Was Game of Thrones Season 8 really that bad?
By: Dea Bardhoshi
Tags: Data, Pop Culture, Analysis, Game of Thrones

Was Game of Thrones Season 8 really that bad?

Photo by Kylo on Unsplash

I have recently started rewatching Game of Thrones, starting all the way from Season 1. Since I was a relatively committed fan of the series since its beginning, I thought that Season 8 was largely disappointing. More specifically, the plot lines were either abandoned or rushed, and I didn’t agree with almost anything that happened in the story. Other people at the time also seemed to think the same.

So, I thought: could we look at Season 8 from a data science viewpoint? That is, can we show objectively that the writing was genuinely bad, aside from the viewers’ own opinions of the season? Well, let’s see. Firstly, here are the tools that we will be using:

Tools:

Jupyter Notebooks, where all the code will live

Pandas and numpy, Python Packages for manipulating data frames and math functions

Textstat, another Python package for analysing text

Datawrapper, a website for generating visualizations

Dataset: This story uses the following data: https://www.kaggle.com/albenft/game-of-thrones-script-all-seasons

And here are some basic questions to guide our analysis:

Questions:

Does the script of GoT Season 8 have a smaller proportion of unique words? Unique words are used to measure the complexity of a text: the higher their proportion, the more complex a text.

are used to measure the complexity of a text: the higher their proportion, the more complex a text. Does GoT Season 8 have less complex words? Complex words in our definition will be words longer than 7 characters.

in our definition will be words longer than 7 characters. Does GoT Season 8 have more “easy” words? In this context, easy words have less than 5 characters.

have less than 5 characters. Does GoT Season 8 have less complex sentences? Let’s define complex sentences to be sentences with at least 15 words.

to be sentences with at least 15 words. What is the grade level of GoT Season 8 script? This metric called the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level refers to whether a student of a specific grade would be able to read a text, and it ranges from 1 to 12.

of GoT Season 8 script? This metric called the refers to whether a student of a specific grade would be able to read a text, and it ranges from 1 to 12. What about the readability score? For this story, we will be using the Flesch Reading Ease score, which refers to how difficult an English passage is to understand.

Unique Words Score

So, let’s begin. I decided to compare the percentage of unique words for each episode of two seasons, 1 and 8. That is because Season 1 is relatively highly rated and any difference between the two will make us inclined to believe that Season 8’s writing is in fact worse. After parsing the text for each episode, I cleaned and tokenized the data to generate the proportion of unique words for each of them. Below you can see a Datawrapper visualization with the horizontal axis showing the season number and the corresponding episode.

Surprisingly, at least to me, episode 4 of the eighth season scores very high in this category. It is titled “The Last of the Starks”, and it takes place after the battle against the Army of the Dead. One reason for its unique words percentage might be that the episode discusses multiple plot lines.

The lowest, on the other hand, is the second episode of season 8, titled “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” and takes place just before the battle against the dead. One reason for the low score of unique words might be that the scene is set entirely in one place and the characters were preparing for only one event, leading to them using roughly similar words. However, what is slightly unexpected is the fact that there does not seem to be a huge difference in the uniqueness score across the two seasons. Despite the fact that many people felt the quality of the series dropped, that does not seem to reflect on this metric.

Complex Words

Continuing with the percent of complex words, I followed the same procedure as above, only adding an “if condition” to scan for longer words. And below are the results. One thing that jumps out to me is the significantly lower proportion of complex words in episode 3, season 8. This episode was titled “The Long Night”, and it followed the army of living fighting against the dead. Therefore, it makes sense that there aren’t that many complex words, since the episode was dominated by fight scenes. The other episodes, both from season 1 and 8, generally have a similar percentage of complex words, hovering from between 3.02 and 4.41.

“Easy” Words

Now, let’s look at easy (shorter than 5 characters) words. Similarly with complex words, I just needed to add one “if condition” to scan for them and here are the results. As you can see, the episodes all have a similar portion of these words, with no episode having significantly more or less easy words.

Complex Sentences

What about the percent of complex sentences? Well, take a look below. First, as expected Episode 3 of Season 8 scores pretty low in this category. Then, second to last, there is episode 5 of the same season, titled “The Bells”. This is also a fighting focused episode, which helps us understand why it comes up low for this metric. A couple of season 1 episodes, 1 and 2, also have a low complex sentence score, which is slightly surprising (at least for me who thinks that season 1 was much better than the 8th). It is also interesting to note that the highest scoring episode in this category, episode 8 of season 1 was written by George R. R. Martin himself, which could have contributed to the complex sentences. As for overall differences in the two seasons, I don’t think that there are any for this metric. What do you think?

Ease of Reading Index

Which episodes’ text is easier or harder to read? The second episode of season one receives a score higher than 90, translating to “Very Easy”, whereas episodes falling between 80–89 are “Easy” to read according to the Flesch metric. As you can see, only two episodes are harder to read: S1.7. which is “Fairly Easy” and S1.8. which is “Standard”. Again, the fact that George R. R. Martin wrote S1.8. might contribute to it being harder to read. Some next steps for this part could be to compile an average of this metric for TV Shows, especially since the ease of reading index usually refers to written texts, which are more complex than spoken ones.

Grade Level

Let’s look now at the grade level for all episodes of season 1 and 8. As you can see, episodes 7 and 8 of season one that were harder to read (above) also correspond to a higher grade reading level. In addition, the decimal points round down to the lower grade (for example 6.2 rounds to 6). The other episodes range from 4.5 to 6.5, with the sole exception of S.1 E.2, whose reading level scores a 3 (or third grade). Like above, it would be interesting to see whether some type of average across TV shows could be compiled to see how Game of Thrones would rank.

Generalizing to all Seasons

Now that we looked at all of the metrics, how about we check how each season performs in them? Below you can find a line plot, with the season numbers in the horizontal axis. Interestingly, there is a jump in the complexity of sentences in Season 6, but the metric largely remain relatively similar across seasons.

Concluding

To sum up our findings, I was certainly surprised to see that Season 8 didn’t score worse than Season 1 for the metrics we used. On the contrary, the scripts for this season’s episodes got similar results in unique words, complex and easy words, complex sentences and the ease of reading metrics. This could suggest that people’s dissatisfaction with the series lied mostly in the plot lines and how they were handled, rather than in the textual components themselves.

Thank you for reading!