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

Sept: Margaery, her dad, Tommen (sort of), priest Jonathan Pryce, Loras, Kevan Lannister, Lancel Lannister

Pycelle, not in the explosion but right before it.

Arya killed the Freys in that same episode too.

TBH a part of me will be glad if we go back to scheming and politics, that felt like the basis of the show to begin with and now its been waylaid by high fantasy battles which is like, fine of course, but life goes on, someone gotta sit on dat throne.

rip Margaery you did only scheming wrongs and we’re too hot to die

i thought melissandra was going to start singing New Order's "Temptation" with the eyes bit

As far as “where did Arya come from?!?” at the end, on rewatch, I have determined she must have gotten to the godswood before Theon’s demise, and hid herself amongst the corpses. Sneaky!

Is Jon not able to make the dragon breathe fire? I notice he didn't do this and kinda seemed pointless him riding around on it as a result.

I also wondered why there was only Theon and a few other lads guarding Bran, but also why they only had to fight off a trickle of dead.

The godswood only has one entrance in I think

As far as “where did Arya come from?!?” at the end, on rewatch, I have determined she must have gotten to the godswood before Theon’s demise, and hid herself amongst the corpses. Sneaky!

You see her pass a wight, if you watch; a wight's hair gets swept up in a light wind and he turns to look over his shoulder, then cut to the shot on NK and Arya comes flying in from behind.

O sorry yes I figured she was good at hiding in plain sight, no quibbles there. I just meant how she kinda came at him from behind and sort of airborne?

I phrased it today as “flying out of nowhere” and that’s about right imo

What sort of absolute fucking animal watches TV in a bar.

My wife watched Joffrey die in bar in NY with a big screen and apparently it was amazing, everyone cheered.

I’m disappointed we won’t get to see flying dragon skulls breathing fire on Cersei. But I loved the contrast between ‘not today’ for Aria and Melisandre signing off with her final ‘OK, today’. I’m going to give that episode a second viewing, I think.

just been watching a squirrel try to sneak up on the bird feeder, where we've put defences in place. it realised and deftly climbed up the tree above it to jump down and attack the bird food that way. Maybe arya could've just hidden in the tree.

Also the Night King is literally a dumb CGI avatar and would have made an incredibly underwhelming Big Bad, the problem with zombies is that they're scary but also kind of one-note and boring after a while, best to get them out of the way early. It's already been established that at some point in Westeros history they managed to defeat the army of the dead and humans still managed to fuck everything else up for themselves.

More to the point the Night King is a bad manager, what's the point of expending literally everything trying to take a well-defended fortress like Winterfell when you can just roll across country and take everything in your path?

Generally I thought this episode was great, I'm not especially nostalgic for the show as it used to be and big dumb fight scenes rule. Good move to have spent seven seasons building Arya up as this bitter avenging character and have that all be in the service of something higher. It does seem ridiculous that not a single White Walker managed to rinse through
Sam given he spent the entire episode with at least of of them pinning him down.

There's been a surprising amount of screen time given to one little girl who was being served by Davos and later in the crypt, I couldn't quite work out what they're building towards with that.

it's either a red herring or chekov's gun. what if she's had greyscale and is still contagious? she's been at close quarters with a lot of the principals so it would be a real threat

Probably do need to rewatch at least some of this. THink I missed a couple of the rapid points. Somebody being dragged over teh battlements etc.

Did see the bit with the dragon and Jon Snow and thought it was a bit close to a computer game or an arcade one.

& Arya may have been a bit close to a deus ex machina but on the other hand had probnnably been built up to that purpose all the way through.
Wondered what the next stage if she hadn't done that would have been. I guess the Night king would have still been trying to expand his kingdom and gone up against Cersei and whoever. Who would have been ill-prepared. Was there anybody who could work with dragon glass even if she had recognised taht as a possible tool. THough that's a moot point now.

It was very well executed, and extremely tense. Lazily concieved though, and padded out plotwise. Arya killing the NK was cool and a bit surprising and made sense (a GRRM plot point?), but other than that you could describe the plot as "they had a big fight and the goodies won". Very linear and unimaginative, particularly compared to the books and the early seasons, and continuing to squander any thematic complexity.

