Game of Thrones (S7)

[Bender]

That Chekovalyrian dagger introduced in Act 1 needs to pay off.

I'm starting to think that the show is planning on having Littlefinger come out on on top in this conflict. We all sort of figured that Sansa finally had him beat. And that Arya coming to Winterfell would likely lead to his death. But maybe we had it all wrong, as Littlefinger finally seems to have found a way to outmanoeuvre Sansa. A show like this isn't going to have a happy ending in every single aspect. Not every villain is going to die and not every hero is going to survive.

I've found that every time the fans come up with awesome theories, the show does the plainest, most obvious thing. And since they're on a callback kick with season 1:

Incoming reversal, methinks.

That would actually be a cool call back actually.

 

[Kin]

Instead of being struck by how much of a game changer the Night King having a dragon is, now I'm stuck on where the hell the chains came from.

I heard an interesting idea from someone on Twitter that the chains might very well have come from some of the ships that would have still been anchored outside of Hardhome(because only a small group made it out) but that still doesn't answer the greater question of how these wights could yank the dragon out of the water and, if they could do that, why couldn't they do other relatively complicated things like, for instance, sail those boats south of the wall?

I guess one of the things for me is that in conventional fantasy I don't think things like a zombie dragon make for that much of a game-changer in any real sense. If we're sort of at "a wizard did it" in terms of plot then we know that in conventional fantasy the final boss is going to have Maguffin X that is way more powerful than what the good guys have and only their rag-tag scrappiness or secret bigger Maguffin Y or being lovingly carried by Sean Astin is going to save them. The particulars of it, ok, they're sort of interesting but effectively not so much. The Night King could have been immune to dragons or there could have been ancient dragon bones in the north from the long, long ago that he turned into a zombie dragon or any number of things that would up the danger level with exactly as much sense behind it. Still though, we've gotten Deus Ex Dragona about 8 times now on this show and I'm sure we'll get it a few more before it's done.

So like you say, it's always been the world building that interested me about this show. I forget which podcast(my guess it would be The Watch) I heard it on but earlier in the run they were talking about how it was a shame that there was so much plot to get through that we never got an episode that shifted away from the characters we knew and just gave us a day in the life of a common soldier or wildling or the guy who makes all the wine Cersei is drinking. Something so that when these guys get lit on fire or turned into walking corpses we actually have some sense of loss as opposed to just being an endless line of red shirts to fake us out with.

Now, however, they're cramming so much plot into the show that I don't really even understand what's going on within the confines of the world they've established. All we've been left with is spectacle.

 

[herman]

So like you say, it's always been the world building that interested me about this show. I forget which podcast(my guess it would be The Watch) I heard it on but earlier in the run they were talking about how it was a shame that there was so much plot to get through that we never got an episode that shifted away from the characters we knew and just gave us a day in the life of a common soldier or wildling or the guy who makes all the wine Cersei is drinking. Something so that when these guys get lit on fire or turned into walking corpses we actually have some sense of loss as opposed to just being an endless line of red shirts to fake us out with.

A lot of the complaints about "Beyond the Wall"'s epic battle were the thickness of plot armour around every non-Thoros/non-red-furs character.

Miguel Sapochnik directed two of the best battles we've seen on GoT: Hardhome, Battle of the Bastards, and he deliberately spent time visually introducing the stakes to the battle. In Hardhome, he showed Karsi, the wilding leader, loading her daughter onto an escape boat, and fortifying her other children to be brave. When she encounters wight-children, we fully understand her inability to fight them. When she reanimates as a wight, we are suitably crushed and come to a greater understanding of what is at stake and why Jon feels so strongly about bringing the wildlings south.

Alan Taylor (Thor 2, Terminator Genesis) did not even bother establishing the extra wildlings existence (we catch them in the background occasionally), only drawing the camera's focus when they are about to bite it. Even Viserion had next to no screen time ($$) before he was blown out of the sky. Rhaegal screamed once but then quickly buggered off to conserve VFX money. Taylor (and the script) literally didn't care about them, so why would the viewer?

 

[Kin]

A lot of the complaints about "Beyond the Wall"'s epic battle were the thickness of plot armour around every non-Thoros/non-red-furs character.

Miguel Sapochnik directed two of the best battles we've seen on GoT: Hardhome, Battle of the Bastards, and he deliberately spent time visually introducing the stakes to the battle. In Hardhome, he showed Karsi, the wilding leader, loading her daughter onto an escape boat, and fortifying her other children to be brave. When she encounters wight-children, we fully understand her inability to fight them. When she reanimates as a wight, we are suitably crushed and come to a greater understanding of what is at stake and why Jon feels so strongly about bringing the wildlings south.

