4041

If you fill a lake with napalm, you don’t really have to do much but hit the lake, which is slightly bigger than the broad side of a barn.

I really haven’t had much hopes that the series will ever capture the full glory of the “big scenes” of the books, but I guess that’s a trade off I have to live with for my wife to get some sense of one of my favorite book series of all time, that I read back in 2000, and is suddenly cool now.

4042

Is there anything more badass than Tywin Lannister walking into a room in full armor?

4043

Yep, it was pretty bad. I thought it really came off as no different to the director’s other work though - boring shots, never moves the camera, special effects shots telegraphed a mile away and look goofy as shit, no real work put into composition of any shot or any continuity, bla bla. I thought the best examples of his style was shit like Brom killing a guy with an arrow then beating up some other guys then … where does he go? Nevermind. Or the cut from Tyrion killing the 5 people guarding the ram (where did the rest of them go?) to the rest of Stannis’s guys coming through (wasn’t the ram the main landing point? where did they come from?). Or the dozen guys all running away getting cut down leaving Stannis on the wall with 2 others … he gets down somehow, don’t worry. Every shot totally disconnected from each other and there’s no sense of flow or direction to the battle at all. And of course every shot of someone getting sliced up is framed pretty much identically and looks very silly indeed.

Ship blowing up was very cool though. Probably nothing to do with that guy.

4044

So, remind me, does Lord Tywin save the day in the 2nd book, or do he and his host not show up till later, well after the battle?

4045

On the whole I have mixed feelings about the episode. I loved the dialogue and the interplay between the actors was superb as ever but the fighting was awfully underwhelming. The scale… it really felt like TV in way that previous episodes haven’t. They cut the line before, they’ve asked viewers to indulge their imaginations but this time felt like a stretch. The wildfire explosion, well that ended up looking like so many CGI sequences we’ve seen before.

I suppose I wouldn’t have been happy with anything short of a full feature budget with hordes of extras.

All that said, there were a number of great moments in that episode; Lena Headey was utterly fantastic and I can’t wait to see what they do next.

4046

Quoting myself for the win.

Though I haven’t seen the episode yet ;)

4047

Yeah, I don’t think it was any real budgetary failure on this as just basic storyboard/story kind of shit. If you have 35 guys - insert a line about everyone deserting leaving you with 35 guys, fine, continue on. The interview mentions he was coming up with new shit to do on the day and this is sold as some great thing they got by hiring him - no it isn’t. It really explains why so much of it seems to have so little to do with anything else, it’s just this disconnected series of vignettes that give you no idea what they’re trying to show happening. I thought the interior scenes directed with maybe a bit more flourish and time would have easily carried the episode (hound and sansa, cersei and sansa/tommen/shae, etc) and were much more tense than watching extra 34’s mannequin get cut up.

I dunno. Has this been a shit show for lack of battle scenes so far? I don’t think it hurts to drop them if the alternative was filming anything with a dire wolf like dog soldiers.

4048

This was good television and the best GoT so far. It’s obviously Marshall’s work (always love or hate, but I love it) but also obviously Martin’s work. Brilliant stuff.

4049

If you thought this episode was shit - why are you even watching Game of Thrones? For teh boobies? Or were you actually believing you would get Helm’s Deep or Saving Private Ryan opening scene? Honestly, please enlighten me, I’m genuinely curious.

I’ll just throw some stuff out there that I liked and since I’m not much of a rivet-counter when it comes to accuracy in medieval fantasy battles on TV, there’s even a few battle scenes in there:

  1. Wildfire. Huge fuck-off green firey explosion for the win.
  2. Every Tyrion-Varys scene is a good scene. This was no exception.
  3. Joffrey - when his mum tells him to go inside and play. He was perfect.
  4. The Hound. I liked how all his lines were so Swearengeny. “I see anyone dying with a clean blade, I’ll rape your fucking corpse.” Had a nice ring to it.
  5. Sandor Clegane. It seems that Martin likes him as much as I do. More lines and more screen time than all other episodes combined.
  6. Sansa had some wonderful lines and some equally wonderful scenes I thought.
  7. Drunk Cersei.
  8. Tywin Lannister entering a throne hall.
  9. The Hound and Sansa and his line about killers.
4050

Game of Thrones is not going to get any better than it was last night. Moreover, the show runners are not going to be aiming for anything grander or larger than it was last night. That’s the high-water mark for the show.

