support, he rejects her, a decision he doesn't make if he's not her nephew.

Daenerys' isolation and paranoia are exacerbated by the revelation of Jon's real parentage. And without that revelation, the sack of King's Landing never happens.

Bran should be king because he has "the best story?" What the hell does that even mean? Arya and Sansa don't have compelling stories?

Man, this pissed people off.

Here's the thing: a lot of folks apparently read Tyrion's support for Bran in the finale as a substantive case for the youngest surviving Stark child - as though Tyrion was arguing that Bran objectively had the best story and therefore deserved to be king. But that's a mistake - Tyrion isn't saying Bran will make the best king because he has the best story. He's saying that the realm will find Bran's story the most compelling and unite behind him. Tyrion is basically making an electability argument.

Look at the realistic options* for the role. The guy with the best case, Jon, is in prison, and while it's hardly unprecedented in Westerosi history for someone to go from regicide to king, it might be a bit of a tough sell. More importantly, Grey Worm makes clear that Jon is utterly unacceptable to the Unsullied, and he might have murdered the entire grand council on the spot if they had chosen Jon. So Jon's out.

That leaves us with three choices: Arya, Sansa and Bran.

*Let's grant that, for dramatic reasons, the choices are limited to an extent they wouldn't be in real life. Even after the civil war there are probably a handful of non-royal nobles hanging around who would merit consideration. But you can't very well elevate the lord of Wolf's Raven or wherever in your series finale.

Arya has a great story, the show's critics point out. She saved the goddamn world! She killed the Night King! What more do you want? You can't sell that?

Here's the thing: Arya would be a crummy queen. We all love the character, she's awesome, Maisie Williams is great. People name their daughters "Arya." She's cool as hell.

But can you really see Arya presiding over feasts or tourneys? Can you really see her politely treating with foreign diplomats issuing veiled threats? Can you really see her balancing a budget or haggling over loan rates with the Iron Bank or figuring out how to fund a new sewer system? Can you really see her getting married for the good of the realm?

Of course not. Arya has a very specific set of skills, most of which boil down to stabbing things. And while those are very useful when you're trying to kill the Night King, they're of limited value when ruling a massive kingdom. The entire point of Robert Baratheon's story was to show what happens when you make a soldier a king and he runs into problems that can't be solved by stabbing them.

Tyrion doesn't say these things aloud, of course, but he has had front row seats to rule by monarchs whose first instinct is to murder their problems away. He's not setting Arya aside because he doesn't think her story is impressive - he's setting her aside because he doesn't think she'd do the job very well, and she's not the type to be a puppet queen.

What about Sansa? Unlike her sister, she has a compelling argument on the merits - we've seen how she navigates complicated diplomatic and logistical problems. She's smart, she understands politics, she was taught by a gifted (if profoundly creepy) mentor. Sansa would, almost certainly, be a good queen.

So why isn't she Tyrion's choice? Again, it comes back to the public perception. We know, as viewers, that Sansa has a great story - we've seen all of it. But it's not an easy narrative to sell to a larger public that hasn't been watching an HBO series over the course of a decade or reading a series of books for more than 20 years. Sansa doesn't have a famous military record (like Jon), she didn't kill the Night King (like Arya) and she doesn't have superpowers (like Bran).

Her skills are more subtle, her accomplishments hidden. Everyone knows Jon won the Battle of the Bastards because he was the guy on the battlefield - who knows that Sansa brought the Knights of the Vale and saved the day? Everyone knows Arya killed the Night King - who knows that Sansa played a huge role in organizing the defense of Winterfell? Sansa is just a harder sell.

And it's impossible to ignore the fundamentally misogynist nature of Westerosi society. The people of Westeros have, in their lifetimes, had experience with two queens: Cersei and Daenerys. The first turned out to be a murderous sociopath. The second burned King's Landing to the ground in the Westerosi equivalent of a nuclear attack.

Is that actually a good reason to disqualify Sansa? Of course not. But Tyrion is dealing with perception, and he's living in a society that likely views its most recent experience with queens as an affirmation of its pre-existing opinions of women in general. And if that seems ridiculous, keep in mind that Hillary Clinton lost an election three years ago and now Democrats are running headlong into the arms of Joe Biden because they're terrified that a woman might not be electable.

Which brings us to Bran. Tyrion's right about him, by the way - he does have a hell of a story. A victim of the loathsome incest between the much-hated Cersei and the Kingslayer. A kid who went north of the Wall and gained literal superpowers. A kid who looked the Night King in the eye and never blinked.

Maybe you find that less compelling than Sansa's story - fair enough. But again, Tyrion isn't actually issuing a verdict on the quality of their respective stories. He's talking about perception. And he has plenty of reasons - some substantive, some selfish - to elevate Bran.

Tyrion comes to the great council deeply skeptical of untrammeled kingship. He's not willing to support Sam's argument for a democracy, but he's seen what happens when kings and queens rule unchallenged. He explicitly advocates for an end to the hereditary monarchy. Is he calling for a 21st century UK-style constitutional monarchy? Not in so many words, but it's clear he doesn't want a dictator.