Eh. You're right in that it was better than nothing but I don't know that her 2 or 3 minutes of screen time prior to dying led me to be "crushed" by her eventual zombification. It's better than nothing, sure, especially when up until that point we hadn't gotten much in terms of humanizing the wildlings but I think that just generally better world building would have been more effective.

I think the gold standard here was a show like Mad Men or Treme when every so often a relatively minor character would get an episode's worth of an arc. Especially if they were introduced as one note or background players Nothing major or overly significant but enough so that eventually you figured there was depth and importance to everyone, regardless of time spent actually with them.

Like I said, I wish you'd had even one episode where you pulled the breaks on the plot and maybe got to know the proles in general and what all of this nonsense seems like to them. I think that's all it would take. There's that one episode of Star Trek TNG where they focus on a random group of entry-level folk on the ship and how weird it was for them not to be in the know about the goings on of the higher ups and I thought that was really effective.

Alan Taylor (Thor 2, Terminator Genesis) did not even bother establishing the extra wildlings existence (we catch them in the background occasionally), only drawing the camera's focus when they are about to bite it.

I think that's the bigger/more valid criticism. The whole Pokemon Go quest to catch a Zombie was so poorly established that I had no idea who was with them so that when the no-names died my first reaction was "Which one is tha-oh, they have another guy".

 

[herman]

Eh. You're right in that it was better than nothing but I don't know that her 2 or 3 minutes of screen time prior to dying led me to be "crushed" by her eventual zombification. It's better than nothing, sure, especially when up until that point we hadn't gotten much in terms of humanizing the wildlings but I think that just generally better world building would have been more effective.

I was crushed

I think the gold standard here was a show like Mad Men or Treme when every so often a relatively minor character would get an episode's worth of an arc. Especially if they were introduced as one note or background players Nothing major or overly significant but enough so that eventually you figured there was depth and importance to everyone, regardless of time spent actually with them.

Like I said, I wish you'd had even one episode where you pulled the breaks on the plot and maybe got to know the proles in general and what all of this nonsense seems like to them. I think that's all it would take. There's that one episode of Star Trek TNG where they focus on a random group of entry-level folk on the ship and how weird it was for them not to be in the know about the goings on of the higher ups and I thought that was really effective.

I really like those episodes because the audience is so trained to be in the know that seeing it from that different perspective adds significant depth and weight to the decisions they've been making 'up top'.

Buffy did such an episode from Xander's POV that was really effective, seeing the usual supernatural mega-fight from the perspective of the one non-powered member in a gang of 3 Slayers, a witch, a warlock, a redeemed vampire, and a werewolf.

I think that's the bigger/more valid criticism. The whole Pokemon Go quest to catch a Zombie was so poorly established that I had no idea who was with them so that when the no-names died my first reaction was "Which one is tha-oh, they have another guy".

A lot of casual watchers couldn't even clock that they were sporting dragonglass weapons until well after the fact.

The Northern battles are pretty tricky to track in general. Everyone is in furs because it's so friggin' cold that the red-furs you know are going to die are all bundled up (faceless and voiceless hostages to the plot). But we need to know the mains, so they're okay without hoods.

 

[CarltonTheBear]

Just thinking out loud, but I think if they wanted to make the 'catch a zombie' plan a little more effective they should have written it so that the wight that they bring back to Kings Landing had some sort of connection with Cersei.

This would have obviously taken a lot more planning and foresight on the behalf of the writers (something they clearly didn't really use much of in the original plan): they would have needed to make sure somebody Cersei knew somehow went beyond the wall, they would have needed to get Jon Snow and his crew beyond the wall for a reason other than just catching a random wight (maybe Bran tells them he spotted some dragonstone or something there or a Valyrian steel weapon), and they would have needed the crew to stumble upon the reanimated corpse of that person Cersei knew and had somebody think of the bright idea of bringing it back on the spot.

I mean, that still requires a lot of stretching to make it happen but I think it would have told a better story than what they went with.

 

[CarltonTheBear]

A lot of casual watchers couldn't even clock that they were sporting dragonglass weapons until well after the fact.

I had no idea, because I'm pretty sure there was zero mention of it. I knew that they were of course mining dragonglass but I'm pretty sure nobody said anything about weapons being crafted right there and then. I thought it was all going back to Winterfell where it would be crafted there.

 

[herman]

Just thinking out loud, but I think if they wanted to make the 'catch a zombie' plan a little more effective they should have written it so that the wight that they bring back to Kings Landing had some sort of connection with Cersei.