You are, of course, entitled to your opinion as to what you like and what you don’t. However, if in your view, Ep #19, Blackwater was a “real stinker” then logic indicates that you should stop watching the show as it’s clearly not intended for your tastes.

4051

Actually I think most people who didn’t like it seem on board with the show, and mentioned the dialogue scenes as the highlight of the episode? Please forgive me if I’ve somehow missed the GOT you’ve been watching full of cheap shitty derivative battle scenes, I’ve been watching the one that has worked pretty well within its limitations and done a reasonable job of maintaining the clever dialogue and velocity of plot movements of the books.

Just to make sure you can take a swing at something other than a strawman this time around - what’s being said is, when they try and do lavish big budget epic scale battles on the cheap, they look cheap. If they then fill an episode full of cheap looking battle scenes that bear little relation to the dialogue and in no way respect what they can pull off (“Thousands!” - cut to 35 dudes) - that’s actually kind of shit. Especially when it pushes out other scenes they can actually pull off well. You know - like most of the show so far.

Although it is a shit show (and enjoyably so), I think they should just hire the guys who make Spartacus if they want to do this again. They have no money but they at least have a good sense of what they can pull off and what kind of scale battle they can get for their money without it looking dumb. If they were going to rewrite Blackwater so much anyhow, I don’t know why they didn’t rewrite it to concentrate on smaller scale fights and make them awesome, than do big fights that look silly.

Writing a book here now but seriously - I read this over at avclub comments too - this line of - “Oh you wouldn’t be happy unless it looks like Helms Deep or Saving Private Ryan, which they don’t have the budget for.”. Yeah… we know. So … why try and do that then? Is that ever not going to look like the cheap tv cousin of LOTR if you do that?

4052

Tywin’s host and the Tyrells catch Stannis’ men outside the walls and save the day. Loras Tyrell, Renly’s lover, was there with Tywin at the episode’s end. Looks similar enough to Lancel that I’ve seen others confusing the two, but that was their way of hinting at Tyrell involvement.

4053

Thanks for the reply. I was genuinely curious, especially considering it was Martin Himself who wrote the episode. But I think I see now. You hate the director going in and you also hate that they tried to pull off the grand scale of the battle. Fair enough.

Well, since I’m not going to argue over what the director’s done before I’ll just concentrate on why I thought the battle worked well enough. I probably should add that I’m no great fan of any of the huge battles in LOTRO and really have to search my memory for huge sword&shield battles that I’ve thought managed to fully pull it off. Maybe opening scenes of Gladiator? But even Ridley gorram Scott refrained from going into the nitty gritty of the infantry battle there.

  1. It worked because the many nitpicks I had didn’t, ever, distract me from the story of the battle, which is why it was there in the first place. It showed enough for me to understand what was going on and what the difficulties presented to the characters were. I always had a good sense of what was happening and why.

  2. There simply had to be a big battle. The series commanded it and the audience deserved one by now. We’re no longer in the days of “I, Claudius” where we can have huge drama like The Blackwater happen offscreen and relayed to us by two characters sipping wine at a dinner table. We got their best shot at a great battle and it really worked well enough for me.

  3. “35 men” fighting may have been what we got but that was not how I experienced it, at all. I understood that for every “35 men” that were onscreen, there were thousands more fighting off screen. I was also very happy that we didn’t get somersaults, slo-mo and other “300” stunts. Because that would really have been shit. I don’t watch “Spartacus” so I have no idea what you wanted from that show. Except that you think their battles don’t look cheap.

  4. Everyone we don’t already know are completely unimportant in great battles. It’s also fairly uncommon for big battles to show both sides like Blackwater had to do. We had Davos and Stannis on the one side, Tyrion, The Hound, Bronn, Lancel and Joffrey on the other. Yes, it is incredibly silly that none wore helmets but that … well, you’re a smart man, no need for me to explain the basics of visual storytelling for you.

There were, as I said, several silly things about the battle but not enough for me to claim the episode was shit. I thought that for a shit show it was one of the most not shit episodes.

