GOT 7 ep. 6

I think its cheating for the Night King’s team to have a dragon.

Does the Night King remind anyone of Belichick?

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Epic. I loved the episode, even though it was crazy and impossible and filled with plot holes galore.

But, I hate the idea of Zombie Dragons. I mean, and I knew it was coming. I knew Zombie Dragon had to follow the best dragon rescue scene, evah. But the writers just stepped in it when they sent that small group on their wild ghoul chase, and there’s just no way to rationalize that, so you have to make up for it with an epic dragon rescue. The whole series was pointing toward that . . . though I’m not sure Martin would have ever set it up that way.

Next Sunday is gonna be soooo wild.

Speaking of time, Business Insider has a map (prior to this episode) of all the Jon Snow travels, compared to the White Walkers and the Wights. Martin didn’t explain this in the books, if memory serves, but, sheeesh!! One team must live on coffee and Red Bull, while the other prefers a different kind of buzz.

map shows how far Jon Snow has traveled compared to the White Walkers on ‘Game of Thrones’

This may be taking the easy way out, but . . . . I personally got frustrated watching the slow trudging from one part of Westeros to the next in years past. I think those episodes took too much time to get anywhere, literally and figuratively.

But this season has the opposite problem. So . . . um, well. There’s gotta be a middle ground there, right? And I say that as someone who can’t stand that kind of assessment in most political matters. As in, public policy is naturally better if it’s somewhere “in the middle.” Aside from that being all relative, “the center” as usually defined by our two parties almost always means grotesquely ineffective mush.

But when it comes to art and mapping out a TV series . . . well, I think there’s some merit in finding that sweet spot between trudging through the tundra for weeks and weeks and instantly arriving as if Scotty beamed them across Westeros.

Yeah, PA . . . “silly” is a fair critique. Too many impossible matters of time travel, especially, from Gendry’s speed in reaching the wall, to the speed of the ravens alerting Dany, to her flight to the exact right place to save the day.

If I’m the writer, I don’t concoct the “bring back one wight for proof” story at all. It never made any sense within the context of the GOT universe. Far too risky, after what we all saw with the massacre at Hardhome. Sending a small troop of mortals to find a needle in the haystack of thousands and thousands of wights, and their white walker masters?

If they needed to get a dragon to the Night King, there had to be a better way.

One of the things that happens with a lot of fantasy shows . . . . and I mean this within the logic of the story itself . . . they often tend to set up impossible odds when that’s just not necessary. You can create stories of struggle, conflict, overcoming the odds, without them being impossible to overcome. By definition, the impossible part means you can’t. So they should dial that back a bit and make it crazy hard, but at least doable. The audience will find that thrilling and exciting too, and it won’t see it as “silly,” unless you set up enemies and circumstances that just shouldn’t ever be overcome. Again, even within the universe of the story.

Billy_T wrote:

One of my current (bingeing) favorites is Person of Interest. It’s a Sci-Fi story set in New York that doesn’t make its Sci-Fi aspects hard to imagine as actually existing now. The foundational premise is mass surveillance via an AI “machine.” But it gets ahead of its skis at times when it sets up confrontations between enemies and heroes. When it has impossible numbers of enemies, armed to the teeth, facing off against the very small band of regulars.

You know I have been wanting to watch that series for awhile but just haven’t done it yet. I know that Johnathan Nolan was a creator and I’m a fan of his(as my quote tag reveals)and so one of these days I have to do it. I want to see if it’s on Netflix because I’d like to start at the beginning.

PA Ram wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

One of my current (bingeing) favorites is Person of Interest. It’s a Sci-Fi story set in New York that doesn’t make its Sci-Fi aspects hard to imagine as actually existing now. The foundational premise is mass surveillance via an AI “machine.” But it gets ahead of its skis at times when it sets up confrontations between enemies and heroes. When it has impossible numbers of enemies, armed to the teeth, facing off against the very small band of regulars.

You know I have been wanting to watch that series for awhile but just haven’t done it yet. I know that Johnathan Nolan was a creator and I’m a fan of his(as my quote tag reveals)and so one of these days I have to do it. I want to see if it’s on Netflix because I’d like to start at the beginning.

Yes, it’s on Netflix. That’s how I’m rewatching it now. I love it, despite the sometimes impossible story-lines.

If you do start watching, give it a bit of time. It’s not one of those series that hits the ground running. It has a lot of complicated back stories, needs a bit of build-up and, IMO, it doesn’t really take off until they add the character of Shaw, played by Sarah Shahi. I think that’s in season two. But the show gains sustainable momentum toward the latter part of season one. You likely won’t want to stop watching it from that point on.

I wish CBS had hung in there with it longer. If memory serves, it made it through five seasons, but there was enough material for more. It was nowhere near past its prime, IMO.

And, at the risk of belaboring the point — I’ve had waaay too much coffee this morning — here’s another major factor:

From what we know of the GOT universe, the wights tend not to travel alone or in small groups. When we see them at this stage of the story, they’re a part of that mass army we saw at Hardhome. Which means, Jon and his band weren’t going to be able to go guerilla and pick them off one by one. They were almost certain to meet them as part of a massed army, and that should have been a factor in their planning. To me, knowing this, knowing the size of that zombie army . . . . that would have nixed the plan from the start.

Anyway, the sun goes out soon. I blame Cersei.

Apparently, the Night King is also the Lich King now… because he just raised Sindragosa.

Shout out to WoW fans.

wv wrote:

I watched the latest episode again, and i liked it a lot less. Too many plot contrivances.

And i dont like what they’ve done to Arya. She should be smarter. They’ve made her seem pretty dum.

Good series, enjoyable series, but the writers/producers have failed this season. Big fail, imho. My question is, is that because the writers were never that good, and it was all George RR Martin? Or is the main problem the producers decision to shorten the season.

