Dark Matter Season 2 finale review

Dark Matter has just concluded its second season, ending with a major cliffhanger that will set up the events of Season 3. The plot revolves around the Raza crew’s attempt to prevent the bombing of a space station, which would result in all out Corporate War. Suffice it to say the good guys lose: Ryo seizes the blink drive and has the station destroyed, leaving everyone else’s lives in peril and all but ensuring the beginning of a Corporate War.

My grades for the season’s episodes

1. “Welcome to Your New Home”                                            A-

2. “Kill Them All”                                                                    B

3. “I've Seen the Other Side of You”                                        A-

4. “We Were Family”                                                               A-/B+

5. "We Voted Not to Space You"                                             A

6. “We Should Have Seen This Coming”                                B+

7. "She's One Of Them Now"                                                  B/B+

8. “Stuff To Steal, People To Kill”                                          A

9. “Going out Fighting”                                                           B

10. “Take the Shot”                                                                 A-

11. “Wish I'd Spaced You When I Had The Chance”             A-/B+

12. “Sometimes In Life You Don't Get To Choose”               A+

13. “But First We Save the Galaxy”                                       A-/B+

As a whole, “But First We Save the Galaxy” was a stronger finish than last year’s bottle finale. But it was not without its flaws. To begin with, the plot to stop the bombing didn’t have a proper amount of set up – up until now, there hasn’t been much indication in the prime reality (unless I missed it) that a summit of the Corporations was going to place. And we’ve never seen the Raza crew realize that this would be the key moment they would need to change to prevent Corporate War. Moreover, the show completely skips over the immediate aftermath of the Zairon coup, picking up with the Raza some time later, with their plan to prevent the bombing already in motion. This leaves open a whole bunch of nagging questions.

Given his intentions for the blink drive, why did Four not keep everyone on Zairon locked up, while his scientists replicated the technology? Why did he let everyone simply leave? Or did the Raza escape Zairon before he could get to the drive? Arguably, we could infer that Ryo believed his former crew would come around to his side and he was grateful for their help in his ascension to the throne, so he released them. But there was still a lot of missing connective tissue.

Moreover, the finale didn’t find a whole lot for everyone to do, with the exception of Ryo and Emily. And the series returned to one of its worst tendencies – deactivating Andrea, a gimmick that already grew redundant and tiresome by the end of last year.

It also highlighted a glaring problem of the second season – the fact that it seemed to have little idea of how to utilize its new regular cast members. Nyx and Devon were promising additions to the Raza crew, but they became increasingly marginalized as the season moved forward. Devon was killed off before contributing anything major to the plot mid-season, as though the writers lost their interest in him, even though they were sowing the seeds of a possible romance between him and Emily. And then Nyx, who began as a new major lead and a veritable badass, turned into little more than Ryo’s girlfriend in the last stretch of episodes before getting an all too brief fight scene in the finale. Her unceremonious death at the hands of an apparently envious Misaki retroactively diminished her further, because she wound up servicing Ryo’s character, as opposed to functioning as an individual in her own right.

Maybe there were contract issues or the writers “ran out of story.” [Melanie Liburd apparently moved to New York and signed up for a new series, so it is likely she didn’t renew her contract beyond S2.] But Nyx and Devon both deserved better or at least to go out better. Perhaps Arax Nero will return in some capacity in the future, so the prison arc will have some longer lasting consequences. I hope that, at the very least, Dark Matter won’t pull off another Lost Season 2 next year, when it comes to its newest protagonists.

But let’s talk about the good stuff, because there was plenty of it. The finale, if anything, cemented the fact that this was the year of Five, aka Das, aka Emily Colburn. Jodelle Ferland’s green-haired hacker was at the center of almost every major event this year and her thread in this episode was a true highlight, if just for seeing her don a blonde wig and act like a spy. Those last minutes on the station were exciting and suspenseful, with that final shot seemingly spelling the doom for everyone and leaving us wondering how they will get out of this mess. Certainly, the rules of television storytelling pretty much guarantee that none of the core Raza crew will have died in the explosion, but their failure will definitely resonate throughout the third season. And things do look bleak, with the blink drive gone and Corporate War now a certainty.