And that's why Bran is Tyrion's choice. He knows Bran has no interest in the day-to-day tasks of ruling a kingdom - he says as much, and so does Bran when he stops in at the small council meeting toward the end of the episode. From Tyrion's perspective, Bran is the perfect king - utterly selfless, without wants or demands, popular with the common people and willing to leave the hard work to Tyrion and his other advisers. King Bran won't be a puppet, necessarily, but he's clearly comfortable giving autonomy to the people Tyrion thinks are most equipped to run a kingdom. And yes, that includes Tyrion himself.

There's another point worth acknowledging here: Bran has literal superpowers. He can see through space and time - into the distant past and into the far future. This...this is kind of a useful skill for a king to possess. If it came out that John Hickenlooper could see the future it would be a pretty compelling argument for his candidacy. And it's a pretty compelling argument for Bran's.

Imagine a king who could see the future - who could see all of the threats facing his kingdom and see them decades before they arose. Now imagine that king has no earthly desires - not for wealth or power or glory or sex.

Choosing that guy...well, that's a pretty reasonable ending to his story.

Game of Thrones' Penultimate Episode Is One of Its Greatest

Series: Game of Thrones
Episode Title: "The Bells"
Episode Grade: A

For many years, one of the primary criticisms of Game of Thrones was that too many Daenerys storylines were resolved through dragon ex machina - Daenerys would seem to be in an impossible spot, her dragons would show up, Emilia Clarke would smugly say "Dracarys" and all of the messy plot complications would disappear in a stream of dragon fire.

In a way, "The Bells" represents the obvious narrative conclusion to that line of criticism. Daenerys Targaryen had brought herself from the desolate steppes of a distant land to the gates of King's Landing thanks to fire and blood. She had transformed herself from the chattel wife of a brutal warlord into one of the most powerful human beings on the face of the Earth, and she had done it through the liberal use of dragon fire.

And, in the end, that is how she took the throne she believed was rightfully hers. It was the only way she could - with fire and blood.

There are so many adjectives to describe "The Bells." Breathtaking. Extraordinary. Brutal. Tragic. Intense. All are accurate. But somehow, even taken together, they fail to truly convey the sheer scope and strength and greatness of Game of Thrones' penultimate episode.

"The Bells" is already catching flak for its treatment of Daenerys, for supposedly ruining a much-loved character. But if the moment when Daenerys sits astride her dragon, hears the church bells ring out across King's Landing, decides to ignore the agreed-upon signal of surrender and proceeds to incinerate the city was not inevitable, it did not, we must admit, come out of nowhere.

Daenerys has always solved her problems in such a fashion. And we have always cheered her on. We cheered in "And Now His Watch Is Ended" when we heard "Dracarys" for the first time, when Daenerys roasted alive the slavers of Astapor. We cheered when she crucified the Wise Masters of Mereen. We cheered when she burned Vaes Dothrak to the ground in "Book of the Stranger." We cheered when she destroyed the forces of Slaver's Bay in "The Winds of Winter." We cheered when she roasted the Lannister army in "The Spoils of War" and we cheered in that same episode when she burned alive Randall and Dickon Tarly.

We cheered these acts of horrific violence because we thought of Daenerys as The Hero, because she was killing bad people and she was going to end tyranny in Westeros.

And in "The Bells," she finally succeeds. She kills the evil tyrant on the throne and eliminates all of her supporters. She fulfills her destiny and accomplishes the mission we've been watching her pursue for the better part of a decade.

And it is terrifying.

"The Battle of the Bastards" was a master class in showing the brutality of a pitched battle between competing armies. "The Bells," for its part, is an extraordinary, heart-pumping exploration of the on-the-ground reality of a city's destruction. Jon Snow is here with the Northern army, but the episode - directed brilliantly by Miguel Sapochnik, who should be using this on his clip reel for the rest of his life - makes very clear very fast that the The Battle of King's Landing isn't about him. Jon has only slightly more control of what's happening than the hapless men and women dying in agony in front of his eyes.

No, "The Bells" is the culmination of Daenerys' arc, and if that feels wrong to you, well, Game of Thrones has always made clear the darkness within the character. She is, after all, the daughter of a literal Mad King, and she is convinced of her own righteousness and of the glory of her purpose. Cersei is the great evil befouling Westeros, and Daenerys has seen her brutality first hand in the execution of her beloved Missandei. She believes the man she loves has betrayed her, she believes her advisers are either traitorous (Varys) or incompetent (Tyrion) and she believes herself unloved in her kingdom.

The innocent people of King's Landing aren't the masters of Slaver's Bay, of course, which is why so may feel like this episode represents a betrayal of a character they love. But the Daenerys we see in "The Bells" is a version of the character that has always been lurking - once you've decided that cruelty is an appropriate response to evil, the other lines grow perilously thin.

Game of Thrones has always been about subverting the audience's expectations and dashing its hopes, showing the dark side of heroes and the nuances of villains. Daenerys is (almost) the last in a line of hereditary monarchs known for their cruelty, a woman who believes she has a gods-given right to a throne and who possesses the Westerosi equivalent of a nuclear weapon. If you believed she would only ever use it for indisputable good, if you believed she would only ever be a simple, straight-forward hero, well, you can't rightly claim there were no signs warning you of the danger ahead.

Daenerys is nothing so much as avenging angel in "The Bells," a winged figure of fire who cleanses the land of corruption so that justice might rule and she might break the final chains. Except "The Bells" doesn't keep the camera on the avenging angel - instead, it's a ground-level view of what happens when such a creature turns her attention on your home.

