HBO's adaptation of Game of Thrones - Thread 2. There are a lot of nerds.

Oh and the show runners and writers and the actor herself gave Melisandre a wonderfully emotional end, probably the best moment in the episode imo was the look of hope and confusion she did the prayer thing

was gonna say, was it just me or was it super dark and I couldn't tell who died and who didn't -- apart from the super obvious ones

Nah. I had to turn the brightness up for some scenes

Trash. I love how the big battle they have been setting up since S1E1 ends in a single episode (one in which they spend the first 10 minutes picking around) with no deaths of any consequence. Everyone has known Jorah was going to die saving Dany for at least four seasons and Grey Worm is a redshirt that got a few (too many) lines. Makes you think that Jon was a big idiot for running around scaring everyone for six seasons with talk of the end of the world.

picking = dicking

Grey Worm is still alive, isn't he?

Yes

I’m glad the highly predictable endgame battle is not actually the endgame

Episode was great btw

Grey Worm is still alive, isn't he?

Oh, thank god.

Guys I want a Thrones game so fuckin bad.

I want to be in the shit trying to hold off white walkers, then have to fall back to the ramparts and to defend the castle, and then have a stealth section dodging wights in the library, and then slither my way to the godswood to kill the Night King.

the general reaction of "not enough characters died" is pretty lol

Battle sequences about as legible as a Brakhage film.

Yeah, as far as big budget GoT tentpole battle eps goes, this was pretty weak and deflating. Big sense of "that's it?".

I feel like I would have had no trouble with the look of the ep if I'd been watching on a nicely calibrated television instead of via a shitty Crave stream on my desktop.

so does this episode qualify as climate change denialism y/n

I'd had a few beers when I watched it and the TV wasn't great in the hotel where I am, but I am glad to see I wasn't the only one kind of confused at times.

Like, the white walkers created a storm to confuse the dragons? And this led to all those bits where they were just flailing around the sky? I guess it was clear but also a very GOT solution, like we need the battle to go on for a while, how can we prevent this character and the dragon being in it without anything significant happening? All their writing for the last three or four seasons seems to be about how to avoid having to use the tiny two minutes of plot they've managed to come up with. Like they don't place obstacles in front of their characters that require development or change so much as stick them in deep freeze or press pause.

I also missed the first ten minutes but as far as I can tell, nothing of any importance happened since I have yet to hear any mention of a bit I didn't see.

It’s not that not enough characters died, per se, it’s that the stakes of the entire Night King story feel so small because it was inconsequential, unexplained, and meaningless.

mostly just a lot of silent buildup/ominous portent xp

I don't think it's true that the Night King story was unexplained. he got an origin story and a motive of sorts. but the conclusion was definitely a bit of an anticlimax.

the stakes are kind of big. there were, what?, 50 people left alive out of the forces Dany spent the entire series building?

someone made a good point re: the Dothraki getting wiped out early - took care of most of the horses which surely helped with the budget and logistics

i do think the scene with all the flames in the dark slowly extinguishing was a nice, dread-inducing touch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MG-KjqtI6s

When I went on a guided tour of a cave one time, the guide told everyone to hold their lamp down by their side, not up in front of your face. If you do the latter all you’re going to be able to see is the lamp, he said. Those poor Dothraki rode in blind as bats.

that scene was kinda the whole episode (series?) in a nutshell, simultaneously impressive and stupid xxp

I guess we know why these people haven't discovered electricity yet

lmao @ that Romney video

Re stakes: LOL, I bet 5 minutes into the next episode Dany sniffs momentarily about how her Dothraki all died, then we never hear of them again.

I had this embarrassing moment as we saw Arya’s dagger drop, where I was like, “Who is below her?!?!” And then that split second of realization, “It’s her other haaaaaand!”

lmao

so does this episode qualify as climate change denialism y/n

It was a triumph of geoengineering imo (in the face of an overwhelming systemic threat, human innovation unexpectedly saves the day at the very last moment)

stabbing climate change in the face - could it stop global warming? in this essay, i will

I’d be interested in reading about how reasonable the tactical decisions being made would seem to a historian. I really palpably felt, in the past, especially with the Battle Of The Bastards, that there were some surprising and yet logical tactical decisions being made. It all made sense and felt real.... but then I thought it seemed really weird to start the battle by spurring on the cavalry into the darkness right away, but maybe not?