The finale also had an excellent subplot with the android Arian, who feels like a truly sympathetic character with his own economical mini-arc, despite having never appeared on the show before. Andrea’s year-long struggles with her emotions provided the series with a great deal of shorthand for this plotline, while also hinting that emotion-capable androids may become an even bigger deal in future episodes. That his sacrifice was ultimately for naught underscores how tragically this season ends. Despite their best efforts, the good guys lose and they lose hard, and not because of outside forces, but again, because one of their own has turned against them. So, if I had issues with the gaps left over from last week’s piece de resistance, I have no qualms about where this episode takes Emperor Ryo, who now has all the makings of a sympathetic antagonist that fully believes in the righteousness of his actions.

The fact that he willingly has the station destroyed feels like a natural progression for his character and cements the fact that, unlike Six, he won’t be coming back to the Raza fold. Not anytime soon at least. There’s no way his former comrades will forgive him for murdering all those people, betraying them and getting Nyx killed in the process, however inadvertently. Given the show’s recent meta-commentary on the nature of resets and status quos, this looks to be a change the show will commit to, opening the possibility of Ryo becoming the series’ primary antagonist. Assuming Alex Mallari Jr. remains a regular, emperor Ishida’s continued presence suggests a significant amount of story next year could take place off the Raza ship, dealing with Zairon’s conflict with Pyr. I’m not sure the show’s budget will allow that – maybe Ryo will be more of a guest star, with whom the crew will have occasional check-ins. But either way, it’s an exciting and bold direction for the show to go in.

Looking back, this season, while uneven, was definitely stronger than the first, with the weakest hours of this year surpassing the weakest hours of last year. While it continues to intertwine its episodic and serial plots with aplomb, the show also slowly, but surely, appears to be embracing its seriality, with the blink drive/corporate war arc providing a much-needed sense of focus. [The show began more in the vein of the early Lost, where each character would anchor their own mini-series for the duration of an episode. There’s nothing wrong with this approach but sooner or later those disparate threads have to add up to something bigger.] As a result, the season moved with a greater degree of confidence overall, even though it still struggled with its new characters. It also was again able to execute some excellent bottle shows.

There is still some sense the show isn’t always living up to its potential, possibly as a result of corporate interference, but I am confident that when Dark Matter returns next year, it’ll be able to iron out its remaining rough edges.

Side notes:

• Congratulations to the cast and crew on the show’s third season renewal. Here’s hoping it will keep doing 13 episodes per season. 10 will simply not do.
• Really feel sorry for Inspector Kierkan. He remained a devout loyalist to the end. (Though I’m sure there is the possibility that this Kierkan was another temp clone. So, he might come back next year. If he does, I’m wondering if he’ll be fired for messing up so many times this season.)
•  Jeff Teravainen's Anders is alive after all! Curious as to what he’ll be up to with Boone.
•   Lots of loose ends left over for the future. There is still the matter of who exactly hired Corso to take out One/Derek Moss (the events of this episode were supposed to take place closer to the season’s end point originally, so the lack of resolution would’ve presumably been less surpri-sing), what was up with that squid-alien thing from Dwarf Star and who crossed over from the Mirror Universe. [My money is on AU Five, who was conspicuously absent on the AU Raza, despite it having a blink drive, and would have the prerequisites to create that virus in 2.10.]
•  I really hope we’re not completely done with the Seer plotline, despite the death of Nyx and the Seer leaders. They left behind a whole ship, full of people hooked on drugs. I assume that ship is still somewhere on Zairon and maybe Ryo will make use of the remaining people’s precognitive abilities.

Was Hulk gonna turn Gray in Age of Ultron?

One of the interesting things that happens when you're a fan of a certain property is that you find different parties working on a movie or a TV text offering conflicting information.

In the case of Avengers: Age of Ultron, there is now a question of whether or not the Grey Hulk, an evil or perhaps angrier, less controlled version of the famous green giant was to appear.

