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Games of Thrones Unsullied thread

elizium

By elizium
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Jiji

Jiji

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Posted (edited)

The first twenty minutes of the episode were horrific in all the best ways. Wonderful job building suspense and tension especially as I was predicting most everybody to die. Fowler nailed why Aria was the only one that made sense to do the job. Everything she's done, the water dancing, the stealth, and the shifting all played out here and the emotional arc she went through was superb too. 

I was fine with things being obscured. Why wouldn't the Night King try to nullify the dragons with some super powered snow storm? The battles I  thought were way too clean for the masses involved, particularly near the end where it was just a series of all the main characters fighting off the multitudes like it was a naive capitalist's dream of killing all of the faceless communists in the 1980s.

I loved it, don't get me wrong. The broad strokes were pretty great. My main mang Theon redeemed himself and the scenes of dread  were incredible. But it felt like the show (continued to) betray the series' underlying theme of avoiding and subverting cliches like the above (while they did dodge the NK v Jon Snow climactic battle after teasing it). Now I wasn't expecting No Country For Old Men either but pretty much everybody in the courtyard should have died. Part of me wanted the Night King to destroy everything for what he represents or at least for his destruction to be the climax of it all. 

Dame Arya made my day too. Thanks, Raziel. 

Edited by Oyaji
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TheVileOne

TheVileOne

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3 hours ago, Craig H said:

I thought it was pretty anticlimactic and I had been feeling that since a few days ago. We've built to this final battle or what should be the final battle for all mankind all series long and now it's over. And with the way the last two episodes played out it was pretty clear that almost all of the main players were going to make it out alive.

My other gripe was that I couldn't see a fucking thing. Shit felt like Transformers at times where it was just blobs and colors rustling around endlessly. If it wasn't that, then it was showing Jaime or Brienne or Sam or someone else and they're always just screaming and looking like they're about to die only for them to cut away and come back to them 15 minutes later where they're doing the same thing in a different location. It just eventually started to feel like there were no real stakes.

And despite all of that, I still thought it was a good episode with plenty of badass moments I could make out. I wished we could have had a longer sequence of Arya being a killing machine or I wished we could have had Jon vs the Night King, but you guys are right. This show doesn't build to those kinds of moments. I have no idea where they go from here though since the good guys are beyond fucked, they're down to one dragon, and Winterfell is a wreck.

It was anticlimactic. It also looked like garbage. The lighting was terrible. This episode sort of encompasses how this is one of the most overrated shows in TV history but it gets away with it due to insane production values and edgy content. 

Not to mention a fairly bloodless episode considering this was the battle for the dawn and everything. I just don't get how the entire show has been building to this for almost a decade, and it's really wrapped up in just one episode. Seems strange to me. None, yes none, of the actual important or main characters died here. 

Additionally, what was ultimately done with the White Walkers and the Night King is in direct defiance of everything George RR Martin has ever talked about with this book series. It's a total betrayal. Just saying, everything he's ever said about bad guys and dark lords, they basically made Night King into your typical one dimensional bad guy. Now YouTubers and theorists are partly to blame for this for always pushing the idea of the mystique of the White Walkers and there being more to them. There simply wasn't. Finally learning all they wanted was an endless night was a rotten carrot though. 

They spent so much time putting up death flags last episode, I guess they couldn't follow through with all of them.

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Brian Fowler

Brian Fowler

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The show always made it clear the white walkers was just Death. It never hinted at them being anything else, other than maybe the arrangement with Castor. I never expected to learn anything about what they wanted, because what they wanted was the eradication of life.

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TheVileOne

TheVileOne

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10 minutes ago, Brian Fowler said:

The show always made it clear the white walkers was just Death. It never hinted at them being anything else, other than maybe the arrangement with Castor. I never expected to learn anything about what they wanted, because what they wanted was the eradication of life.

I call bullshit on this. At the very least the show built up the White Walkers to being the most important and world shattering event of the entire series and they did it for eight years. 

Also what they want goes against everything Martin was setting out to accomplish with this story.

"Much as I admire Tolkien, and I do admire Tolkien — he’s been a huge influence on me, and his Lord of the Rings is the mountain that leans over every other fantasy written since and shaped all of modern fantasy — there are things about it, the whole concept of the Dark Lord, and good guys battling bad guys, Good versus Evil, while brilliantly handled in Tolkien, in the hands of many Tolkien successors, it has become kind of a cartoon. We don’t need any more Dark Lords, we don’t need any more, ‘Here are the good guys, they’re in white, there are the bad guys, they’re in black. And also, they’re really ugly, the bad guys.

