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

Also extremely funny as everyone said that Euron hit Rhaegal in motion but about a million huge crossbows couldn’t bring down Drogon. Def some stormtrooper aiming going on there.

I mean one of the dragons was literally lame and straight out of another battle so I broadly buy that it would have easier to take down. Quite enjoyed how easily they destroyed those shitty crossbows this time round.

I don't really expect well rounded characterisation from GoT but Cersei was particularly badly served by the writers this season. I wanted to see her go full Hitler in the bunker. Not giving her a proper scene with Tyrion was perhaps a mistake as well.

But in general the whole horrors of war thing was so well done that I didn't care that much about the rest of it. Only Arya showed any heroism at all which I suppose was the point of having her break the revenge cycle.

She wasn't even in the episode but things are really not looking good for Sansa at this stage.

feel like she's as likely to end up on the throne as anyone

“I don’t think she decided ahead of time that she was going to do what she did,” Weiss says. “And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It’s in that moment, on the walls of King’s Landing, when she’s looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to make this personal.”

these guys really are spectacularly dumb

I mean one of the dragons was literally lame and straight out of another battle so I broadly buy that it would have easier to take down.

She really wanted to make it personal. So instead of going after Cersei, the woman who had heard her so much, she decided to just fly around and kill people she didn't know for a few hours. Really personal, can't get more personal than that.

In last night’s episode, Dany made use of the sun, spitfire style, flying with it behind her so Euron couldn’t see the initial approach. And then she kept moving, making the dragon a much harder target. The other dragon attack was unexpected and, I think, hit with the first bolt (though how she failed to spot the iron fleet from the air is still beyond me).

The other *attack on the dragon* was unexpected, I mean.

“I don’t think she decided ahead of time that she was going to do what she did,” Weiss says. “And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It’s in that moment, on the walls of King’s Landing, when she’s looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to make this personal.”

this is bad enough in itself but the fact they actually had to stick in a 30-second close-up which she played as if they'd just told her the above as direction makes it somehow worse.

'she sees the home her family built and thinks - i am about to own that home - i will destroy it'

Yeah was wondering about the fate of the throne since the throneroom seemed to be in a right mess. THought she actually wanted to be on that throne, even if there is a substitute elsewhere. Thought the object had weight in itself fro several centuries of tradition etc.

The thing about the crossbow attack last week is that Dany just flew away and let Euron attack her fleet. Why didn't she just roast him then and there?

based on this ep she prob should have just flown the dragons to kings landing a few seasons ago, didn't even need any troops really.

not least since they didn't even believe she had dragons.

The troops definitely shredded through a lot of KL soldiers. I think the dragons were more for the killing of innocent civilians.

implying that if john just got over the incest ickyness, he would magically heal the crazy woman's uncontrollable emotions is just terrible optics. No way they earned the character turn for daenerys.

I had the same takeaway as you, seemed like a really misconceived scene. The writers even highlighted it in their behind-the-scenes explanation, so it seems they meant it to be the real turning point for her, rather than dying dragons or dying personal assistants

I thought people were saying that they should allow the troops to rest up a while after the big battle at Winterfell to make sure they were in shape to fight in the South. & Dany was pressing for immediate movement which appears to have cost her a dragon that wasn't in great shape and could have done with a chance to repair.

the whole rage attack thing might have worked better if they'd had the dragon killed in the same episode

There was time for word to get back to Winterfell about it dying so yeah, might have been more explanatory if the action had been more sequential. Or that is to say much closer together.

I was just going to say what Stevo said about the dragons being knackered. Sansa specifically said to her that her troops and her dragons were exhausted and no use for fighting, and she should wait two weeks, and because it was Sansa who said it to her, she decided she would go immediately. When Raegal went down, our first reaction was, "You should've listened to Sansa, but oh no. What would she know about battles?"

rip euron greatest character of all time, dying by the sea smiling about how great you are was very fitting, who can say this show doesn't give the fans what they want?

it's a pity he was Lord Flasheart

Lol show Euron is essentially just Victorion which is fine in its own way, but I wanted the unholy black magic pirate king, not the second tier alt right Youtuber.

rushing the final season like this and the way they've treated euron does make me consider tackling the books, ingenious work

i just want madman troll GRR Martin to pop up and say "yo my books are coming and i made them completely different to the series lol"