We see much of this through the eyes of Arya Stark, just two episodes removed from slaying the Night King and literally saving the world. She enters King's Landing walking side by side with The Hound, a confident bad-ass on her way to finally wiping the last name off her list and killing Cersei. But when The Hound points out that Cersei is already doomed and convinces her to leave, Arya begins a descent into the Hell of war, fleeing helplessly before the onslaught of Daenerys and her dragon.

Maisie Williams, always great, is extraordinary here, selling every inch of the character's terror and exhaustion as she desperately scrambles through the guts of a dying city, looking for some escape. She recognizes a mother and her child and tries to save them, but fails. By the end of the episode, she is bruised and bloodied and covered in the falling ash of a burning King's Landing, and we have witnessed Arya finally discovering the horror of full-scale war, instead of the clean, clever assassinations she had been trained in.

There are some truly breathtaking moments in Arya's journey, including an epic long take in which she maneuvers through the crowded, panicking streets of King's Landing and an extraordinary shot near the episode's end of Arya lit by a setting sun amidst the falling ash.

While there's still one episode remaining, "The Bells" feels like a culmination of everything Game of Thrones has been building toward, both as a narrative and as a viewing experience. It goes straight into the show's pantheon as one of its best episodes, and is likely to be considered an extraordinary film-making achievement for years to come.

Notes

• I wanted this to be more of an argument than a traditional recap review, so there's a lot that I didn't really cover. 
• One of my only disappointments is that Jaime really was coming to rescue Cersei and not kill her, as many of us imagined. The two die together, which is only appropriate, but it rather neuters Jaime's redemption arc to make attempting to save Cersei his final act.
• The long-awaited Clegane Bowl mostly justifies the wait. Some of the early sword fighting between Sandor and Gregor is too chopped up by camera cuts to really have an impact, but once Gregor removes his armor the fight becomes much more compelling.
• Euron also dies. 

A Series of Reunions Highlights Game of Thrones' Emotional Strengths

Show: Game of Thrones
Episode Title: "Winterfell"
Grade: B+

Long-running TV shows build a power, a kind of weight, a history that's created through years of effective storytelling and character work. It's the history that forges a connection between show and audience. And it can propel a show forward in its waning days, even when much of the show's previous energy and vitality have leached away.

The best example of this is probably Battlestar Galactica's series finale, a mostly crummy, nonsensical episode that still managed to hit some genuine grace notes through exploring the final moments of characters we had watched go through hell for years.

"Winterfell," Game of Thrones' last season premiere, certainly doesn't reach those depths. It is, in fact, a solid, effective episode. But that effectiveness is built on the show's lengthy history, leveraged through a series of heartstring-tugging reunions in an otherwise mostly sedate episode.

Objectively speaking, not much actually happens in "Winterfell." The big centerpiece of the episode is Daenerys and Jon's entrance into the titular castle in a sequence that deliberately echoes the royal procession into Winterfell in the show's pilot so many years ago. Down south, Euron Greyjoy returns to King Landing with the Golden Company and finally gets to bed Cersei, while Theon successfully rescues Yara in a disappointing and rather eye-rollingly quick and easy operation.

North of Winterfell, Tormund and Beric - who unsurprisingly managed to survive the Night King's dragon attack in the season seven finale - stumble across a horrifying scene in Last Hearth, the ancestral home of House Umber. It's a visually striking moment, the tiny young Lord Umber impaled on the wall of his keep, surrounded by the White Walkers' trademark spiral of severed limbs.

Other than the grisly scene in Last Hearth, the biggest moment in the episode is Jon's first dragon ride, a well-executed sequence that mostly succeeds in capturing the power and grace of the massive creatures, even if it doesn't really give Kit Harrington much of a chance to sell the character's sheer terror. It's a lovely scene, a rare moment in which Game of Thrones is able to really exploit its fantasy trappings for joy and fun and not just epic-scale death and destruction.

This lack of incident should be more annoying than it is. After all, "Winterfell" represents more than 16 percent of the show's final season. We only have six episodes left in the show's run - shouldn't some things, you know, happen in every episode?

But "Winterfell" works in spite of that ticking clock. It's built around a series of emotional reunions sprinkled throughout its runtime. Some of these - hi, Theon and Yara - are not terribly effective. But when Jon and Arya meet under the weirwood tree in Winterfell's godswood it's a moment weighted with emotional resonance - you're suddenly aware of the fact that these two haven't been on screen together since the first season all the way back in 2011. There's nothing particularly special about the dialogue here, which is probably a good choice - Arya and Jon aren't really the weepy, sentimental types. But the entire scene is fraught with the emotions that come from watching these characters go through eight years of hell - we literally watched Jon die. 

Arya, in fact, gets three great reunions in this episode, two in one scene. She finally runs into the Hound after leaving him for dead back in season four (she robbed him first, she helpfully points out), and they share the begrudging respect of two people who don't like each other but who at least have come to tolerate the other's existence. And Arya falls right back into her cutesy flirtatious energy with Gendry, who she forged a nice little bond with way back in seasons two and three.

