Game of Thrones & House of the Dragon

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Roscoe
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Re: Game of Thrones

#101 Post by Roscoe » Wed Apr 27, 2016 4:38 pm

They've pretty much erased the whole "wharg" stuff from the series, except where Bran was concerned. I doubt it will be an issue with Jon and his wolf. But of course, one never knows.

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YnEoS
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Re: Game of Thrones

#102 Post by YnEoS » Wed Apr 27, 2016 10:00 pm

I think for a while now the show's been spread out so thin that each episode ends up mostly being a quick update for each group, with 1 or 2 important story-lines getting more scenes, or sometimes they'll cut certain stories to develop the others to an interesting point. I think though normally the last episode of the season tends to be sort of a wrap up episode with nothing terribly dramatic happening, whereas season 5 ended on a lot of cliffhangers, so the first episode of season 6 was kind of just checking in on everyone and seeing where they're at now.

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domino harvey
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Re: Game of Thrones

#103 Post by domino harvey » Sun May 01, 2016 9:58 pm

Well, thank god they didn't drag that out all season like some were predicting

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Trees
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Re: Game of Thrones

#104 Post by Trees » Mon May 02, 2016 12:47 am

Another average episode.

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nosy lena
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Re: Game of Thrones

#105 Post by nosy lena » Mon May 02, 2016 12:47 am

Couldn't let him rot too much, he'd lose his sex appeal.

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Game of Thrones

#106 Post by knives » Mon May 02, 2016 1:14 am

That was okay, but I think the show would drastically improve if they took a page out of Netflix era Arrested Development's book and dedicated whole episodes to single storylines or settings. The intercutting is severely hurting the momentum.

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movielocke
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:44 am

Game of Thrones

#107 Post by movielocke » Mon May 02, 2016 4:38 am

Outstanding episode throughout and a nicely paced ending.

As a book reader it is fascinating seeing all sorts of components click together from multiple volumes in new ways, such as the grey joy storyline or the flashback they teased as upcoming in next weeks episode. Setting it up this week with a Hodor centered flashback was an interesting touch, it suggests to me that Hodor definitely has his role to play in the coming ragnarok, not just as an avatar for bran. Also, the children of the forest makeup is a spectacular upgrade from the awful work in season four.

But my favorite part of the episode was the dragon "laughing" at Tyrion's joke, "please don't eat the help" on the other hand, Tyrion being reduced to utterly ineffectual one liners about varys eunuch status is a depressing comedown from their typical banter.


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domino harvey
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Re: Game of Thrones

#108 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 02, 2016 12:35 pm

Image

I thought this was a better episode overall than the last one, but I'm pretty much done with being interested in Ramsay Bolton now that he's fully succumbed to every dumb cartoon supervillain trope you can think of. Hopefully you know who gets him out of the picture sooner than later

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nosy lena
Joined: Sat Sep 22, 2007 12:40 am

Re: Game of Thrones

#109 Post by nosy lena » Mon May 02, 2016 1:02 pm

Well it seems like they are setting it up for Theon returning to the Iron Islands, claim the throne and returning (with Snow) to Winterfell with an army to kill Ramsey and give Winterfell back to Sansa. However, with Euron and all the recently dead Iron born soldiers, that unfortunately might have to wait until episode 9 or 10.

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domino harvey
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Re: Game of Thrones

#110 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 02, 2016 1:04 pm

I'm pretty sure the stated plan was a Bolton-led attack on the wall to get that last threat to his claim on Winterfell out of the picture

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nosy lena
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Re: Game of Thrones

#111 Post by nosy lena » Mon May 02, 2016 1:44 pm

Yeah, maybe Ramsey stays back at Winterfell though.

