Game of Thrones & House of the Dragon

[cdobbs]

SpoilerShow

It's likely that knowing what Martin planned for Jon Snow, the producers thought that two resurrections of major characters would be a bridge too far.

[domino harvey]

Jon Snow is a terrible battle commander

[knives]

Yeah, in a world of really incompetent people he's uniquely stupid.

[aox]

That might have been the best battle scene I have ever seen on screen. The opening to Saving Private Ryan is a different beast, so maybe restrict my comments to hand to hand "medieval" battles on screen, and not modern military. Absolutely masterful.

I really don't know how they will top it with the final battle in the final season. The bar is high now.

[Roscoe]

Jon Snow is best at hand to hand combat -- he's outclassed as a battlefield thinker, especially by someone as unspeakable as Ramsay. One of the themes of the series as a whole has been that goodness is nothing like a shield: the bad guys are always smarter.

I've been waiting for that little development with Davos for way too many episodes. I'm hoping they do something interesting with it.

Emilia Clarke and Peter Dinklage may be THE comedy team for the coming half decade.

It looks like they just blew the budget for the entire series on this one episode.

[domino harvey]

I think we are still gonna see Cersei go Mad Queen on King's Landing with the wildfire in the finale at least, but yeah, when Dany and her dragons flying around and destroying ships is barely a blip in an episode, they've over stacked it!

[ALLCAPSAREBASTARDS]

The first army in Westeros that discovers how useful a scouting unit is will conquer the whole continent, I swear.

What happened to Tyrion? He turned into a complete buffoon. My guess is that the producers are bound by contract to give him a minimum amount of screen time each season so he's shoehorned into every scene they can put him in.

You can tell GMMR didn't write any of this.

[nosy lena]

I think we are still gonna see Cersei go Mad Queen on King's Landing with the wildfire in the finale

care to elaborate? when the hound came across the church-builders i was so certain that the hound would end up facing his zombie brother in the trial by combat, but now i really don't have a guess what will happen. clearly the queen is up to something and she will not let her brother suffer/die.

so am i right to assume that the mad king heard voices saying 'burn them all' (or burn the wall), possible from the three-eyed raven (new or old), in reference to the night king's army? hopefully cersei doesn't waste it all, it will probably come in handy for the big war to come.

[domino harvey]

Probably the best episode of the whole series. Beautiful stuff and deeply satisfying, which is not always something you can say about this show or the books

[mfunk9786]

Over/under on how many episodes until Cersei's dead?

[domino harvey]

Hopefully never. It's been tempting to switch affiliation along the way but I knew being Team Cersei would pay off eventually

[domino harvey]

Also, how long til Miguel Sapochnik gets handed the keys to a big budget tentpole movie? Minutes?

[knives]

Technically a few years ago if you stretch definitions. It would be nice though if someone besides Alan Taylor got good fortune from the show.

[mfunk9786]

Hopefully never. It's been tempting to switch affiliation along the way but I knew being Team Cersei would pay off eventually

Yikes! Enjoy that.

[YnEoS]

Great finale to another great season, glad the show is back on track again. I'm curious how they're going to handle the final stretch, the conflict is looking much more simplified now, a few more revenges to scratch off before the big confrontation with the white walkers. The whole show has been built around intrigues, seemingly evil characters slowly being humanized, revenge being delayed, and the looming mythical threats. I'm sure they've thought through something more interesting, but could easily turn into mindless fantasy action at these final stages. A bit of that is warranted payoff for the characters, and they've certainly got the budget if the two mini seasons get a full season budget each, but it would also be cool to see the greater threat at least force some people who hate each other to work together.

Also, how long til Miguel Sapochnik gets handed the keys to a big budget tentpole movie? Minutes?

Hopefully not before he's locked in to do a few more episodes for the show.

[YnEoS]

Also, Cersei's outfit looks way too awesome for her to die off anytime soon.

