Knight of the Seven Kingdoms review: Game of Thrones’ best path forward

But that scope — and its further extension in the prequel series House of the Dragon, which jumps back about 200 years in the Game of Thrones timeline — could also be exhausting. The sheer scale of the story didn’t always leave enough time for individual fan-favorite characters, or for arcs to play out at the length audiences might have liked, especially in the series’ notoriously rushed final season. The franchise has been in flux ever since that finale, with multiple new spinoffs announced and subsequently canceled, mutating into new forms, or just quietly disappearing into development hell.