The early trailers for the film, which depicted a battle between Hulk and Tony Stark in his Hulkbuster armor gave some people the impression that Hulk was looking grey or grey-ish, suggesting Grey Hulk would make his debut appearance.

As the film has shown, this is not the case. And, according to director Joss Whedon and producer Kevin Feige, was not the intent.

From EW [http://www.ew.com/article/2015/04/27/avengers-age-ultron-joss-whedon-and-kevin-feige-gray-hulk-super-women-and-saying]

Entertainment Weekly: During the Hulkbuster fight, am I picking up on the Hulk turning gray when he gets especially irate? 

Joss Whedon: You’re not picking up on the Hulk turning gray in the sense of a Gray Hulk. What you’re picking up on is that we wanted to put a little spell on him. What we wanted to evoke was a sickly, out-of-control, diseased-brain Hulk. We deliberately took the green down and made him look unhealthy, but not in a gray-canon way. … That literally never came up. 

Kevin Feige: It came up with consumer products and marketing! I think there might even be a Gray Hulk section of a [toy line] somewhere, which we kept saying, ‘It’s gray-ish.’

Now, however, a report by WIRED on the effects of the film, says different.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReDCNzeTjg8]

According to them:

Initially, Hulk was actually planned to turn grey when he is angry Hulk in the Hulkbuster sequence, but hey, everybody wanted the green guy. So in the end, ILM just changed his eyes to make them look more sullen when he is under the control of Scarlet Witch.

At the very least, it suggests that the idea of him becoming canonically Gray for a bit did come up. So, it seems that there were conflicting views on whether Hulk becomes Gray or not.

In Defense of the Smaug Climax

I really like The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. (DoS) That, however, is not the subject this post. This post means to react to the strange backlash to the film’s “Golden Statue climax”. To summarize – in the final chapter of DoS the dwarves of Erebor return home and face off against the fearsome dragon that took over their kingdom. They hatch a plan. First, they trick Smaug into using his fire to reignite the great furnaces of Erebor. Then they lead Smaug to a central chamber, where they unleash a large mold of a Dwarf. As the mold falls off, it is revealed that it has been filled with gold, resulting a Giant Golden Dwarf Statue. Smaug is mesmerized by the sight of it.

He approaches what seems to be his new, beautiful treasure – only for the Statue to start melting, covering him in Gold from head to toe. Thorin and Bilbo seem relieved – the plan has worked. But then Smaug bursts from the gold, brushes off the coating and flies off to decimate Lake Town. Putting aside the fact that Smaug’s decision to destroy Lake Town is not very convincing, I found the climax to be mostly successful. It was thrilling, entertaining and a good final set piece. A lot of people, however, take issue with this climax.

Chief complaints are:

1. Smaug’s credibility is severely undermined, as he never manages to bring down any of the dwarves and his keen sense of smell is non-existent.

2. The sequence, which includes a lot of death-defying bits of action, repeatedly defies the laws of physics. Eg. Smaug’s fire doesn’t burn the dwarves, Thorin is able to use a wheelbarrow to swim through molten lava, gold seems to melt too quickly or not quickly enough.

3. The Dwarves’ plan is meaningless/stupid, as the dwarves should know that Smaug is impervious to heat.  Why would they try to burn him?

The last point seems to especially raise a lot of ire. Having spoken to at least one Tolkien scholar and read a number of comments, I was surprised to learn that apparently many people believed that the Dwarves were intending to immolate Smaug, a point that really put them off from the film. The Huffington Post, for instance, lists it as one of the top five preposterous events in the film. Per Seth Abramson:

“1a. That giant statue of molten gold. During what has been referred to in The Atlantic as the dwarves' "MacGyveresque" battle with Smaug -- a term which, incredibly, makes it sound more plausible than it was -- Thorin's final gambit involves drowning Smaug in a lake of molten gold. Putting aside that Thorin knows, as we all know, that dragons already have inside of them a substance as hot as molten gold, making immolating a dragon with molten gold an impossibility, does anyone know why the massive dwarven totem Thorin stands atop during this desperate attack is filled with molten gold in the first place? And -- moreover -- molten gold that comes out if you just pull a couple chains really hard? Sure, the dwarves had just lit the forges of Erebor -- itself an unlikely feat under the circumstances, especially in the time allotted for it -- but are we really to believe that the second the forges are fired up, elsewhere in the dwarven stronghold a fifty-foot high statue of a dwarven king instantly explodes, presumably killing everyone standing anywhere near it?”