Sophie Turner and Peter Dinklage get an opportunity to turn in their characteristically good work in the reunion between Sansa and Tyrion - husband and wife, you may have forgotten, since we haven't seen the two together since season four in 2014 (though one doubts these two crazy kids will try and pick things up where they left off). Turner, in particular, gets to showcase how much she has evolved with her character in those five years - Sansa is no longer the cringing, frightened child outclassed by Tyrion's wit and cynicism.

In fact, everyone in the cast is pretty much working at their peaks in "Winterfell." Even Harrington and Emilia Clarke, who've always been the weakest members of the show's extraordinary ensemble, seem truly comfortable in their roles - Clarke, especially, is a lot of fun when teasing Jon around the dragons.

More than anything else, "Winterfell" goes a long way toward proving that Game of Thrones is still capable of hitting its subtle emotional beats. There's no doubt that the show has placed more emphasis on huge setpieces and spectacular battles in recent seasons. But time and history are on the show's side, and one of the most anticipated season premieres in recent memory proved that Game of Thrones knows how bring to both to bear on its own behalf.

Notes

• Sam tells Jon the truth of his parentage toward the end of the episode. I'm thankful they didn't draw that out. Jon took it pretty well, considering he was just told he had been sleeping with his aunt - but then, once you've come back from the dead the whole "laws of gods and man" thing kind of loses its power.
• Bronn is back! He gets the show's requisite female nudity scene, which...eh, they've cut back pretty dramatically on those in recent years. The three prostitutes he's hanging out with talk a lot about all of the Lannisters lost in the famous Loot Train Battle, and it turns out "that boy Eddie, the ginger" got most of his face burned off. So, if you were wondering what happened to Ed Sheeran, there you go.
• "Stay back, he has blue eyes!" "I've always had blue eyes!"
• Still, the funniest moment of the episode is Jon keeping one eye on the dragon while kissing Daenerys and the dragon warily glaring at him the whole time. We've all struggled to impress the new girlfriend's pet, Jon. 
• Arya gives Gendry a weapon schematic, because videogame crafting systems are now truly ubiquitous. 
• Lena Headey doesn't get a lot to do in this episode, but her sad little smile when she's told the Golden Company didn't bring its elephants is perfection. 

Fire and Blood is an Enjoyable - But Unnecessary - Game of Thrones Side Story

Book: Fire and Blood
Author: George R.R. Martin
Grade: B-

Falling in love with a fictional society is pretty easy - lots of people have done it. But it takes a very specific kind of personality to become truly fascinated by the history and backstory of that society. These are the kinds of people who don't just care about Kings X, Y and Z who show up on screen or on the page - no, they want to know all about Kings A-W, their wives, their wars, their evil ministers and even the non-royal lords and ladies who populated their courts.

Which is to say there's undeniably an audience for Fire and Blood, George R.R. Martin's history of the Targaryen dynasty, which ruled Westeros for about 300 years before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin's justly popular series of fantasy novels that spawned the HBO mega-hit Game of Thrones. For those readers or viewers who just enjoy Daenerys and her dragons or Jaime's redemption arc or Tyrion's wit, however, Fire and Blood might have limited appeal.

Martin always took a somewhat patchwork approach to sketching in the backstory of his universe - he would occasionally joke that he'd likely lose a trivia contest to particularly devoted fans. Westeros had lore, but it always felt more instrumental than comprehensive - it existed to provide context for the story being told. The Targaryens had a history so Daenerys could have a history. There was a story behind Robert's Rebellion so that the relationship between Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon could have weight and texture. And so on and so on. There was no sense that Martin's universe had a carefully written history dating back thousands of years, and that was fine - the story he was telling was compelling enough as it was.

Fire and Blood isn't Martin's first attempt to fill in the details of his universe - The World of Ice and Fire, written in collaboration with super fans Elio Garcia Jr. and Linda Antonsson, takes a more comprehensive approach to the whole of Martin's world, while Fire and Blood is a more detailed narrative focused specifically on the reign of the Targaryens. Fire and Blood begins with Aegon Targaryen and his two sister-wives bringing their dragons to the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros and conquering the land with...well, you know the title of the book.

There's a framing device here: Fire and Blood purports to be the first volume in a chronicle written by one Archmaeter Gyldayn, with Martin a mere transcriber (in typical Martin fashion, the book got a bit out of hand, and what was supposed to be one volume became two, with the second yet to be written and presumably years away from release). It's a bit of an affectation, but it gives Martin a chance to have a little fun - the "author's" commentary makes him a bit of a character (albeit a prissy, judgmental one), and there are some genuinely interesting passages where Gyldayn wrestles with the necessity of synthesizing multiple unreliable narratives into a single, comprehensible account. This is the kind of thing - bringing realistic questions of history and governance to a fantasy narrative - that Martin has always excelled at, though the conceit of the Maester's chronicle does render some of the long passages of dialogue a little out of character.

Anyone who has read through histories of European dynastic struggles can tell you just how tangled and confused they quickly become, and Martin's fictional history of the Targaryen dynasty is no exception. Things become muddled almost immediately after Aegon the Conqueror dies. There are surely readers who can easily differentiate in their minds between Queens Alicent and Alysanne and between Rhaenyra Targaryen and Rhaenys Targaryen. And there are surely readers who can remember the hopelessly intertwined family relationships that run through the narrative. The rest of us, however, have to flip back and forth from the family tree in the back of the book, and even that is only so helpful.