4054

I’m pretty sure he’s calling Spartacus a shit show (which it is, but enjoyably so)…I hate when I see Game of Thrones venture into Spartacus territory though, with the overdone gore and way-too-explicit-borderline-porn sex scenes. The source material is much superior to that so I don’t like seeing it stoop to that level. What does it add to the show to see Stannis slice the top of someone’s head in half? How much budget was wasted on that B movie crap? Honestly, if they can’t do the scenes right then I would have rather had the battles rendered off scene so Martin could have filled the episode with more of the character interplay and development that all of us fans love to see onscreen. And judging by how horribly directed the battle scenes were in my opinion, they certainly couldn’t do them right.

djotefsoup captures my sentiments pretty perfectly above, especially with the “disconnected series of vignettes” comment. I’m honestly shocked at how terribly put together I thought the entire siege was. I’m apparently in the minority in this case so that’s fine, just wish it could have been done in a less cheesy, Beastmaster/Conan (the Destroyer!)/Spartacus type of way. At least we didn’t have any ‘wipe the semen from the whore’s face before her next customer’ scenes this episode so I’m grateful for that at least.

My main complaint is that I think of the Game of Thrones world as a brutal, dark, very serious environment and I think the show should reflect that. When it busts out the B movie crap then it feels like it’s reflecting badly on the series to me. I love the humor that’s interjected into various scenes but as an offset to how bleak a land at war can be.

4055

I’m going to pile onto the ‘damn, that was awesome’ side of the equation.

From Sansa stepping up as a she-wolf, Cersei drunk, Podrick with a spear, to Joffrey begging Lancel for a reason to flee the battle, to Tyrion’s winning over of the reluctant soldiers - everything came together brilliantly for me in this episode.

And I had totally forgotten that I had teased my girlfriend that Tyrion was gonna die this year - so when he took the sword to the face, her horrified ‘Oh My GOD, is he REALLY dead?’ was an epic moment.

All of it was capped off by the Rains of Castamere, though. That was the best moment in the show so far, and I love the show.

4056

Why do some people think that the show in general is shit? I haven’t really been following this thread too closely, so I must have missed the reasons given. Is it the boobs?

I haven’t seen the Blackwater episode yet, but I feel that I could come down on either side. To be honest, I’m among the people who think that the battle scenes of LotR kind of ruined the last two movies, so I’m not too pleased if GoT is going in that direction. On the other hand, I doubt they’ll be able to do it very often, so if it’s a one-shot I can probably overlook it. Not to mention that I might turn out to like the way they did it.

4057

I think the episode was awesome. The things that sucked, sucked. Super-strong characters like the hound may cut people in two, but nobody else sould be able to pull that type of stuff. The battled could have be filmed better, and the general way to describe the history was not very strong. But watching this episode has ben like being in a tunnel, when the episode has finished, I have blinked and noticed that it was still a day. The episode totally captured my attention, and I want to know more and watch the next episode.

Some notes:

  • The producers of the serie have no idea how to show common people / angry mobs.
  • The producers of the serie are not very smooth at showing flow in battles
  • Boobs, delicious boobs.
  • Cersei about to kill that children made me feel nervous. Is so a GRRRRRRR character.

I don’t remember the books, can we expect more awesomeness from Tyrion, of this is the last?, I think the return of his father mark his downfall, but I don’t remember the books.

Stannis vs Tyrion is a good match, both are smart and cold personalities. Stannis manage to buy his army trust with pure skill, winning victories. Stannis is nobody if lose a battle. Tyrion start a battle with nobody trusting him, he manage to save the day, but even if he win 200 battles, he is still the halfmen.

4058

Yeah, battle scenes don’t work on screen. What works are dance scenes, and the closer the director can get to that when filming a fight, the better. Watching medieval reenactors bump into each other doesn’t make for very good television.

4059

To some extent, the scope of the battle worked very well for me because I saw the long HBO preview of this episode - where they said - ‘this is not helm’s deep’ - and that they were attempting to follow several characters through the fight.

4060

God would the people complaining about the violence just STFU!!! Its fucking war you pussies. Also the constant bitching about sex and nudity…just go jump off a cliff or something.

It was a very well done episode. Its still TV not a $150 million 2 hour movie.

Bronn setting off the wildfire and the explosion was fucking awsome.