A lot of strategy is based around forcing an army into a retreat, which was not going to happen with a bunch of zombies

I've been rewatching some Spartacus lately and, while it's much more deliberately lowbrow (and low-budget!), the battle sequences in the last couple of seasons have a lot more ingenuity, invention and lucid staging than anything on GOT

For a second I was all "Kubrick? Seasons?"

lol

Posted byu/glimmerofdawn
1 year ago
Arya will kill the Night King

The valyrian steel dagger reappearing in the Stark storyline quite conspicuously, more than necessary for the sansa-arya plotline.

the useful Chekhov's gun of Nymeria's wolfpack, capable of running across snowy land without attracting attention from the wights.

the general tendency of the show to frustrate expectations in interesting ways. nothig will be as you are led to believe it will be. if they want you to believe that either dany or jon will do it, neither will.

the general theme of her being committed to the heroic lifestyle, while limited by being a girl. if she can pull this off she beats all the knights ever hands down in terms of heroism.

the beric dondarrion suggestion for no plot purpose in that scene, for reasons (the mass of wights to fight through) that arya would not face (she could sneak past).

1 comment

JinnDante
2 points ·
1 year ago

no.

I don't think it's true that the Night King story was unexplained. he got an origin story and a motive of sorts. but the conclusion was definitely a bit of an anticlimax.

― Simon H., Monday, April 29, 2019 7:58 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, the idea that he needed a motive beyond what was already shown is kinda mystifying to me. the white walkers are like mickey's brooms from fantasia--they were created to do one job, and they did the job way too well. for the brooms, it's fetching water, for the white walkers, it was to kill.

it does create some story problems imo--i thought the whole point of the white walkers was to prove that the internecine conflict between the human factions was meaningless, and that the real threat to humanity came from the forces of nature. now, i guess not? the forces of humanity didn't have to come together at all, and they still won, and the real story ends with the political squabbling that was supposedly a distraction.

Lots of rumbling on Twitter this morning that the HBO GO stream of the last night's episode looked considerably better than the cable airing.

i watched on hbo go and could barely see anything for long stretches due to darkness

video compression + lots of blacks = ????

It can be argued that it’s a failure of the show runners that the battle didn’t feel consequential and it felt anticlimactic, but it seems to me that when you put the battle in the context of the rest of the show, it feels pretty grand: it took the amassing of like four armies, two dragons, the training of a ninja who can steal people’s faces, a sudden amassing of magic stone from across the continent, days of forging weaponry, to hold off the wights long enough for a ninja to sneak along and stab the night king.

I think part of the anticlimactic feeling was that I was hoping for humans and wights to progressively and cleverly one-up each other—you want the Night King to do things you don’t expect. He didn’t, he just slammed bodies against the walls until it worked (which, at the end of the day, really is the central looming threat of the white walkers).

The episode had a ton of great moments, it thrilled me and made me feel emotional. For someone who knows nothing about battlefield tactics, the battle provided a few head scratchers, but overall, there were some incredible visuals and it inspired existential terror in me.

idk i was totally thrilled watching the episode, but it fell a bit in my estimation when i thought of it in a broader story context

Usually these sorts of spectacles inspire complaints that the CGI has superseded the writing, but this might be the first show or movie where I've heard people repeatedly defend bad writing with "well, they only had so much CGI money ..."

Also the first time I've actual seen discussion/debate about TV calibration/screen quality in reviews

we switched to the bedroom TV a 10 year old 46" Panasonic Plasma that handled the dark scenery like a champ .

Yeah I had relatively little trouble making sense of things via hbogo so I was surprised how unanimous that reaction was.

I would probably have felt better about the episode if there'd been 4 or 5 fewer instances of name characters getting saved at the last possible second by another name character

Also I found it funny that after all that talk of Sam's inability to keep up as a soldier/fighter, he was able to hack n' slash like a champ through the whole thing

My major problem with the battle was that they went to the trouble of building and ranging all those catapults and trebuchets and fired each of them exactly once. Come on, guys. I know you got dragons, but jeez

When they kept getting saved by each other among the chaos I was fine with it, but when it got to the point that Jon runs in (from outside winterfell) and sees each named character standing on top of their own personal hill of corpses swinging swords (and getting overwhelmed -> cutaway -> cut back and they're fine) it was extremely silly looking to me. My memory might be exaggerating it, though.

I would probably have felt better about the episode if there'd been 4 or 5 fewer instances of name characters getting saved at the last possible second by another name character

the showrunners are totally addicted to this--it was the worst in that beyond-the-wall sortie from last season, where everyone rescued everybody else and only thoros kicked it.

i was amazed by the dragon's precision fire breathing more accurate than modern day drones that's for sure

My only issue with this extremely cool episode of TV where a zombie army invaded a castle (that part owned) was really that they pushed a few characters to the margins and kept cutting back to them in frantic retreat with never any moments of escape. Brienne and Jaime and Podrick(?) were against a wall desperately fighting for the last thirty min before Arya saved the day. I understand the issues of time and devoting more of it to certain characters but wish there’d been some relief for them, cf. Arya hiding out in the Winterfell library.