The fact that Fire and Blood has loads of characters with complicated relationships to each other isn't necessarily fatal. "Loads of Characters With Complicated Relationships to Each Other" is basically the subtitle to Game of Thrones.

But Fire and Blood lacks the key ingredient that made A Song of Ice and Fire so compelling: a sense of character.

A Song of Ice and Fire is, essentially, an attempt to complicate the basic narrative of both history and fantasy. The easy story is, "And so Robert the Brave overthrew the Mad King Aerys Targaryen with the aid of his loyal and honorable friend Eddard Stark and all in Westeros lived happily ever after under the new king's just rule." But what if Robert the Brave is a good soldier and a crummy king? What if Ned Stark is so loyal and so honorable that it ends up getting him killed?

Martin's novels succeed because he writes characters, not just names in a family tree. They're complicated and they're compelling, and so they're easy to remember even when the sheer number of them can get a little overwhelming.

Fire and Blood, by contrast, throws a staggering number of names at the reader without ever really bothering to build characters around them. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, old men and children who die in their cradle - they're introduced, their basic personalities are conveyed in a sentence or two and then they just become another set of names that occasionally show up every few pages.

As a result, there's no real drama in the book's story, and not just because the outcome of the Targaryen squabbles is foreordained. It's hard to care who wins The Dance of Dragons - the cutesy name given to the brutal civil war between rival Targaryen claimants, over Archmaester Gyldayn's amusingly fussy objections - when the two principal characters, Aegon II and his half-sister Rhaenyra, are so flatly drawn and unmemorable.

And this dynamic is even more noticeable when the book turns away from the royal family and starts naming other lords and ladies. It's essentially impossible to keep track of which house is on which side of the Dance, for example, and scenes set at the royal court lack any real personalities. Tywin Lannister is one of A Song of Ice and Fire's best characters, a brilliant, ruthless, relentlessly competent individual who is the best kind of villain - the kind who could make for a compelling protagonist in a point of view-flipped version of the story. There's no one like him in Fire and Blood, no endlessly fascinating character to keep the audience's attention when the focus turns away from the Iron Throne.

Much of Fire and Blood, then, reads like an (admittedly erudite) college student's term paper on The Wars of the Roses - a chronological record written with no real passion or verve that manages to successfully name all of the participants without making a case for why the reader should care.

None of this is helped by the competent - but uninspired - illustrations from Doug Wheatley, who mainly serves up a series of generic blond Targaryens and indistinguishable dragons.

There are, to be sure, some exceptions. Mushroom the Fool, one of the sources from whom Archmaester Gyldayn draws his information, comes off well, eventually earning the Archmaester's grudging respect. And Corlys Velaryon, lord of a house that's essentially a side branch of the Targaryen family tree, is drawn well enough that the reader comes to respect his dignity and honor, though this is perhaps a reflection of the character's age and the fact that he hangs around for five monarchs and a few hundred pages.

And Martin has not lost his eye for grand tragedy. The most compelling material in Fire and Blood is a long, detailed account of a massive, days-long riot that consumed King's Landing, culminating in a mob storming the Targaryens' beloved Dragonpit and, in a fit of religious frenzy, killing all five of the dragons housed there. It's a beautiful piece of writing, one that manages to capture both the epic scale of the rioting and the intensity of the dragons' final moments.

Still, though it checks in at 736 pages, Fire and Blood ultimately feels like a profoundly lightweight experience, a curiosity of interest to only the most devoted Song of Ice and Fire completionists. There are real charms here - Martin is too good to write a book without a few. But in removing the human element from this story, and turning it into a mostly dry chronicle of names and events, Martin has drained much of the fire and blood from Fire and Blood.

The New God of War Is Caught Between Realms

Can a videogame serve as an effective apology?

I'm not necessarily thinking in terms of, like, Ken Levine forgetting his wife's birthday and apologizing by creating a videogame that serves as a deconstruction of birthdays and the very nature of regret.

It's unfair and reductive to say that the new God of War, a distant sequel to the series of hack-and-slash action games that dominated the PS2 and PS3 about a decade ago, is simply an apology for those famously bloody games. It's a profoundly well-made game, a labor of great effort and passion, thoughtful and elegiac and deeply interested in important questions.

But it is, in many ways, an attempt to grapple with the complicated legacy of the original series (defined here as the three main games released for the PlayStation consoles, and not including the weirdo subtitled side games). The God of War series was a genuine phenomenon at the time the games were released - God of War is the 11th-best selling game in the history of the PS2, God of War 2 was the 14th-best seller and God of War 3 sold more than five million copies.

Still, for all the sales and all the acclaim, God of War had mostly faded from the critical conversation. There was a sense that the games represented a kind of evolutionary dead end - epic scale hack-and-slash action games that refined and perfected the form without leaving much room for future development. Dante's Inferno is what you get when you try and iterate from God of War, and that illustrates the point nicely.

But there was also a sense that God of War epitomized an immature, rather embarrassing era in gaming. The original three games weren't just bloody - they were gleefully vicious, glorifying in brutality and lingering on lovingly rendered images of over-the-top violence. And the obligatory sex mini-games in each entry were particularly effective at inducing eye rolling.

