The final season of Game of Thrones was characterised by an all-round lack of care. You could see it in the storytelling, which sacrificed years of painstaking world-building for a gormless clatter towards a stupid ending. You could see it in the creative choices (one episode was so badly lit it made you feel like you’d been kidnapped and were being forced to watch it through a burlap sack). But most of all, you could see it in the coffee cups.
You remember the coffee cup. During a Winterfell-set scene in episode four, entitled The Last of the Starks, viewers around the world noticed that the careful mise-en-scene had been disrupted by the appearance of a very modern takeaway coffee cup, absent-mindedly plonked in front of Daenerys Targaryen. The mistake quickly went viral, with Emilia Clarke eventually hurling her co-star Conleth Hill under the bus for it.
