Pretty decent season. My thoughts going into the show are basically my thoughts coming out of the show. Good politicking, good upper crust drama. But the show kind of misses the mark on one of the key aspects that made the original good. The lack of perspective or consideration for commoners is fairly distressing when you start to think about it. So much of the original show was about contrasting the priorities and narrow mindedness of the elites in society and how they callously grind away at the rest of us for short term gain. And here, all you get is the high palace intrigue and almost none of the contrast. I thought it was pretty telling of the blinders the writers seem to have in episode 9: where they had that one old princess smash through a public precession, only to turn around and run away. The character didn't want to be 'the one to start a war' because earlier she gave high minded lectures about how good leaders consider their impact on those they rule. Meanwhile, the entire usurping conspiracy ringleaders are all in this one place, and they're completely defenseless. She could have killed literally all of them with one word, consequence free. You cut the head off of this beast, and there is no war because every competitive claim to the throne is now cinders. So she all but guarantees a war begins by flying away. Meanwhile, all of that is nakedly contrasted by the fact that when she entered the scene, she undoubtedly killed hundreds of innocent bystanders to do so. The entire point of her character is supposed to be that she had superior temperament and judgment and should have been made monarch, but the one test of leadership and judgment we see of her in the entire season she fails spectacularly. There's a lot of moments like this in the show where the writing is saying to the audience one thing, but then the form of the story takes a giant shit on the messaging. This was just the most obvious and egregious form that took place so far.
