A lot of what I’d say has already been covered. I will say that I too hated the “tactics” employed, especially with the cavalry and the trebuchets. This page has some useful tricks for setting up your TV - just turning off the power saving (that I hadn’t even known was on) would’ve made an enormous difference.
So…now back to the very title of the series - the Game of Thrones! Will Our Heroes go back to the (pointless, stupid) internal bickering, or will they grow a bit of common sense and (try to) take out Cersei before they start stabbing each other for the throne? Tune in next week!
Ice was melted down and recast. They showed the new swords being cast from molten metal in the very first scene of season 2 or 3. But Valyrian steel is also magic. It’s like Damascus steel except it requires spells and such to be cast during the forging process. I don’t think Gendry, the only remaining blacksmith apparently, knows how to do it.
If their place is evidently “to rule”, then I agree with you. Let’s review. The North: Sansa looks like she’s going to be queen, Cersei rules the Kingslands. Yara looks like she’s got a shot at ruling the Ironborne. The Sand Snakes, in one of the more idiotic plot twists, had Dorne under their rule for a while. We already know about Dragon Sue. Any bets on Arya eventually running the Faceless (Wo)Men? Now Azor Ahai looks like it was Arya, and not Jon.
Who’s left?
The joke that the plot lately runs on Grrrrl Power! didn’t come out of thin air.
I write off the head covering angle as that it’d be even harder to tell the Heroes apart from the red shirts if they had on some sensible head coverings. Though it does make you realize why medieval, and shoot most armies up to say the 1940s, really tried hard not to fight at night. Or why medieval commanders, or the rest of their army, wore the bright garb they did. IFF and command/control, is really hard at a distance, and when you rely on voice or runners to give your orders.
I don’t know specifically what you’re referring to here, but I did find it a bit weird when Arya turned into a helpless maiden who needed to be rescued by Beric and the Hound. In fact, she needed to be rescued so badly that the friggin’ Lord of Light himself kept raising Beric from the dead to fulfill this ultimate purpose.
I mean, I get she had a non-trivial head wound when the wight slammed her into the doorjamb, and she was solid until then and totally fell apart after, and concussions are real bad, m’kay, but still.
Because Cersei has ballistas that can take down dragons. I’m sure there is a strategy that can overcome this but strategy does not seem to be our heroes’ strong point.
Yeah, I have my 70" 4K LG TV very carefully calibrated, and I watched in a dark room, but this was…not good. I think they did this to save money on the VFX, but it just led to a lot of “what’s going on?” and “who is that?”. :smack:
So I would rate the hour right in the middle as possibly the worst hour of the show ever (although the ridiculous mission to capture a white walker is up there). But it started well and finished strong, so it’s not the show’s worst episode as a whole.
That’s reaching. Arya was simply overwhelmed and disarmed at that moment. It was plot armor that saved her, not the idea that she was a helpless girl and needed saving. Every major character, male and female, was saved in a similar way - at the last moment, just as they were being overwhelmed by the dead.
I’m just trying to get my head around the idea that Game of Thrones is about putting uppity women in their place. The show started with men running everything. Those men are now all dead, and women control almost all of Westeros.
The men have mostly been stupid or venal, and paid for it. Theon was tortured endlessly and horribly for being ‘uppity’. Ramsay Bolton was eaten alive on the order of a woman - and we cheered. Ned had his head cut off. Jon was murdered. Ser Jorah had to have his skin flayed ti stay alive. Beric Dondarion has been killed multiple times. The Hound almost died. Almost every major male character has been brutalized endlessly, as have some women. I’m not detecting a gender bias here.
In last night’s episode the men did almost nothing to advance the plot. The biggest badasses of the night were three young women - one still a child. The previous episode spent a bunch of time making the point that it was stupid that only men could be knights, and Brienne was knighted.
If you are watching this show and all you can see is ‘uppity women being put in their place’, I think the problem is more with your perspective than with anything the show is doing.
I pointed out in another post that Danaerys first war council included five women (two of them bisexual), three eunuchs, and a dwarf. Not exactly an indication that he-men were still in charge.
I don’t remember the specifics between the show and elsewhere. I know the specifics are slightly different. What isn’t different is that there are only a few people in the world that can work Valyrian steel. A few as in like 3. And those three just know how to work with it not how to make more.
I have a different reaction. These are the Starks we are talking about. The guardians of the north for 1,000 years. They follow the old ways. They should be following burial practices that render bodies unable to be raised even if they don’t fully understand why.
I’m seeing a lot of adjusted light footage around the 'net and things are making a whole lot more sense to me. So asking-- If I watch it again on HBO Go on my computer, will it look better than it did on my (not 4K but HDTV) TV?
I found myself looking at my watch a few times, waiting for whatever deus-ex was going to end the battle, because it clearly wasn’t going to be won through clever strategy or anything else, just prolonged with “we’re being overrun!” / later / “good thing we escaped being overrun, somehow!”
Oh, good, kill the head zombie and all the others instantly collapse. Maybe try spinning next time, that’s a good trick.
Also, a handy rule for Giants: If your squished victim has something sharp and is still wriggling around, you really shouldn’t put it up to your eye to get a really good look at it.
You’re wrong. Valyrian steel is melted in the show. See the beginning of episode 1 season 4 where Ned Stark’s sword is melted to produce two new Valyrian steel blades.