2018's simply titled God of War tries to avoid all of those sins. It makes a number of core gameplay changes to enhance the depth and breadth of the experience and works hard to create a mature, thoughtful narrative. Nothing in the game fails - every element is polished to a glimmering sheen and mostly works well enough. But too many of them feel awkwardly grafted on to a property with which they don't naturally fit, and you can see the seams. And those seams are enough to keep the game from reaching greatness.

Take, for example, the game's foray into open world exploration. The original games were essentially linear experiences, with some occasional opportunities for Kratos to wonder off on a hidden path and find some collectible or power up. But God of War takes Kratos out of his traditional Greek environment and plunks him - and his son Atreus - into the Scandinavian countryside, where there's much more room for side quests, collectible hunts, exploration and the usual open world flotsam.

There's no doubt this new landscape is gorgeously rendered, and there's a lot of pleasure in simply wandering around and admiring the scenery. But the open world element of God of War feels almost obligatory, as though you simply can't make a big, ambitious AAA game these day without open world exploration. For all the effort developer SIE Santa Monica Studio put into crafting the look of the open world, there was seemingly little thought as to how that world fit with the way the characters move.

The best open world games - for example, Batman: Arkham Knight - ensure the scope of their worlds doesn't exceed their characters' movement abilities. Arkham Knight, in fact, succeeds at turning the simple act of moving about the world into a genuine pleasure.

God of War, however, builds a big, gorgeous world, and then mostly expects the player to get around it at walking and rowing speeds. There are "mystic gateways" scattered throughout the game map that allow for fast travel, but their functionality is severely limited for the first 2/3 (or so) of the game. They're essentially one-way trains to a central hub -  for most of the game you can fast travel from Point A to the hub, but not from Point A to Point B, or even from the hub to Point B.

As a result, the player is left to spend a lot of time simply rowing around the giant lake the forms the heart of the open world. Again, this isn't actively unpleasant - there's some humor and character building in the conversations between Kratos and Atreus that take place on the boat, for example. But you're always aware of the time you're forced to invest in rowing across the lake, especially since those journeys are never interrupted or broken up by, say, surprise encounters with lurking enemies.

The open world is paired with an increasing emphasis on RPG elements like character and gear upgrades. These existed to some extent in the first three games - Kratos could upgrade his weapons and find power-ups that enhanced his health and magic capabilities, for example. But these upgrades were mainly found within the character's linear path - the new God of War fills out its much larger world with a much larger range of gear to find and tweak.

There's a lot of this stuff, but most of it fails to add anything truly substantive to the experience. At their worst, big, open-world RPGs degenerate into a quest for numbers - the player is less concerned with advancing a story or exploring the world than with finding a sword or piece of armor that has a slightly higher number in the "DAM" or "DEF" columns.

Again, God of War doesn't quite fall into that trap, but it comes closer than you'd like. There's the usual rush that comes from your first big armor upgrade, and a couple enhancements genuinely help - you'll definitely want the Niflheim Mist Armor when trudging through Ivaldi's Workshop in Niflheim. But most of the time you'll find yourself shuffling through various combinations of chest armor, waist armor, gauntlets and enhancements in an attempt to make the numbers on the right side of the screen just a little higher.

In theory, these combinations favor different skills and can be tailored to your unique play style, but the reality is that your "unique play style" is probably the same as mine. Whether you slightly tweak your vitality, your attack power, your defense or your runic abilities, you're likely to approach combat challenges in more or less the same way.

Part of the reason so much of the seek-and-upgrade RPG elements here don't really matter is that God of War's combat never really encourages variety or creativity. God of War is clearly going for a more grounded combat system than the original three games, where combat was a gleeful, acrobatic affair full of spinning blades and flying bodies. The new God of War is more indebted to Dark Souls and other games where combat is a careful, strategic affair.

Except God of War doesn't quite have the courage to go full (or even half-) Dark Souls, and instead settles for a functional, mostly pleasing combat system that never really evolves after the opening battles. You can rack up as many experience points as you like, upgrade Kratos' skill set to include increasingly complicated combos and, in the final battles, you're still likely to get through combat by mashing the light attack button and tossing in the occasional heavy or runic attack.

So instead of the over-the-top fun of the original series or the intellectual pleasures of a more tactical game, God of War mostly ends up creating a simplistic, unchallenging combat system that never finds a niche.

There's no real ability to customize your approach or tactics - you can't build a stealthy Kratos or a long-range specialist Kratos or a tank Kratos. No matter how you invest your experience points or which armor set or enhancements you choose, your game is going to look the same as everybody else's. That's not, in and itself, a crippling flaw - not everything has to be infinitely customizable. But it's aggravating when the game goes out of its way to make you jump through all the RPG min/max hoops, then makes it clear that none of it really affects your experience in a meaningful way.

The same sense of not quite here and not quite there drains some of the force from the game's narrative and atmosphere. God of War clearly has a more complicated relationship with violence than the original games - it doesn't want to wallow in blood and guts, and it wants to interrogate Kratos' rage and aggression.

But God of War wants to have its violence and critique it too. Kratos is more of a reluctant killer than he was in the original series, but he's still slicing through armies of anonymous monsters and demons. And while God of War doesn't revel in over-the-top bloodshed in the manner of its forebears, it's still more than happy to capture decapitations and dismemberments in all their gory, meticulously detailed glory. .