[domino harvey]

High Sparrow should've upgraded his potato sack then

[Luke M]

When Cersei meets Daenerys, it'll be the greatest moment in the history of television.

[Shrew]

Yeah, kudos to the wardrobe department for Cersei's shoulder armor and collar. It's nice when a group dedicated to a fairly conservative aesthetic of woven tunics and armor gets to let loose a little, like with Dany's Jeans a few seasons back. They also did a great job with Tommen this episode, who's never quite glammed it up as much as Joffrey used to, even if we didn't get much of it. Speaking of Tommen, the framing/pacing of his final scene reminded me a lot of a similar scene in Ida. A random (but effective) reference to slink into GoT.

But overall, a much better season than last, and a pretty great episode to go out on. I wouldn't call it the best (that'd probably be Blackwater or Rains of Castamere), but you'd be hard-pressed to find a more satisfying resolution of so many plot threads. If only Sidding were still around rather than the Sand Snakes. I can't see Cersei surviving long into the final (half-)season thought, if at all; not with that ironic curse hanging over her head. The episode also did a good job of bringing that potential conflict into the fold, after pushing Jaime in a different direction than where he was in the books at this point for most of the season.

I will say that the relationship/conflict between Jon and Sansa was pretty poorly handled this season though. Sending Brienne away left Sansa without any confidant/channel of exposition to work through her misgivings about Jon with, which meant all her decisions seemed random.

[knives]

It was also quite nice to see them save slightly Arya's plot with the Queen of Goths outing.

[movielocke]

I really loved this episode right until the final shot. It was pretty much perfect until then. But that final shot had me screaming. Why is Varys standing behind Dany? He's half a world away a few minutes earlier. Otherwise the shot was magnificent. The episode was stunning. The long kings landing bit had the best score in the entire series and is probably the best directed sequence in the entire series. The whole thing was mind blowingly great until Varys revealed he could teleport. I have never been all that bothered by any of the dumb travel things in the show before. I laughed at people who complained pedanticly about them. But this one infuriated me, karma is a bitch, I suppose.


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[domino harvey]

Interestingly, the writers and director submitted "Battle of the Bastards" as their Emmy submission episode for their categories instead of the finale (they apparently could only choose one)-- that would have sounded like a good idea until we actually saw last night's episode. At least Hedley submitted it as her episode

[Roscoe]

For me this season was by very far the weakest season yet. They really only had about five episodes' worth of plot, and it got stretched out for ten solid episodes, and there was a lot of wheel-spinning as they kept telling me the same things over and over and over. The doings at King's Landing got infuriating, and I got sick of the sight of the High Sparrow and Ramsay Bolton, who was thrown over the shark by the production about midway through the season when his callous sadism became tiresome rather than appalling.

Still, it did end with a bang, didn't it. Peter Dinklage and Emilia Clarke are THE new high comedy power couple. They're just marvelous together.

I'm not as bothered by the temporal issues as others have been. Seeing Varys back on the boat with Danarys and Tyrion after his appearance at Dorne seemed like a silent acknowledgement on the part of the series that they're playing fast and loose with time -- who can really say exactly how much time (months, weeks, years) is really passing in each episode? I'm not really caring, frankly.

[ianthemovie]

I was confused by Varys on the boat, too, but a friend I was watching with (who knows the show and books much better than I do) said we are meant to understand that Varys is there because he convinced the Tyrell grandmother to give her fleet of ships to Daenerys. All of those ships were apparently Tyrell ships, which I hadn't realized. I guess Varys was able to make that deal, leave Dorne, and get back to Dany and Tyrion in time to leave with them in the final scene.

[domino harvey]

Yes, he's there on the boat to show the audience that his appearance at Dorne didn't mean he was stabbing Dany in the back but was working in her interest. Many could have inferred that from Tyrion seemingly knowing of his plans (without revealing to the audience what those were), but it helped the clarity-- or so I thought, if it too needed to be explained!