This would have obviously taken a lot more planning and foresight on the behalf of the writers (something they clearly didn't really use much of in the original plan): they would have needed to make sure somebody Cersei knew somehow went beyond the wall, they would have needed to get Jon Snow and his crew beyond the wall for a reason other than just catching a random wight (maybe Bran tells them he spotted some dragonstone or something there or a Valyrian steel weapon), and they would have needed the crew to stumble upon the reanimated corpse of that person Cersei knew and had somebody think of the bright idea of bringing it back on the spot.

I mean, that still requires a lot of stretching to make it happen but I think it would have told a better story than what they went with.

If they wanted real stakes and emotional impact, then they could've gone with the hare-brained catch a wight plan, completely botch it even more, and end up with Ser Jorah (who sacrificed himself for Jon, let's say) as the only wight they could bring back.

Didn't LC Jeor Mormont already send wight-evidence to King's Landing back in season 1 with Thorne? Hand at the time Tyrion, kind of hating on Thorne, made him wait for an audience, and by the time it came around, the wight hand had decomposed too much to matter. They could have leaned into this stupid plan as Tyrion trying to make up for it.

 

[CarltonTheBear]

If they wanted real stakes and emotional impact, then they could've gone with the hare-brained catch a wight plan, completely botch it even more, and end up with Ser Jorah (who sacrificed himself for Jon, let's say) as the only wight they could bring back.

I thought something like this was going to happen maybe when they encountered that first group and Jon killed the White Walker and it seemed as though all of the wights crumbled afterward. Sure was convenient for them that there was a single wight with them that that particular White Walker didn't reanimate.

 

[herman]

I had no idea, because I'm pretty sure there was zero mention of it. I knew that they were of course mining dragonglass but I'm pretty sure nobody said anything about weapons being crafted right there and then. I thought it was all going back to Winterfell where it would be crafted there.

Zero mention at all. But the weapons were nominally visible during the trek (spearpoints) and "I know you" conversations. Tormund switched axes after the bear attack and everyone else had at least a dagger.

Dragonglass (obsidian) weapons don't really require any particular treatment, other than chipping away pieces into edges and strapping onto handles/arrow shafts. I assume they had a lot of Dothraki/Unsullied available at Dragonstone to put a cache together pretty quickly as it's just standard stonework.

 

[Kin]

The Northern battles are pretty tricky to track in general. Everyone is in furs because it's so friggin' cold that the red-furs you know are going to die are all bundled up (faceless and voiceless hostages to the plot).

Although let's not even get started on what should be all of our biggest complaint. These tough, hearty "Winter is coming" doofuses who call themselves Northerners or Wildlings collectively have never heard of hats.

That offends me to my very core as a Canadian.

 

[CarltonTheBear]

Although let's not even get started on what should be all of our biggest complaint. These tough, hearty "Winter is coming" doofuses who call themselves Northerners or Wildlings collectively have never heard of hats.

That offends me to my very core as a Canadian.

The fact that you called it a hat and not a toque says otherwise.

 

[Kin]

Although let's not even get started on what should be all of our biggest complaint. These tough, hearty "Winter is coming" doofuses who call themselves Northerners or Wildlings collectively have never heard of hats.

That offends me to my very core as a Canadian.

The fact that you called it a hat and not a toque says otherwise.

A tocque is a specific kind of hat. I'd expect them to wear something closer to a trapper hat.

You haven't been calling all hats tocques, have you?

 

[CarltonTheBear]

You haven't been calling all hats tocques, have you?

Any winter wear hat, yes. I actually wasn't even really familiar with the term trapper hat.

 

[Kin]

You haven't been calling all hats tocques, have you?

Any winter wear hat, yes. I actually wasn't even really familiar with the term trapper hat.

You're one of those people who call Kickball "Soccer-Baseball" too, aren't you?

 

[Joe S.]

Even if they do make it to kings landing with their zombie and get to show it to Cersei, I feel that she'd shrug her shoulders and show them that she already has her own mountain zombie.

As frustrating as I'm finding this season, at least you feel like they are fast forwarding to the finish line - as opposed to the walking dead which seems to be going absolutely nowhere.

 

[CarltonTheBear]

You're one of those people who call Kickball "Soccer-Baseball" too, aren't you?

Nope, firmly on team Kickball there. That one was pretty odd to me.

 

[Joe S.]

Funny enough we called it soccer baseball - but I went to a french school, so we were backwards in many things we did.

 

[herman]

So I have a lot of complaints about the storytelling on Game of Thrones.

Where I have no complaints though:

• Soundtrack
• Costume
• Location scouting

 

[Kin]

Well, I thought that was pretty good. Some bits maybe weren't as impactful as they could have been because of sloppy writing leading up to it(Sansa + Arya stuff) but overall pretty good.