I give this show quite a lot of good will especially when there are conflicting emotions, motivations etc contributing towards major characters' decisions but literally everything the writers say makes it incredibly difficult to keep indulging this good will. they are so stupiddddd

You can discern Martin's hand in the larger plot points. I mean he almost certainly told Benioff and Weiss that Daenerys should eventually succumb to her Targaryen heritage and destroy King's Landing, but they had just had no idea how to arrive at that point in a coherent or dramatically satisfying fashion

I think I found the way to describe it: These last few seasons of GoT has been nothing more, nothing less, than an old tv-show falling apart due to turnover behind the scenes. It stopped being based on GRRMs writings, and it fell apart. It's a bit like the gas leak year of Community. Or, y'know, it's just like countless other long-running tv-shows, which loses it's sense of the characters and runs out of plot to tell. It just feels worse because it's PREMIUM TV and it's ENDING ON IT'S OWN TERMS, and so these things aren't supposed to happen. I remember watching that episode of The Simpsons where Homer is raped by a panda, and it felt the same way like the show had definitely gone off the rails. But imagine if that had been the penultimate episode, that it had all been FORESHADOWED and the SEEDS HAD BEEN PLANTED, and then it turns out the story was leading to Homer getting raped by a panda. Not just that episode, but all of the show, would have felt ruined.

the whole rage attack thing might have worked better if they'd had the dragon killed in the same episode

Or if they'd bothered to write Missandei as anything other than a paper thin character who's done something more in the last few seasons than stand around in throne rooms.

yeah i mean dany definitely cared about the dragons more than any of her redshirt assistants

Been reading a couple of defenses saying, duh, her turn was totally telegraphed! And then they cite something from the previous episode or maybe the one before that.

Show should have ended with her on the throne, a benevolent ruler. And then after the screen goes to black a card pops up over the sound of fire crackling saying "Moments later, she and her dragon soon destroyed the city in a fit of rage." And then they could do a where-are-they-now montage.

"Jon Snow, Killed in Winterfell By His Own Troops."

"Tormond is now President Tormond."

Etc.

“I don’t think she decided ahead of time that she was going to do what she did,” Weiss says. “And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It’s in that moment, on the walls of King’s Landing, when she’s looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to make this personal.”

How about: she hears the bells ringing, realizes she's won, can't accept that, and decides to destroy everyone in a massive act of self-hatred.

you feel sorry for the actors when you think that's actually a thing they made her 'act' for that weird close-up

In retrospect I think they wrote Dany's "turn" very well, the only complaint I have is exactly what Matt DC wrote... that Missandei was not written meatily enough for me to care about her death, or for me to believe that it was a significant motivating factor in Dany subsequent "turning". Grey Worm's, sure.

There is an episode from Season 5 or Season 6, before they started "getting things done", where Grey Worm, Tyrion and Missandei are sitting in a boardroom in Myreen (I think). The scene lasts two, three minutes, just of Tyrion trying to introduce his drinking game to a couple of teetotallers. Varys finally enters in to end this terrifyingly boring and insignificant scene. There was another similar scene, either same episode or around the same time, where Sam and Gilly are sitting in a wagon talking about how great their baby is and how excited they are to be going to Oldtown. These were the moments that threatened to spoil the series for me, they felt like scenes from Ten-Forward in Star Trek, just people sitting around talking and talking. Characters are better developed by placing them into action situations... we learned more about Joffrey, Arya and Sansa in that riverside scuffle in Episode 2 than we did in any of these conversational pieces.

All this is to say... I wasn't a fan of the way the show ran "exposition" in Seasons 5 and/or 6, and I'm finding the clipped pace of Seasons 7 and 8 to be a nice relief, although a far cry from the graceful unfolding of Seasons 1-4

But... they wasted an entire episode of characters sitting around talking about boring stuff before the battle against the night king? And instead of Dany doing something, they spent half this episode establishing what the sound of the bells would mean, so that her madness would be completely unsullied by circumstance... There's still been so much bad exposition, it's just combined with mindless action :(

Danny's autocratic tendencies have been telegraphed since the Mereen scenes at least.

Westeros is an autocracy, so everyone's autocratic tendencies have kinda been out in the open since season one...

without Jorah around to talk her down I think this shit was inevitable

I can't wait for the legions of furious nerds with their Twitter campaigns for GRRM to "save the series" with the remaining books to explode in rage flames when he still turns Dany heel in those too. Probably more slowly and less awkwardly, but still. These Dany stans are weird.