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I usually wait awhile before rewatching them. Sometimes the next year. But it might be helpful.

The TV show is all on its own now, and that may have a lot to do with this not seeming to fit together as well as it once did. It’s not really Martin’s story anymore. It’s the two guys who are reportedly also working on an already controversial show about a confederacy-won-the-war alternative show.

Perhaps the main reason Martin hasn’t finished his series is that he tends to have all kinds of different projects going at the same time . . . and/or he just can’t figure out how to bring it all to a close in a way that he feels good about. He started the whole thing back in 1991, and it took him five years to write the first book. It was published in 1996. Last one came out in 2011. I’ve finished three of my own novels of in less than five years, but they’re admittedly much shorter. His tend to be in the 700-800 page range.

I wish the show had be able to follow the books, instead of outpacing them. But Martin’s methods made that impossible.

zn wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

My take? Jon downplayed the story that he was brought back from the dead. He said that was an exaggeration. The scars say otherwise.

Yes but what’s the big deal about THAT. That is, it’s not clear what the issue is for Daenerys. Unless it;s high school and only the really cool kids get brought back to life. I mean, she has dragons, is immune to fire, and has dealt with warlocks and witches. So why not a resurrection.

It may have something to do with the prophecy regarding her inability to have kids, until . . . The TV show shortened it to a riddle about the sun rising in the west, but the books make it seem like Khal Drogo could be resurrected if she gives birth to a living child again. It’s not fleshed out, but her certainty that she will never have kids, and that the dragons are it . . . may have a loophole. And that loophole apparently could bring back her Khal.

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

But if Qyborn or the White Walkers do it . . . you’re no longer anything approaching human. You’re a zombie, for all intents and purposes.

Those are different magics remember.

Qyborn is represented as a kind of adventurer who actually really doesn’t know what he’s doing. He blunders along in a neo-scientific way in a world where magic is real but he possesses no real knowledge of it.

The wights aren’t alive, they are more like spirits animating corpses. The magic of the walkers is different.

The priests and priestesses of the lord of light are interesting because they have real magic at their disposal, but at the same time, there is absolutely no indication they really understand it or that through them we get a valid, real picture of a force they call the lord of light. For all we know they tapped into something but have no real idea what it is.

But on the latter. It’s a faint echo of the distant, unknowable magic of the wizards in the Lord of the Rings. The wizards are actually servants of a higher being, but they have no knowledge of who and what it is, and whatever it is, it remains loftily distant from worldly affairs, only sending its own agents to blunder along in the world (wizards). The difference is, Tolkien actually explains that mythology. It’s just that in doing so, he knows more than the wizards, so to speak. Martin has it all entirely from a worldly perspective where we have no idea if the priests/priestesses of the lord of light are right in their religious convictions and explanations, and meanwhile…there IS something actually supernatural going on.

It;s like ancient peoples who understood navigation at a deep level (see Pacific south sea islanders and their extraordinary and very ancient navigation techniques) but did not understand the world and stars and heavenly bodies in any real or valid way.

…

Writers/literary critics tell other writers that you should know everything about your characters and their world, their biographies, the historical contexts, even though you’ll never actually present that, or just present a fraction of it, selectively. It’s a tall order, and I don’t think most writers actually do this much beyond core characters and their slices of the world of the novel(s). I’m guessing Martin hasn’t thought all of this out, either, and his books don’t present the kind of complete world found in Tolkein or Herbert. It’s a highly imaginative rendering, but it comes across sometimes as unsure about its own internal “logic.” He leaves a lot of stuff out that would seem kinda important.

Ironically, mostly cuz of the Internet age, you have legions of fans who put things together and expand his universe far beyond his own presentation . . . At least that’s my dime-store opinion.

My guess is also that he hoped/hopes that through the sheer number of books — he originally just wanted a trilogy — he can do a lot of that without having set it all up up front. This also corresponds with the way most of us write fiction. The process takes on a life of its own. You end up being led by your characters more than you lead them — often. Things just seem to take shape beyond your original plans, and you have these eureka moments that just weren’t there until they are.

The creative process, etc. etc.

ZN,

I can see a lot of that as possible. And another thing in favor of your reading is that most of his novels have a single-person perspective, in turns. He gives his characters their own space for that, if memory serves. So that what we read is limited to what they can know on the ground. They don’t get the bird’s eye view — or the dragon’s eye — with exceptions. I’d have to reread them to refresh my memory, and I don’t really have the desire to do that right now . . . but I think that’s the case. I don’t think he does the omniscient narrator stuff all that often, and definitely not as the main method of story telling — though I won’t swear to R’hllor, the Lord of Light, that I have the correct mix.

In short, yeah. It’s quite possible he has it all (or mostly) mapped out and is just giving us glimpses, primarily because his characters can’t ever see the whole. He likely hopes readers put enough together to make it work. And judging from all the print spent on this or that theory, he’s definitely piqued a ton of interest. We wouldn’t be talking about it here if he didn’t get a lot of stuff “right.”

You know what the best part of the last episode was for me — It was the simple, matter of fact, sometimes humorous, Dialogues among the men who were on the quest beyond the wall. Before they met the Bear and things got all action-y.

The humor between the Hound and the Red-haired-guy, talking about Brienne of Tarth. Good dialogue.
The conversation between Jon and whatshisname about the sword — good dialogue.

Etc.

And i consider all that kind of thing ‘character development’. And thats what’s missing because of the decision to make fewer episodes. We miss out on THAT stuff, among other things.

I tried to google the question of just WHY the powers that be, decided to have fewer episodes, but i cant really fine anything that makes much sense. All i found was some paragraphs out there that say the writers basically just wanted to wrap things up. Ah well.

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