His comments are echoed by scholar Kristin Thompson, author of The Frodo Franchise:

“There is so much in the sequence of the Dwarves’ attempt to kill Smaug that is distractingly implausible. Just as the lengthy falls in the Goblintown scene of Journey never seemed to cause so much as a broken bone, in Smaug’s domain the dragon breathes great sheets of fire repeatedly and never seems to singe the Dwarves. When Thorin’s jacket is set afire, he simply takes it off and keeps running.

How could this vast quantity of gold be melted so quickly? How could Thorin ride a river of molten gold in a metal wheelbarrow and survive? Why does the giant Dwarf king’s statue, when the mold is pulled away, stand for several seconds as Smaug admires it before suddenly gushing into a golden lake that momentarily overwhelms the dragon? And why, if Dwarves know so much about dragons, does it not occur to them that a creature full of fire couldn’t be killed in this fashion? Why would Smaug keep bashing down columns and other parts of the “building” which he considers his and where he plays to spend the rest of his life?”

I agree with the notion that Smaug’s credibility is undermined. Jackson and co. obviously couldn’t go so far, as to actually have Smaug kill anybody, as that would stray too far away from the source text.  But all the other complaints I find utterly ridiculous.

For instance, why are people questioning how long it would take to melt and fill a golden statue?

Given that the story takes place in a fantasy scenario, I see no reason as to complain about the fact that melting gold takes considerably less time and effort than it would in the real world. 

Obviously, the process of filling the mold had begun as soon as the forges were ready. Thus, all the time Smaug had spent chasing the Dwarves after igniting the furnaces had been used to fill the mold with the molten gold. For comparison, it takes Khal Drogo a couple of minutes to meld gold medallions into liquid form in A Game of Thrones, which he boils in a pot made for soup. Or what about the T-1000 Terminator from T2, who somehow turns from a liquid metal state to a solid state in mere seconds?

And why are people complaining about the realism of dragon fire all of a sudden? Gandalf the Grey never burned, despite experiencing the fire of the Balrog up close in LOTR. Neither did Frodo and Sam, despite being surrounded by hot lava in the climax of ROTK.

All this brings me to the Dwarves’ plan. Because the Dwarves never really explain their plan to the audience, there’s a common misperception that the dwarves were trying to foolishly immolate Smaug. This couldn’t be further from the truth – the Dwarves were trying to drown him in the molten gold, which would’ve led him to die from asphyxiation, had it worked. When you think about it, it’s a logical solution to the Dragon problem. Smaug may be virtually invincible, but he does need to breathe  --- so, why not cover him in a liquid head to toe that would suffocate him and act as a form of poetic justice?

For those that assert the Dwarves were going for immolation, I would say that there is plenty of against this. For one thing, it’s safe to assume that Jackson, Boyens and Walsh are well aware of the fact that Smaug is impervious to heat and wouldn’t have implemented the Golden Statue method in the film, unless it actually had a chance of succeeding. For another, after Smaug is covered, the camera lingers on a shot of the immobile golden liquid in the great hall – the shot intentionally shows no bubbles rising to the surface, suggesting Smaug has suffocated.

But most telling is the fact that climax of Smaug is actually based on or inspired by the climax from another film altogether – namely, Alien 3.

In that film, the action took place in a prison, where an Alien runs amok, gradually killing off the inmates. Having no weapons capable of killing the beast, heroine Ellen Ripley and the inmates form a plan to lure the alien into their furnace area by using themselves as bait, where they can drown it in molten lead. (This is directly spelled out in the film.)

