For my money, the dragons were always the worst bit of Game of Thrones. They were just about tolerable, or ignorable at least, when they were scrawny lizards perched on the shoulder of Daenerys Targaryen, but as they grew, season by season, they began to dominate proceedings, and tipped the show over into the deep waters of the fantasy genre. Pre-dragons, if you squinted extremely hard, you could just about convince yourself that you were basically watching a fantasy-tinged version of Wolf Hall, with its noble families clandestinely scheming away against each other. That was the real magic trick of Thrones, to convince those of us usually unwilling to dip our toes into fantasy, that we were watching something more than that. But dragons the size of aircraft carriers, including a zombified version that breathed ice instead of fire, made that basically impossible. The spell was broken.