On that note I can completely imagine the rest of the series being two episodes of build up and bro downs, followed by a battle with Cersei in which a few B grade characters die (Brienne and Davos most likely), and the day is saved at the last minute by a third party. Then Jon and Dany will get married and share the throne with Tryion as chief advisor, Arya head of security and Sansa Warden of the North, and everyone in the Seven Kingdoms lives happily ever after.

There's been a surprising amount of screen time given to one little girl who was being served by Davos and later in the crypt, I couldn't quite work out what they're building towards with that.

Then Jon and Dany will get married and share the throne with Tryion as chief advisor, Arya head of security and Sansa Warden of the North, and everyone in the Seven Kingdoms lives happily ever after.

there'll be a targaryen on the throne, a lannister hand, a stark as warden of the north (maybe all women?), it will be summer and everything will be fundamentally it was before Robert's rebellion. Some point will be made about history being cyclical or naturally returning to an equilibrium etc and then we get a whole load of spinoffs.

I'm guessing that Arya killing the Night King is another thing GRRM had planned anyway.

If the little girl died then that makes sense, I thought I saw her alive at the end but fair enough.

a targaryen on the throne, a lannister hand, a stark as warden of the north (maybe all women?)

Dany will make Cersei her hand?

I wouldn't rule it out

jon/tyrion/sansa would be the boring version of course

and of course the unborn Baratheon boy coming into adulthood in just enough time to upset the applecart again and trigger the next winter

they really had fun with the light/darkness stuff in this and there were some really striking visuals: sudden panic of the zombie giant emerging out of the darkness, dothraki lights being slowly snuffed out, dragon fire lighting up the wall of snowstorm, they got more mileage out of beric's sword in the dark, the zombie dragon thrashing around spilling ice fire everywhere, and with all the golden fire light set against the blue white walker glow it felt really trippy by the end. was surprisingly touched by theon's ending despite having been sick of his character for ages: that trembling jaw as he tried to keep it together & bran telling him what he needed to hear. and agree w/ fgti about melisandre, carice van houten was great and eerie & it was one of the most satisfying endings. the night king was so profoundly unterrifying though, they could have done so much better to make him other-worldly, he strutted around with his useless rubbery friends smirking like a 15yo larper who is smug abt getting to be the big-bad

Yeah the moment where the the battle cries and the sound of the horses and the flaming swords were all gradually snuffed out to make way for this terrifying darkness and silence was tremendous. The Unsullied seemed to do better than the Dothraki but how exactly did Grey Worm survive when his crew were pretty much serving as a massive human shield?

I agree with most of this - https://variety.com/2019/tv/columns/game-of-thrones-long-night-battle-winterfell-season-8-1203200303/?fbclid=IwAR0W1qFXx5qF-5b1nwnBTltZqiZgB8x1mjHck3k6DDnRqe58gOfN53YPsSo

how exactly did Grey Worm survive

Some Twitterites are saying he didn't? I couldn't say either way.

He definitely survived because considerably more marginal characters got the gushy sad music treatment when they died. He might be gravely injured I suppose.

Still, excellent defensive enforcer, the kind every fan would want on their team. 8/10 performance even if Arya takes home the match ball.

It's been a bit obscured by it being stretched over two seasons, but it's worth pointing out how incredibly stupid this five episode stretch has been.

Jon Snow is terrified of the ice zombies, so he hatches THE PLAN to go beyond the wall to find one, so that they can get everyone on board with fighting them.
THE PLAN immediately goes pear shaped, and he has to be saved by Daenerys and her dragons. But at the cost of one dragon.
Then it turns out that a dragon was the exact thing the Night King needed to get beyond the wall. If it hadn't been for THE PLAN he couldn't have attacked anyway.
Oh, but it turns out that Cersei tricks them, so THE PLAN doesn't even work to get everyone on board.
But then it turns out that not only does THE PLAN 1) fail and 2) end up helping the exact evil it was trying to combat, but 3) they win anyway without Cersei, so THE PLAN wasn't even needed to begin with.

And also, what was even supposed to be the point of getting Cerseis army anyway? They ended up planning to lure the Night King close to Bran, so more soldiers would just be getting in the way, and would mean more undead enemies eventually.