The plan appears to succeed – Ripley pours the lead, covering it from head to toe. But the creature bursts out of it, angry but alive. Smaug’s emergence from the molten gold directly mirrors the alien’s escape from the lead. In both cases we have a scenario, where the main characters try to kill an unstoppable, man-eating beast by luring it into a molding facility and covering it in molten metal.  The similarities between these scenarios are too numerous to be simply coincidental. So, in short, the Dwarves were trying to drown Smaug, not immolate him.

Obviously, the writers could’ve explained this point better. One can imagine the Dwarves conversing and stating something to the effect of: “The worm loves gold, so let’s drown him in it!” But I doubt anyone on the Hobbit writing team thought that the audience would need this detail explicitly spelled out. This post obviously won’t address everyone’s issues with The Hobbit trilogy or the climax of DoS, but I believe it should be enough to retire the “Why did the Dwarves try to burn Smaug?” question.

Hollywood, Time Travel and the Art of the Pre-Boot

The new Terminator Genysis trailer has premiered. And if it’s made one thing clear, it’s that the new film is effectively what I would term a “Pre-Boot”, a cross between a prequel and a reboot that attempts to simultaneously maintain continuity with the previous films in its respective franchise, while branching off to tell a story that directly contradicts that very continuity. If this sounds confusing, it’s because of the circular nature of preboot storytelling. A preboot typically arrives after several installments in a franchise have moved it to a point, where the prospect of going forward (sequels) with the series for whatever reason is no longer attractive. Perhaps the story has run its course. Perhaps the studio has run it into the ground. Whatever the case is, now is the time to move back and then sideways. So, the preboot opens in what very well could be the relative past of its originary text before splintering off to develop an alternate timeline. Because of this, it has to foreground to some extent its connection to a prior text even as it goes off on its own tangential/reimagined story.

Rise of the Apes, for instance, opened shortly before George Taylor (Charlton Heston) took off in his rocket and arrived on the Planet of the Apes (1968), while Prometheus (2012) took place a few centuries before the Alien (1978) burst out a man's chest aboard the Nostromo. Neither picture truly fits in with the narrative “future” depicted in their predecessors, yet each invites the audience to read it as potentially being part of that same pre-established continuity. No wonder then, as to why around the release of X-Men First Class (2011) there was a lot of debate as to whether the movie was really a prequel to or a reboot of X-Men (2000), with the filmmakers themselves offering conflicting answers. The time-travelling prequel/sequel hybrid Days of Future Past (2014), which would erase the events of X1-Wolverine, subsequently established that indeed, First Class is/was part of the “initial” continuity, even though it deviated from it so much, that some have proclaimed the film continuity as a whole to be “irretrievably f**ked.” [http://io9.com/5966264/8-ways-x-men-movie-continuity-is-irretrievably-fucked]

Ostensibly, the launchpad for all this was 2009’s Star Trek, which internally reset the continuity of the half-century old franchise through the use of a time-travel plot, allowing the filmmakers to maintain that everything that happened previously is still canon, even though new stories would not be beholden to it. Not coincidentally, other pre-booted franchises tend to similarly be science-fiction series with time travel plot elements, a fact that mitigates discrepancies and contradictions between the various pictures and permits the filmmakers to keep the conflicting films interconnected, as though they can take place in one story-verse, but in different timelines. One can also trace the preboot approach to Casino Royale (2006), which rebooted the Bond franchise by telling the origin story of its central character, while maintaining an ambiguous temporal relationship with the previous Bond pictures, which is line with the franchise as a whole. (Eg. The character of “M” is still played by Judy Dench, much like in the Pierce Brosnan films, providing actor/character continuity.)

What is the reason Hollywood has shifted towards pre-booting its franchises, rather than re-starting purely from scratch? One possible explanation is that contemporary audiences are far more in tune with interconnected storytelling than in previous decades. Continuity now has far more value than it did back in the 90s and disregarding it entirely would today likely alienate a sizable amount of audiences. [This is especially visible in how modern horror franchises actively embrace, rather than ignore, past events.]