The core of the game is the relationship between Kratos and Atreus. And to be clear, it's exceptionally effective. The dynamic is heartfelt, the product of great care and effort. Director Cory Barlog and the other writers here clearly poured everything they had into sketching out the father-son relationship in God of War, and both the diligence and execution are easy to appreciate.

And yet...for as skillfully crafted as this relationship is, it lacks a certain specificity. In this sense, God of War is hurt by the recent proliferation of videogame stories about fatherhood. Kratos could very easily be Joel from The Last of Us through most of the game - he's distant and struggles to express his feelings, spurns Atreus' attempts to connect, realizes the error of his ways and eventually grows closer to his son. Atreus, for his part, feels both generic and surprisingly modern - he's your standard-issue gregarious little kid, always asking questions and annoying his withholding father, all while quipping in a discordantly 21st century dialect.

Look, stories don't have to be unique to work. The classic storytelling tropes exist for a reason, and even imaginative writers borrow liberally from those who came before. So it's no great failing for God of War to till the village commons.

But still, it's slightly disappointing to see a character with such a striking legacy reduced to the role of Grouchy Dad. There's only a limited sense of how Kratos' specific history shapes his relationship with his son, and the game is oddly silent about Kratos (kinda sorta accidentally) killing his first wife and daughter in the backstory to the very first God of War, which is the sort of event that would seem relevant to current family dynamics.

In the end, God of War is easier to appreciate than it is to love. It has the feel of a genuine passion project for all involved, and yet the attempts to integrate so many of the most popular trends in videogame design that have emerged in the decade or so since God of War III hit consoles robs God of War of some of the uniqueness its pedigree suggests. It's a mish-mash of game elements - all crafted with skill, but without an apparent sense of how they fit together and form a whole.

God of War, then, is both ambitious and a safe play, a game that tries to say and do so much while staying firmly within established boundaries. That it manages to mostly pull off that off is impressive. But it's impossible to shake the impression that God of War could have achieved more if it had committed to something instead of trying to incorporate everything.

Ignore the Sneering - Infinity War's Ending is as Mind Blowing as You Think it is

(WARNING: As you probably guessed, this post contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War)

I cried.

Not as much as some folks, to be sure. But I definitely cried during the ending of Avengers: Infinity War, an ending which saw Thanos acquire the final Infinity Stones, best the Avengers, snap his fingers and wipe out half the life in the universe. As part of that unprecedented loss of life, many of our beloved heroes died, fading away in a cloud of dust, including Star Lord, Groot, Drax, Mantis, Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Falcon, Bucky Barnes and Black Panther (who was probably a bit bitter about the ingrates killing him off three months after he made Marvel a billion goddamned dollars).

It was Spider-Man who broke me, if you're curious. Tom Holland's (apparently improvised) "I don't wanna go, Mr. Stark," while collapsing in Tony Stark's arms was as heartbreaking as it was shocking, and showed just how well Holland is able to inhabit his character's youth and vulnerability.

Maybe it was Scarlet Witch's look of forlorn acceptance that did it for you. Maybe it was Groot reaching out to Rocket as he faded away. Or maybe it was the loss of Black Panther. There were plenty of choices. Regardless, audiences across the country made clear that they were experiencing a genuine emotional reaction to a devastating ending they never saw coming.

To which critics have overwhelmingly responded: you're wrong.

Yes, the weeks since Infinity War's release have witnessed the creation of an entirely new thinkpiece sub-genre: the "here's why Infinity War's ending is no big deal" explainer. Here's Slate. Here's Vox. Here's The AV Club. Here's The Ringer (a publication that basically turned into The Marvel Post for a week or two after the movie debuted).

I could go on, of course, but that would simply belabor the point. Google is available if you want to find more of these pieces. There are a lot of them, but they basically make the same argument: what appears to be a shocking ending in which beloved characters fade from existence in front of our eyes is actually meaningless.

Let's face it, the critics argue: these characters are coming back. There's a Time Stone, after all - Thanos uses it to essentially rewind the movie, resurrect Vision and pluck the Mind Stone from his head (and if you saw a big Avengers movie taking a plot point from Michael Haneke's Funny Games, well, you're quite the prophet). The surviving heroes can do the same thing in Avengers 4 to reverse Thanos' success.

We know a lot of the actors playing these dead characters have lengthy contracts with Marvel. And we know Marvel has plans for may of the dusted characters - a Black Panther sequel has already been announced (Marvel having decided it really likes money), Spider-Man has just returned to the MCU fold and Sony is definitely not going to let its co-producing partner kill off the iconic hero, James Gunn has been talking about Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and so on. As a result, the critics say, there are no stakes here. This is all just temporary.

Here's the thing: they're (likely) correct. And here's the more important thing: it doesn't matter.

Look, are the dead characters coming back in Avengers 4? Almost certainly, yes. Some might not (Loki is likely dead, dead, dead), but the big name heroes...yes, they're probably due for some resurrections. That could be done well or it could be done poorly, though I think Marvel has earned enough audience goodwill to bet on the former.

But the idea that any of this is a surprise, or that it qualifies as insight, is absurd. Marvel obsessives have a better understanding of Robert Downey Jr's contract than they do their own mortgages. The fans providing Infinity War with the largest opening weekend ever understand Marvel's future plans better than most critics do.