Enjoying the Twitter theory insistent that GRRM has been effectively "held hostage" by D&D, hated the series and has both books ready to drop immediately after the series wraps.

initially proposed by Ian McElhinney tbf!

Was it? I didn't see that part!

this was the best episode of this show in a long time imo. i think the Dany turn was rushed, but wasn't some unbelievable, out of the blue move. felt very GRRM.

Actor Ian McElhinney, who played Barristan Selmy on Game of Thrones until the character was killed off in 2015, claimed (falsely, it appears) at a convention called Epic Con back in April that Martin has already completed the final two books, and he agreed to wait and publish them after the show finished:

“George has already written Books 6 and 7, and as far as he’s concerned there only are seven books. But he struck an agreement with David and Dan, the showrunners on the series, that he would not publish the final two books until the series has completed. So if all goes well, in another month or two we might get Books 6 and 7, and I’m intrigued to know how Barristan, for instance, ends up going through those final two books. George, I talked to him during Season 1 and he did say to me that Barristan had a very interesting journey. But unfortunately I didn’t get to play all of that, so we’ll have to wait and see.”

actually, now that I think about it, maybe he picked it up from Twitter himself. But he certainly gave it more traction

Just saw the episode last night. Hoo boy, did these idiots top themselves! The first time Tyrion mentioned the bells, I turned to my wife and said, “Dany is going to ignore the bells.” Then Tyrion proceeded to say it to everyone like 15 more times because the showrunners think everyone who watches this show are mouthbreathing dim-bulbs, which we all are.

Managing to make Cleganebowl be a letdown takes skill: wait until the penultimate episode and have literally no other stakes, not even that the Mountain was protecting Cersei. And why did the Hound not kill Cersei as she tiptoed by after basically telling Arya, “I got this.” Oh I know, so we can be let down by the Cersei and Jamie buried alive love scene no one wanted. Also why did the Hound wait 2 week’s until they arrived at a burning Kings Landing to convince Arya to go home?

Euron was the thinnest character of all time next to Missandei but he needed ten minutes of screen time.

Dany’s performance against the Sons of the Harpies, the Night King (twice), and Euron the first time really set up that she had the ability to pull off the destruction of KL with a single dragon. Surprised she didn’t walk the dragon through the streets of KL up to the Red Keep and yell Dracarys! Lol at the explanation that she saw the Red Keep and made it personal by not destroying the Red Keep.

The execution on this show makes Lost look like the Sopranos.

She really wanted to make it personal. So instead of going after Cersei, the woman who had heard her so much, she decided to just fly around and kill people she didn't know for a few hours. Really personal, can't get more personal than that.

Like if Rambo made it personal in First Blood by calling in a bunch of drone strikes on Portland.

lol

they explained the bells so much I was trying to work out what dastardly scheme Tyrion had dreamed up to *actually* do when the bells rang

GRRM’s foreshadowing in the last book is all about Dany realising that “dragons plant no trees”, that her destiny is to be a conqueror and that is where it leaves off - that’s a train of thought that you could see proceeding to a brutal sack of Kings Landing.

Have to say, very much not here for the “sensible men characters were keeping Dany from herself!” I mean, Jon is an idiot, Tyrion gives terrible advice and Jorah was motivated by his blue balls as much as anything a lot of the time!

I'm glad I only started watching this show a few months ago so it feels more like a trashy fantasy drama that was very into caring about who these people are and their machinations are and has become a differently-trashy fantasy drama that's more focused on what ridiculous things those characters can do (while ignoring some of the previous characterization and machinations)

Just because they showed some character traits that might suggest tyranny, ie wanting to be a ruler, wanting power etc, doesn't mean that this isn't a sudden shift. There's a pretty big disconnect from the shows first few seasons in which it attempted, however badly, for the characters to have agency and develop slowly within the context of a plot that expanded in some sort of unison with their decisions and actions, and this six episode projectile plot puke.

I don't know why they didn't go for a 10-episode season, give it all a bit more room, make some more money etc. But the quotes etc from the writers are so ridiculous that it seems they were just burnt out, narratively.

I think they screwed up by not keeping all the character threads in play, or underdeveloping the ones that would better explain the current status quo.

Jon seems really glitchy and underdeveloped now, but if you're binging the show, he was pretty functional about twelve hours ago.

(which is yeeears because of the show release cycle)