Over the course of this series, we’ve had pretty regular access to what Benioff, Weiss, and their fraternity of writers and directors think about the work they’ve done. Now seems like a good moment to memorialize, not just who these men have been as creators, but who they have been as interpreters — forced or forthcoming — of their creation. To the naked eye, they have been pretty bad at it. A good place to see this is within the stony, dimly-lit confines of the “Inside the Episode” featurettes HBO has released weekly throughout the series. Benioff and Weiss have been rightfully mocked for their performance in these pieces. They speak as talking heads, narrating onscreen action, offering character insights with a searching tone of voice that suggests this is maybe the first time either of them have thought about what they’re saying. They begin nearly all of their speculations about character motivation with “I think,” which is patronizing to the viewer if we imagine Benioff and Weiss are indeed fully in control of the development of these characters, and just absolutely bonkers if it’s suggesting they really have to guess about the motivations of characters they themselves have written.Weiss, for instance, speaking about Tyrion’s last goodbye with his friend Varys, says: “I think Tyrion is saying goodbye to his best friend in the world outside of his brother…And the amount of guilt that he feels over being the cause of his best friend’s imminent death it’s hard to get your head around.” You’ll note that the way I introduced this quotation was by saying that Weiss was speaking “about Tyrion’s last goodbye with his friend Varys.” This is roughly the same description Weiss offers. But he offers it as an insight: “I think Tyrion is saying goodbye to his best friend.” This is maybe a piddly observation, but it’s telling. Weiss is presenting a basic, surface-level description — a description of this scene that he has to imagine was shared by nearly every viewer who watched it — as the special insight of its writer. But let’s bracket that, let’s say that that isn’t the meat of Weiss’ revelation here. What does he follow it up with? “The amount of guilt he feels…it’s hard to get your head around.” What are these featurettes for if not to get our heads around things? And shouldn’t Weiss have his head around it already? We invest, as fans and critics and scholars, a great deal into the connections we form with these characters. That’s what TV is about — the artful management of empathy, the expression of story and meaning through form, the captivating or calling out of audiences. Should we be irked that even inside the episode these characters remain opaque to their creators? And how artful can these men be as managers if they’re so inartful as critics?If we imagine these to be intimate moments, two creators taking a moment to watch the show as fans, then maybe we can be generous about the comments they make. But whether we watch the featurettes as genuine performances or not, what they show us is a pair of artists who seem willfully mystified by their own work.Sometimes they’re more than mystified. In a recent post-episode featurette, Benioff narrates — as we watch Rhaegal getting downed by Euron’s scorpion — that Daenerys had “forgotten about the Iron Fleet.” As numerous even marginally attentive viewers pointed out the following day, Daenerys had been apprised of the current status of the Iron Fleet in the preceding scene. I realize that there’s an aspect of this that smacks of mockingly nitpicking continuity errors or fishing through the “Goofs” section on IMDB, but this is something else. We have a writer, speaking within a documentary frame, accompanied by an editing style we can easily associate with the form of the “video essay” — calling upon the evidentiary status of the medium of film! — telling us things we know to be false about the show he’s written. And we don’t know them to be false because we’re comparing Daenerys in the show to Daenerys in the book, and we don’t know them to be false because they grate against our affective attachment to the character, we know them to be false because the show told us they were false.The best thing about a show like this is its ability to open out into the world, for us as fans, viewers, critics to think alongside and with the show. I don’t care whether or not Dany remembered that the Iron Fleet was behind that cliff. It’s one thing to write a flat character; it’s another thing to insist that your character is flat. It’s one thing to have a plot hole; it’s another thing to introduce one after the fact. The show Benioff and Weiss describe to us is different, in quality, in complexity, sometimes in actual fact, than the one we watch every week. I don’t need artists to perform exegeses on their art, and I don’t need them to acknowledge and validate every idiosyncratic take. I don’t need artists to say anything at all — as far as I’m concerned, these episodes belong to us the second they air. But if they’re going to talk to us about it, they ought to hold the door open, so to speak, rather than closed.

Benioff and Weiss have been rightfully mocked for their performance in these pieces. They speak as talking heads, narrating onscreen action, offering character insights with a searching tone of voice that suggests this is maybe the first time either of them have thought about what they’re saying.