The fact that audiences, in the stunning final moments of Infinity War, just don't care about any of that is a reflection of the movie's power, not a flaw. A movie is not merely a receptacle for world-weary analysis - it is an emotional experience. Art can spark a nuanced conversation or a critical insight, yes, and I would never suggest that those are illegitimate. But art can also speak to us on a more visceral, emotional level. It can bypass our objections, our preconceptions, our cynicism. It can move us and inspire us in spite of our understanding of modern franchise conventions.

And that's what Infinity War achieved with its ending, with the stunningly quiet desolation of those last few minutes, when the surviving heroes are faced with the loss of their friends and the enormity of their failure. It made the audience feel those things as well, and the emotional reaction Infinity War is able to elicit counts, regardless of what happens in the sequel.

Avengers 4 will not erase that emotional resonance, even if it literally erases what happens at the end of Infinity War. That moment in time - those stunned, tear-stained audiences - will always exist and will always be legitimate.

Take The Last Jedi, which Jesse Hassenger contrasts with Infinity War in the Slate piece I linked above. I don't necessarily agree with Hassenger's contention that The Last Jedi represents a movie that's uniquely challenging to its franchise's fans - Luke Skywalker still gets to save the day (if in an unexpected fashion), he still gets the movie's big, bad-ass moment, the movie bends over backward to save beloved characters and the purportedly "tragic" tone of The Last Jedi is entirely in line with The Empire Strikes Back and The Revenge of the Sith. 

But setting that aside (and a reminder: I liked The Last Jedi!), all of The Last Jedi's subversive virtues exist in spite of the fact that we know they're likely to be set aside in Episode IX. Does anyone seriously doubt that the good guys will come out victorious in the last movie? Does anyone really believe that the Dark Side will win and that The First Order will take over the galaxy?

Of course not. We all know that Episode IX will end as all Star Wars stories canonically end - with the Light Side the winning side. Whatever subversion The Last Jedi can boast, history will almost certainly view its as the temporary setback in the inevitably triumphant story cycle of this particular Star Wars trilogy.

And that's fine! That doesn't take anything away from The Last Jedi at all. Everything there is to admire in that movie will still exist after Episode IX. And the same is true of Infinity War.

For that matter, it shortchanges Infinity War to reduce the power of its ending to the death of so many of its heroes. Audiences were not just moved by the loss of these characters. Yes, it was stunning to see so many Avengers fade into non-existence, but it was also stunning to see Thanos flick away so many Avengers like so many flies. It was stunning to see Earth's mightiest heroes fling themselves at Thanos in desperation and then see them fail - utterly, completely, comprehensively fail, after a decade spent representing indomitable will and unstoppable virtue.

The most stirring, inspirational moment in Infinity War is the sudden appearance of Thor in Wakanda, wielding his new axe, forged by the heat of a dying star, turning the tide of battle as Alan Silvestri's wonderful "Avengers" theme kicks in. It's the quintessential "Big Damn Heroes" moment, all punctuated by Mark Ruffalo's hilarious, "Oh, you guys are screwed now!" (The movie's biggest laugh line in my theater)

And the movie brutally undercuts it minutes later.

And it was stunning to see so much of this from Thanos' perspective. What's striking about the last 10-15 minutes of Infinity War is the extent to which they represent Thanos getting his big act three Marvel movie heroic triumph. He has the huge army in Wakanda, of course, but in so many ways Thanos is the underdog here, the lone warrior battling the imposing forces arrayed against him.

The fight on Titan is a single man struggling against a super genius in a technologically advanced metal suit, a master of the mystic arts, a half-man/half-living planet, a bruising Kree warrior, a genetic mutant with the agility of a spider and his own super suit and an alien with telepathic powers.

And he beats them.

Thanos shows up in Wakanda and has to fight off the likes of Black Panther, Captain America, Black Widow, Bruce Banner in the Hulk Buster suit and the entire Wakandan royal guard.

And he beats them.

Infinity War's ending forces the audience to realize they're rooting for the doomed legions fighting against the unstoppable hero. And after the fight, after Thanos beats his seemingly unbeatable foes, we're forced to watch the aftermath, when the triumphant hero can finally lay down his burdens and enjoy his long-sought-after moment of rest.

Even more than the dusting of the heroes, it's the movie's last shot that sticks in the mind and refuses to leave. Thanos, having found peace and victory in the fulfillment of his destiny, but at a terrible cost, limps outside, sits down and watches the sun rise.

That's it. No swelling orchestral score, no moment of inspiration, no heroes crouching on a roof, watching over their city - just a quiet moment of triumphant contemplation for the genocidal villain. And in that peace is such extraordinary tragedy.

It is, of course, not the critic's job to merely parrot the views of a movie's audience. Donald Trump is President of the United States - the American public can make mistakes, you know? Critics have every right to dislike a movie that audiences like. Popularity does not equal quality.

But the inability of so many Infinity War critics to understand why the movie's ending hits fans so hard in spite of the inevitable Avengers 4 narrative fix represents another failure to grasp the emotional connection audiences have with these characters.

It's real, and it explains why this ending overcomes the genre savvy fans have built up over the year. And it's that connection that enables Marvel to pull off a gutsy, breathtaking, devastating and entirely unexpected ending to one of the most eagerly anticipated movies in recent memory.