No book talk. This is for discussion of the show. Using book knowledge to guess about the ending of the show is the perfect thing to discuss in this show/book thread, not this one.
Open spoilers about the show once it begins airing on the east coast/streaming in a few hours. If you have an actual spoiler (taken from leaks from cast interviews or gossip magazines or whatever) that would be an appropriate use for a spoiler box. A few of us would prefer that if you want to talk about plot points revealed in “next week on…” promos you warn people that you’ll be discussing that first. Thank you.
Previous thread (with links to previous seasons found in the first OP of the season):
8.01 “Winterfell”
8.02 “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”
Show/book open spoilers discussion thread
I am not ready and am afraid.
I’m not looking forward to this episode at all. Mainly because I expect some characters I care about to die, but also because it’s apparently going to be nothing but battle battle battle for an hour and 20 minutes. <sigh>
But at least the news snippets about the battle taking place at night, and with a snow storm on top of it!, and then likely scenes set in a dimly lit crypt finally got me to find out how to adjust my monitor’s settings. Brightness to 100. Contrast to 90. I may actually be able to make out some faces here and there. Yay.
(I have partially impaired vision, making many of the ‘atmospheric’ episodes of GoT into radio plays. Like that one where they were sieging the Tully’s castle. For me, at least twenty minutes of it were black screen with occasional fuzzy torches in the back ground. If not for the comments here, I would never have known that Brienne and Podrick rowed away in the boat at the end.)
I know this seems like an obvious suggestion, but have you considered cranking up the gamma on whatever you watch it on?
Uh, no. Because I have no idea what gamma is, how it affects things? (Sorry, oldie, as in I remember when televisions had horizontal and vertical hold controls.)
On poking around, I see something on the menu labeled “gamma” and another labeled “gamma 1” – I should crank one of them up? Or both?
Hmm, a quick googling gives me conflicting information on gamma vs brightness. This has some explanation. The pictures reflect how it works in video games, but other definitions seem to indicate that this isn’t how it works on TVs.
I’m not sure what gamma/gamma 1 on your TV do. You may just want to experiment to see if you get good results. If it works like it does in video games, it could result in a more useful effect than just cranking up the brightness, although that’s an option too.
Maybe try watching this (lots of blues and greys) while adjusting your monitor.
Ah, that worked great, thanks SenorBeef! Thank you to GreysonCarlisle, too, that was a useful video to practice with.
If anyone cares, there was really only one gamma adjustment, the ‘gamma 1’ was just the setting it was on, I guess, because it changed as I tinkered.
Anyway, I found a setting that looks very, very much better to my eyes, even with the brightness and contrast shifted back down to something more normal. Maybe I will actually be able to tell who is dying tonight. 
Hmm. Maybe I should figure out which episode that Tully siege was, and see what was going on…
I only hope that they make it too confusing to figure out whats going on.
I dont know what to think what to think.
On one hand we have 4 long episodes to go, so they cant really rush the battles otherwise theres nothing to tell before the last episode but on the other hand so far the all the battles so far have been pretty short and to the point so I dont know whats going to happen tonight.
I only hope that Tyrion makes it to the end.
I hope there’s something interesting that lets the North win, or I want the Night’s King to win. A battle like Battle of the Bastards or at Castle Black is significantly less interesting to me.
Watching it now. Man, this is dark…like literally, my tv is fine, but this episode is pitch black.
I’m like 25 minutes behind. So this may look stupid if everyone dies in 15 minutes and you guys saw it. But they should’ve killed major characters early on. It would’ve ramped up the stakes and tension. Boom - 2 major characters dead right off the bat. Brienne, Tormund, Jorah, Grey Worm, the Hound. Kill some of them and we start wondering whose next. I’m kind of underwhelmed with no tension so far. Feels very safe.
This episode has been stunningly tedious.
Yeah, not a fan of that episode. No real big deaths, they win just by stabbing the guy, it looked bad, and the action sequences were not fun or imaginative.
Going into this season I had very low hopes. Last episode raised them some, but I see that was misplaced.
I would suggest to see this as two episodes.
First half was not well done.
Second half was actually quite good.
Not a great episode here. They fall into the cliche where they build it up like everyone is going to die but then are miraculously saved as the (literal) last minute with deus ex Arya. And the rest of it had a lot of waiting. And you know when you have the dead all lined up waiting, it’d be nice if you had a dragon to light them on fire… Oh well, on to King’s Landing.
But Melissandre was a boss.
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So the deaths are:
Jorrah, Melissandre, Theon, Leanna Mormont, Resurrection-man, Edd(?)
Is that right or did I miss something?