A pre-boot’s dual function thus allows it to both appeal to the fans of the previously established franchise entries, while liberating filmmakers to tell “new” stories without being slavishly beholden to the pre-existing narratives that would chronologically come later. It is a good countermeasure especially when a franchise begins to sink creatively following a disastrous outing or two. One can eclectically expunge various undesirable narrative elements (eg. the bungling the Phoenix plotline in the X3), while retaining what worked before and doing something new with it. In prebooting its franchises, Hollywood admits that it’s made mistakes and communicates that it wants another chance to win your attention. If this trend continues, then we'll likely be seeing more and more time travel narratives in current franchises. (I wonder how long before Marvel Cinematic Universe decides to preboot itself?)

After the atrociousness of the last two Terminator sequels, I’m really looking forward to seeing how Genisys (which, btw, obviously stands in for the name of some company within the movie that wants to revolutionize technology) revives/rewrites/revises the franchise continuity and erases T3 and T4 from existence. If it’s good, which I believe it has potential to be, we might see a slew of new quality Terminator films. [Honestly though, I’d prefer three more seasons of Josh Friedman’s excellent Terminator TV series, which, in my book, easily trumps the original Cameron films in terms of narrative sophistication and character development, but I’ll probably be in the minority on that.]

Quantity over Quality: Why Game of Thrones only has 10-episode seasons

Game of Thrones has just concluded its fourth season, ending with an overstuffed finale that divided audiences, as to whether it is the best or worst finale of the series so far. This year, it’s become the biggest moneymaker that HBO has ever had since The Sopranos, a critical and commercial hit that helped restore its reputation after a fallow period of about four-five years, when it was floundering creatively and losing competitively to the likes of AMC and FX.

One of the questions, however, that’s never been satisfactorily answered is why GoT, despite its high ratings, has been getting the short shrift in terms of episodes. That is, why is a GoT season only 10 episodes, as opposed to the 12 or 13 that used to be standard for HBO?

In actuality, the reason for GoT’s thriftiness is quite simple: HBO simply isn’t the network that it used to be. In its creative heyday, arguably between 2000 and 2007, it proudly wore the label “It’s not TV”. 

Under the auspices of Carolyn Strauss and Chris Albrecht, fresh off the massive success of the Sopranos and Sex and the City, it could afford to hemorrhage money on creatively successful, formally experimental and highly expensive shows that would otherwise prove financial failures, such as Carnivale. During this Renaissance period, the network freely granted most of its prestige serial dramas full-length 13-episode orders, as one can see from the first five seasons of The Sopranos (1999-2004), the first three seasons of Six Feet Under (2001-2003) and the first season of The Wire (2002).

The Sopranos

Moreover, it was willing to take long, less rigidly structured breaks between seasons. Whereas networks had to systematically premiere seasons one year apart, HBO could allot 16 months, 18 months, sometimes even more, allowing the personnel more time to work out the new season. This was especially the case with The Sopranos, which premiered its sixth season a whopping two years after the end of the fifth.

Six Feet Under

Around 2003, however, HBO started gradually transitioning towards a 12-episode standard, likely to conserve expenditures somewhat, especially when it came to its most expensive (5-million+/episode) shows. Imagine having about five shows on the air at once, all of which have large budgets and ensemble casts, yet make little money. Removing just one episode from the tail of each season would help save a sizable chunk of money per year.

The Wire

The Wire became a 12-episode show (though the fourth season managed to get a reprieve due to its need to compress a spin-off series focusing on a mayoral election), as did Six Feet Under. Joining them in the 12-episode club would be the three period series Deadwood (2004-2006), Carnivale (2003-2005), and Rome (2005-2007). 

Deadwood

Nonetheless, the long hiatus remained viable. Check out the gaps between the premieres of Carnivale and Rome.

 

Carnivale

Rome

The 12-episode season pretty much remained a constant until the year 2007. By then, the network no longer had its two biggest moneymakers to fall back on, its period serials were failing, the Recession was really taking off. And, not coincidentally, Chris Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss were on their way out. Under the new leadership of Michael Lombardo and Richard Plepler, HBO would become more corporatized and more financially responsible. 