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Murdoch
Joined: Sun Apr 20, 2008 11:59 pm
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Re: Game of Thrones

#112 Post by Murdoch » Mon May 02, 2016 2:50 pm

My patience with this series is nearly at an end. I'm between quitting out-right and moving on to better things or sticking it through since it's six seasons in and I don't want to start a new show. I think my biggest complaint is it feels like all the showrunners have been doing this season and the last is focusing on plot over substance. Things happen for the sole purpose of pushing the series forward story-wise, with so many different things going on there's barely enough time to pack it all in. At its height, which in my mind was the third and fourth seasons, the show spent as much time allowing characters to ruminate over their actions as it did move things along. Tyrion's "Smash the beetles!" monologue, the Hound's story about the origin of his fear of fire or Jaime's telling of his killing of the Mad King are, for me, the highlights of the series. I can't think of a moment like that lately, and the whole thing feels a lot more like cliffhanger TV than the brooding contemplation of human savagery it began as.
SpoilerShow
One thing I appreciated about the series was the sense that dead is dead. Major characters die and the surviving ones grieve and adjust. It had a real world sense of tension and sorrow to its proceedings that's lacking from any other fantasy series. Jon Snow returning to life in some half-assed ritual may be the low point of the series. I expected more from this show than to tease a character's death then do a 180 on it a few episodes later. Part of that is how the magic of the show never felt particularly well explored or thought-out, and seems out-of-place in regard to the brutal finality of the characters' world.
At this point I'm just frustrated, but I'm sure by this time next week I'll have an hour to kill and watch the new episode anyway.

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Roscoe
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Re: Game of Thrones

#113 Post by Roscoe » Mon May 02, 2016 3:07 pm

Yeah, but the show and the books have never really been about "dead is dead." More than one character has been resuscitated.
SpoilerShow
SpoilerShow
And Jon's return was foreseen almost immediately when fans (this fan, certainly) came to the end of DANCE OF DRAGONS.
Whatever else it is, it has been well set up.
Last edited by Roscoe on Mon May 02, 2016 3:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Murdoch
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Re: Game of Thrones

#114 Post by Murdoch » Mon May 02, 2016 3:47 pm

That shows how much I've been paying attention. Although the reveal still felt very cheap to me and I can't say I'm interested much in where it goes.

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Roscoe
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Re: Game of Thrones

#115 Post by Roscoe » Mon May 02, 2016 3:55 pm

I know what you mean, though --
SpoilerShow
the fun of it in the books is that Jon, as a POV character, will be undergoing the process of resuscitation and the reader will be feeling it too. The other characters, including one whose exclusion from the series was a major disappointment, all go through it on their own, away from the reader's prying awareness. I'm hoping they'll do something interesting with it.

I'm wondering what's going to happen if/when Davos finds out what happened to the little Princess Baratheon -- will he be quite as friendly toward Melisandre as he's suddenly seeming when he gets that little nugget of information?
And any series that features Peter Dinklage saying "Please don't eat the help" in those circumstances is fine by me.

Edited to obscure spoilification.
Last edited by Roscoe on Mon May 02, 2016 4:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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domino harvey
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Re: Game of Thrones (Spoilers Within)

#116 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 02, 2016 4:02 pm

Okay, this is getting silly so I'm making an executive decision to do like we did with the Breaking Bad thread and make this a thread where spoiler tags aren't needed unless talking about things from the books which have not transpired yet on the show. There's no way you can not know what happened to Jon Snow by this point thanks to social media / water cooler talk anyways. Those behind on the show, read the thread at your own peril

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movielocke
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Re: Game of Thrones (Spoilers Within)

#117 Post by movielocke » Mon May 02, 2016 5:08 pm

I feel like Ramsey is being setup by the writers to unite warring factions against a common foe and has been from his season 3 introduction. Or the war against Ramsey depopulates the north more and makes it easier for the white walkers

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Trees
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Re: Game of Thrones (Spoilers Within)

#118 Post by Trees » Mon May 02, 2016 9:59 pm

Good call on spoilers, DH.

I hope a lot of thought and effort and creativity is put into Ramsey's demise.

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YnEoS
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Re: Game of Thrones (Spoilers Within)

#119 Post by YnEoS » Mon May 02, 2016 11:33 pm

With the death of Stannis at the end of last season and the recent batch of deaths in season 6 are we pretty much completely down to the younger generation now? I guess the Lannisters are technically still the generation above everyone else, but because Tywin seemed like he was the one running everything I kind of grouped them in with the other children. Baelish and Varys seem to have been doing pretty well compared to most everyone else from the beginning of the story.

I expected Jon was going to come back, but I thought it was going to be done in such a way that it would push the story in a different direction than being just a simple reset. I guess there's still opportunity for that in terms of how it causes people to perceive him and perhaps we'll learn a bit more about all the lord of light stuff.