That said, all of it being so stupid makes me thing GRRM will just avoid anything having to do with that whole thing, and will just have the Night King be killed by Arya midways through book seven in a much simpler way.

it's a relief the night king isn't the final battle. the moans that the show doesn't surprise anymore don't really fit with the ppl complaining they'd built the white walker menace up too much to be dealt with so abruptly

The Night King hasn't even been introduced in the books, so maybe he just made up a rubbish villain of the top of his head to get them off his back.

Yeah but there's satisfying surprises and stupid ones xp

Hey Fred what’s your take on why they didn’t just ride the eagles to mount doom in the first place

I'm not much of an arya fan but I wld still say her suddenly killing the night king leans more towards satisfying than stupid

They made a big deal about this Winter being potentially like an Ice Age but also symbolic of the White Walkers plan. Arya has totally destroyed that, is the real climate change. Or Cersei is the real Winter.

Hey Fred what’s your take on why they didn’t just ride the eagles to mount doom in the first place

― El Tomboto, 30. april 2019 13:59 (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lord of the Rings is stupid as well :)

Xpost why not a fan? (Just curious. Not slamming you in any way!)

Btw totally not a Jon Snow fan. His facial expression is just....no. Also have to say, reading the books, even less of a fan.

I keep reading more and more hilarious meta-defenses of the show vis a vis budget. "They had to kill off the Dothraki because horses are expensive." "The giant wolf runs off because the wolf CGI was expensive." "Now that they've had this big battle they have to focus on talking and palace intrigue, because they blew the budget." And so on. The perplexing one I'm starting to see more of is "the show runners hate fantasy," "I'm glad the Night King is dead, I hate fantasy," and so on. The "zombies are boring and one-note" criticism I'm seeing is equally perplexing. It's all about the writing/plotting. If the zombies were boring it's because the show failed to make them more compelling. If the fantasy elements were unsatisfactory, unexplained or confusing, it's because the show never explained them or found a consistent place for them. (For that matter, if people were into this show but not fantasy, then I don't know what to say.) If supposedly dwindling budgets are shaping the plot, then the show didn't make the right use of budgets or wasn't smart enough to figure a way around them. And so on.

I read the first couple of books and was pretty underwhelmed, but the show seemed to do a pretty good job sticking to the script, as it were. I stopped watching the show a couple of seasons ago but have kept up, since it's a big cultural event. Yet more than ever I'm curious to learn if Martin had a better vision than what's apparently playing out in the show. I suspect he perhaps didn't, since he was constantly talking about Gordian Knots and whatnot, and also because he's struggling to write another book, but I also suspect however the show ends will at least in some way reflect his own narrative goals. I am a little surprised the show not only sped through his giant books so quickly but also seems to be in a strange hurry to wrap it all up. (While paradoxically doing a lot of wheel-spinning and stalling ...)

Arya delivering the killing blow was the one thing I did find satisfying about it, and as I and others have pointed out it's the plot point that reads most as a GRRM idea out of the episode.

It's the surprise of dispatching this threat that has been built up carefully since the very opening of the show so abruptly which is sloppy. That the threat is actually kind of boring and one-dimensional does not mean it's good writing to get rid of it and move on to more interesting things; good writing would have been making the threat more interesting, and maybe weaving it in with other threats and stakes in the dynamic manner the show used to be so good at. As they're doing it now, it's linear, like a platform game - we've defeated one boss, now on to the next one. And as the boss they've just defeated was set up (perhaps misguidedly) as being the biggest, the effect risks being one of bathos. Maybe the last few episodes will redeem this, though I'm not particularly hopeful (I'm sure I'll enjoy them nonetheless).

tldr - Weiss and Benioff are good at detail but shit at long term plotting.

I admittedly don’t really like fantasy and faux middle ages/magic/dragons stuff but they reeled me in with the eloquent dwarf and the nude women

I still want to know whether Bronn is still on his way to Winterfell to kill Cersei’s rivals! (There is no way he’s not going to flip allegiances at the drop of a hat)

As far as “where did Arya come from?!?” at the end, on rewatch, I have determined she must have gotten to the godswood before Theon’s demise, and hid herself amongst the corpses. Sneaky!

― El Tomboto, Monday, April 29, 2019 10:15 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Also, just two episodes prior, Jon Snow was standing in the exact same place in the godswood, turns around to see Arya, and says, "How did you sneak up on me?" It's her job, binch.

Eliza otm

My wife watched Joffrey die in bar in NY

Hubert Selby's Game of Thrones