Boardwalk Empire

Now, virtually every season would follow the network mode of premiering a year after the previous one, with a strict production cycle that cannot exceed a year and a run of 10 episodes, leading to abbreviated returners like The Wire and Big Love, as well as truncated newbies like Treme and Girls. (To clarify, some of the 10-episode returning shows, such as  Rome, were likely abbreviated prior to the new regime, but in any case HBO was heading towards shorter seasons and less expenditures at this point.) Sure, there’d be a couple of outliers, like True Blood and Boardwalk Empire, but even those shows are now getting truncated orders due to dwindling ratings and growing production costs. Game of Thrones was originally slated to have 12-episode seasons, back when Strauss was still more or less in charge. Check out this excerpt from a 2007 conversation, wherein Benioff and Weiss make it clear that the series is going to have 720 minutes to cover the first season:

Game of Thrones

Evidently, after Lombardo and Piepler took over, they decided to not allow GoT to diverge from their new standards. When Maureen Ryan raised the 10-episode question to the execs following the conclusion of the first season, this was the reply:

True Blood

"If we could do twelve episodes of 'Game of Thrones,' we would," Lombardo said. "They are already in production on the second season. They had to start writing early to actually produce those shows at the level of execution they need, and deliver in time, so we're not asking a consumer to wait more than a year, which we've decided is a mistake. There is no way they could physically do more than ten without us making a decision to dilute the quality of the execution, to have [executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] be less hands-on, which is not, again, what we're about. So I fully appreciate it. I think the only good news is, I hope it lasts for 20 years. You know, I can promise you we won't stop it before it's ready to stop."

(Source: http://www.aoltv.com/2011/07/29/game-of-thrones-hbo-george-martin-future/)

If you think about it, the claim that larger 12-episode orders would dilute quality makes little sense – most people can tell that GoT is forced to cram way too much material into too little a time frame. And that dilutes the show’s potential quality, as it leaves little breathing room, while forcing the writers to cut their scripts down to the bone, rush through developments too quickly and excise crucial scenes of character development and interaction. Even George Martin has repeatedly advocated longer seasons, remaining unconvinced of the benefits of a 10-episode season.

Hidden, however, within this response is the actual reason – the scheduling. Namely, the fact that Benioff and Weiss must “deliver in time, so we're not asking a consumer to wait more than a year, which we've decided is a mistake.” 

In other words, what Lombardo is actually saying is: “If GoT were to get 12 episodes, the show would require at least 2-3 more months of development/production time, which would mean that it couldn’t premiere every April, making the consumer wait over a year. And our policy is not to deprive our clients of the series for more than a year.”

Following the end of GoT season 2, Benioff would pretty much confirm this in an interview with Ryan:

"I would say that, going forward, 10-episode seasons are really all that are possible, given our 12-month [production] cycle," Weiss said. "For this show specifically, it's really all we can do to do 10 of them in a year. I would say not to expect more than 10 a season any time in the near future ... We had always planned on a 10-episode season [for the show's third year]."

(Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/game-of-thrones-third-season_n_1416386.html)

To view these extensive breaks as a mistake is a sign that the new regime really favors quantity and timely delivery over quality. If an 18-month break worked fine for the ratings-peak fourth season of The Sopranos, why not GoT? The resolution would be to simply allow GoT 12-episode seasons with longer production cycles and 18-month-long breaks, alternating between premieres in the spring and in the fall. The median quality of an episode would go up, the show runners would have more break time to reenergize and have to take less anti-anxiety pills, while George Martin would have more time to write the books without worrying about the show catching up.

Admittedly, the Stark actors would age faster and likely have to be recast after S3, and there'd be some headaches schedule-wise here and there, but it'd be worth it in the long run, at least when it comes to quality and longevity. (Not to mention that GoT constantly recasts actors, minor and major.)

Sure, right now we get our GoT fixes faster, but we’ll forever be deprived of the great series it could really be, were it to get enough space to breathe. GoT is a very bright star right now, but HBO is burning through it too quickly.