Overall I'm pretty happy with where the show is going, I just hope this season can deliver some of the high points of the first four seasons. There's only 2 seasons left so hopefully the plot is going to kick into high gear at some point soon. I think one aspect that frustrated me about last season was that we were getting a lot more hurdles and set backs thrown in front of our main characters and it wasn't really clear how it was going to pay off in the grand scheme. If they don't spend forever to get Daenerys out captivity, having Arya learn how to fight while blind, and having High Sparrow stopping anything interesting from happening at Kings landing I think the show will be in good shape again.

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knives
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Re: Game of Thrones (Spoilers Within)

#120 Post by knives » Mon May 02, 2016 11:54 pm

Have they said definitively only two more seasons despite the unpublished books not being adapted yet (for obvious reasons)?

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YnEoS
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Re: Game of Thrones (Spoilers Within)

#121 Post by YnEoS » Tue May 03, 2016 12:02 am

I thought I had read that somewhere, but googling around it looks like there are talks of a season 8 so I suppose that's not necessarily the case anymore. I know there was some producer years ago saying they didn't want the show to drag out beyond 7 or 8 seasons, and I think I read somewhere that the showrunners already know all the major plot points for the rest of the story, just not the exact steps of how to get there.

I can't imagine them waiting for George R.R. Martin to catch up considering how long it takes for him to get a book out.

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movielocke
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Re: Game of Thrones (Spoilers Within)

#122 Post by movielocke » Tue May 03, 2016 12:23 am

knives wrote:Have they said definitively only two more seasons despite the unpublished books not being adapted yet (for obvious reasons)?
pretty much, they're only doing eight because they think they only have fifteen hours of material for what is presumably the seventh book, they can't do that as a single fifteen Episode season given the filming scale (three plus countries simultaneously for months at a time) because they're unable to logistically have directors et al be able to film all the scenes of their episodes within the time constraint of the filming schedule, and after production wraps they can't cut, color, score, loop, mix and get effects done for more than ten episodes within the time constraints of an approaching April premiere date and an accompanying eleven consecutive week delivery schedule.

So if it were a single fifteen hour season seven they'd need to expand production timeline by fifty percent, expand post timeline by fifty percent which means an air date being pushed by half a year at least. Additionally, delivering fifteen episodes is harder than delivering ten, you need more lead in time in post from the start of post to premiere date to meet 15 or 16 consecutive air dates rather than ten. At a certain point, logistically, your air date schedule either splits in two to get enough time for post production to finish the back half or if you're determined to air it over consecutive weeks, your premiere date is eight to ten months after the normal premiere date. Shows never want to take that long of a break off bad for viewership.

So they've basically recognized they'd have to split the season or skip a year if they wanted to produce it as a single season, so they're opting for two smaller seasons from the get go.

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movielocke
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Re: Game of Thrones (Spoilers Within)

#123 Post by movielocke » Tue May 03, 2016 12:29 am

I have to say I loved the stylistic approach of the melisandre scene they opted for. It had the feel of a ritual funereal rite, recalling the cleaning of the bodies done at the house of black and white. Quite the literal "wake" wasn't it.


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DarkImbecile
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Re: Game of Thrones (Spoilers Within)

#124 Post by DarkImbecile » Thu May 05, 2016 4:32 pm

What I really wanted to see - and what would have felt more in line with the series' penchant for pulling the rug out from under its viewers - would have been the king of the white walkers (who stared meaningfully into Jon Snow's eyes as he raised the dead last season) appearing at the wall, raising Snow, and using his (presumably) royal lineage to make him the leader of his army of undead.

This would subvert the main character of the show in a truly tragic way, while setting the series up well for a Daenerys/Jon clash for control of the world.

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SpiderBaby
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Re: Game of Thrones (Spoilers Within)

#125 Post by SpiderBaby » Thu May 05, 2016 7:42 pm

DarkImbecile wrote:while setting the series up well for a Daenerys/Jon clash for control of the world.
I'm still of hope that Daenerys is the 'villain' turn, a 'Mad Queen' like character switch. I just have no interest in her character otherwise. Hopefully a clash with the charismatic Euron in the future can help that.

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