It is certainly a genuine, legitimate topic as the core of fantasy, but I think the battle between Good and Evil is waged within the individual human hearts. We all have good in us and we all have evil in us, and we may do a wonderful good act on Tuesday and a horrible, selfish, bad act on Wednesday, and to me, that’s the great human drama of fiction. I believe in gray characters, as I’ve said before. We all have good and evil in us and there are very few pure paragons and there are very few orcs. A villain is a hero of the other side, as someone said once, and I think there’s a great deal of truth to that, and that’s the interesting thing. In the case of war, that kind of situation, so I think some of that is definitely what I’m aiming at." - GRRM

So basically, Benioff and Weiss just made a bunch of ugly bad guys.

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Eivion

Eivion

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Posted

Loved the episode for all the individual moments be they badass, or things from survival horrors.

The big death count was about what I expected numbers wise. I'm shocked Grey Worm survived though I still have no expectations of him making it to the end.

5 hours ago, Matt D said:

Terrible night for House Mormont.

I was really hoping that after they took out Lyanna, Jorah just might make it. I should have known better.

 

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Brian Fowler

Brian Fowler

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Plus there's a good chance this ends in a manner that exactly reflects what Martin said, and this coalition falls apart with shades of grey everywhere.

Edited by Brian Fowler
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TheVileOne

TheVileOne

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Posted (edited)
46 minutes ago, Brian Fowler said:

Plus there's a good chance this ends in a manner that exactly reflects what Martin said, and this coalition falls apart with shades of grey everywhere.

You're giving the writers way too much credit methinks.

Jon Snow was about as useless as fighting Mike Tyson without earmuffs in this episode.

Also, doing a Jurassic Park velociraptor scene in the middle of the episode...just...why?

Edited by TheVileOne
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TheVileOne

TheVileOne

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6 minutes ago, Brian Fowler said:

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/DBr-UmSsQhRyu-ZFQ6erkln-UiM=/0x0:1572x782/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1572x782):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/16199146/Screen_Shot_2019_04_28_at_8.36.55_PM.png

Certainly appears to be in this picture

If Ghost is still alive after this battle, then this is one of the worst edited shows ever.

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AxB

AxB

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1 hour ago, Brian Fowler said:

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/DBr-UmSsQhRyu-ZFQ6erkln-UiM=/0x0:1572x782/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1572x782):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/16199146/Screen_Shot_2019_04_28_at_8.36.55_PM.png

Certainly appears to be in this picture

He's been shrinking some. Direwolves are supposed to be as big as a horse. That's just a regular sized dog.

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OSJ

OSJ

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I'm calling it now, Cersei doesn't get her army of mercs because the Iron Bank has had enough of her antics and invests on sending them elsewhere or just sitting around playing dominoes. 

Edited by OSJ
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BobbyWhioux

BobbyWhioux

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Unless Jaime, specifically, goes on to kill Cersei then her ignoring/dismissing the undead White Walker threat cost her absolutely nothing and was morally and tactically correct of her, and the southern half of the kingdom was always justified in ignoring the existential threat to humanity/writing off every crisis at The Wall as "just a northern problem" to focus on the petty squabble that is the game of thrones.

And even if he does that's all still mostly true.

Gotta admit that kinda bums me out.

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Jiji

Jiji

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Yeah, precisely. And while I can think the battle was fantastic in many ways, the above is going to stick with me and hope that if Martin ever gets around to finishing his story that it's very different. 

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Zakk_Sabbath

Zakk_Sabbath

Posted
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46 minutes ago, BobbyWhioux said:

Unless Jaime, specifically, goes on to kill Cersei then her ignoring/dismissing the undead White Walker threat cost her absolutely nothing and was morally and tactically correct of her, and the southern half of the kingdom was always justified in ignoring the existential threat to humanity/writing off every crisis at The Wall as "just a northern problem" to focus on the petty squabble that is the game of thrones.

And even if he does that's all still mostly true.

Gotta admit that kinda bums me out.

My prediction for the season was Arya killing Cersei while wearing Jamie's face but now that she did the honors last night, I'm not so sure.

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EVA

EVA

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47 minutes ago, BobbyWhioux said:

Unless Jaime, specifically, goes on to kill Cersei then her ignoring/dismissing the undead White Walker threat cost her absolutely nothing and was morally and tactically correct of her, and the southern half of the kingdom was always justified in ignoring the existential threat to humanity/writing off every crisis at The Wall as "just a northern problem" to focus on the petty squabble that is the game of thrones.

And even if he does that's all still mostly true.

Gotta admit that kinda bums me out.

This is true.  And definitely in conflict with the book’s portrayal of her as being mostly an idiot.

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