Game of Thrones 8.04 "The Last of the Starks" 5/5/2019 [Show discussion]

Cafe Society
641

One complaint I have seen a lot in various places (maybe not so much here) is that they should have shown Sansa’s and Arya’s reaction to the news about Jon’s parentage. I will actually defend the showrunners on this: I don’t think there’s any way to make that work on screen.

:rolleyes: Seriously? Please, give me a little more credit than this. I’m well aware of how streaming works (it’s right there in the name!). I’m also aware that my various streaming services constantly get “confused” and (rather annoyingly) lose their place, just reverting back to the beginning of an episode for what strike me as far less excusable reasons (like just quickly going to another episode to get clarification on a plot point) than “the actual source file in the cloud was swapped out for a brand new one”.

642

This is pretty much all off-topic, and long enough that I’ll hide it in a spoiler box to be easily ignored. To summarize: Sorry, Slacker, my bad. It was a shot at streaming in general, not you.

[spoiler]

Sorry, that was more a soapbox issue of mine than a backhanded swipe at you. I can see that it looks like the latter; my bad.

My cable company keeps pushing multi-room dvr, but I steadfastly hold onto my outdated hard drive dvr (also provided by them) because the low-responsiveness of the multi-room dvr is the same sluggish shit as their on demand service, and that would drive me insane trying to FF through commercials. I get annoyed just thinking about it.

I see what you mean now, but I think it’s much the same thing. Amazon Prime is known to lose my place while watching things, and even forget what I was watching at all.* But I don’t think those issues are related to the source files on the server changing. I think it’s just because they suck in general.

*I was watching a new release (that day) movie on Amazon Prime via my roku. Had to search for it to find it, started watching. Within around 4 minutes I realized wanted close captioning. Instead of pushing 3 or 4 buttons to toggle captions like with my cable, I had to do the following:

  1. Go to roku Home => Settings => Captions
  2. Go back to Prime (brief pause while the app loads)
  3. Search for the name of the movie I was just watching (?)
  4. Fast forward to 4 minutes in since it clearly had no idea I already started this movie

And the FF/RWND is so incredibly sluggish and poorly designed that I think it might have taken me longer than 4 minutes to navigate to the 4-minute mark. Gah!!!

I normally turn CC on and off all the time, usually multiple times per movie or tv episode. But that was the last CC I used watching that movie. Anything I didn’t hear right, oh well.[/spoiler]

643

That’s cool. And yeah,

[spoiler]that’s basically what I meant: “Streaming struggles with so much other shit, I’m amazed that they could hold it together when they actually change the episode I’m watching!” If they were smoother in general, I’d have been less amazed.

The thing with captioning really does vary so much–for me it’s especially noticeable on my phone. At least one streaming service–maybe Hulu?–requires only a very simple toggle to tap the CC and darken it or lighten it. On or off, easy peasy. Others require various maneuvers. (Streamers aren’t necessarily the worst: my Blu-ray player frustratingly requires toggling through however many languages the disc supports, which for major releases can be dozens.) But my Apple TV, although it does as I say often lose its place if I’m not very ginger with it, does at least make captions and rewinding easy, thanks to the voice operation. “Turn on/off captions.” “Go back eleven seconds.” Best of all, “what did he/she/they say?” makes it jump back maybe twenty seconds or so, turn on the captions for that stretch of time, and automatically turns them back off when you get back to where you were. I love that, because while some things are hard to catch, I don’t like having the captions on all the time.

First world problems!
[/spoiler]

644

Euron had received enthusiastic support from the islanders, precisely against Yara. He build the largest fleet ever. He didn’t suffer from any drawback or defeat. I’m not sure why the people would now suddenly want to change allegiance in favor of the person they recently rejected.

The sentence you quote seems to imply that her meager crew would be able to take control of the islands when the fleet/army is away, presumably against the will of the population, local lords and so on. I see this has extremely implausible, unless we assume an extremely small population and pretty much no defense. She wouldn’t even have enough men to, say, conduct a siege. And we can’t assume a very small population given the supposed size of the fleet.

Two conceivable explanations :

-The population is indeed very small and there’s indeed no defense. Pretty much every single able-bodied man between the age of 15 and 60 has been enlisted and is aboard Euron’s fleet. Yara just marched to the castle, defeated the 5 elderly guards left there because they suffered of severe rheumatism and proclaimed she was the new boss. Problem in this case : her being in control of the Iron island brings absolutely nothing to Danaerys since the only thing she’s now in charge of is a crumbling castle, the pregnant women and three fisher boats.

-Yara disembarked and was challenged by Euron’s steward. She proceeded to beat the crap out of him, and all the islanders, impressed by her talent in a fistfight, immediately switched allegiance. Would make absolutely no sense, but it’s pretty consistent with the behavior of the islanders as depicted in the series, who change allegiance at the drop of a hat providing that you act manly.

645

Regarding Yara’s forces, remember that Theon took ten or a dozen Ironborn with him to Winterfell and they all got slaughtered protecting Bran.

However you look at it, Yara’s taking the Iron Islands is just hand waving as far as what we’ve seen. She doesn’t have the men, the ships, or the political support to take the islands unless there’s almost nobody left there. If she shows up with a big fleet to challenge Euron it will be ridiculous. (Of course, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.)

646

You mean they’re ARRbitrary?

[sub]more accurately, you mean they’re fickle, I realize[/sub]

647

TWEET!!

That’s it! Bryan, out of the pool!

648

Yara had a lot of support in the Kingsmoot, Euron just had more. It’s possible she rallied sympathizers that remained on the island.

I would imagine that Euron bending the knee to the Lannisters was less popular than his original plan of marrying Dany. Greyjoys and Lannisters had a war against each other ~10 years ago. Unclear if they fought each other much during the war of the 5 kings.

649

I think that’s exactly what Yara did. If the NK won, she’d repopulate the Iron Islands with the survivors from the North. If the NK lost, she’d bug out again, probably back to Dany.

650

Aw, c’mon. I realize I’m not really a fan of GoT; I wasn’t watching from the beginning and it’s only in the last six weeks or so that I’ve binged up to the current episode, admittedly after watching numerous individual scenes on YouTube with mildly-growing curiosity. I think I decided to just watch the series when I saw one YouTube clip with Tyrion in service to Danerys, and I got curious about the chain of events leading to that point.

I have to admit; I *like *Peter Dinklage, I like Tyrion, but I’ve never been entirely sold on Peter Dinklage as Tyrion, maybe because while he’s a good actor, his attempts at a pseudoBritish accent are distracting, surrounded as he is by actors who are actually British or can at least fake it more easily.

I haven’t read any of the books and I sped through the earlier episodes, so… what’s the deal with those face-trees? I was kind of expecting them to start talking at some point, maybe grow out arms and legs, walk away… that’d be awesome. That’s Ent attainment!

[sub]This joke is stolen property. Alert law-enforcement.[/sub]

651

I agree that Dinklage’s accent is rough. Really rough.

652

If Dinklage hadn’t existed, would they have tried to film this series?

653

I thought Jordan Prentice was going to get the role.

654

They would have shoved Warwick Davis in there if they had to.

655

Interesting suggestions…but just wrong. My image of Tyrion is set forever, I guess.

656

Personally, I was OK with Peter Dinklage’s performance, British accent or not. After all, he’s not playing a British person, so who cares whether the accent is authentic? And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t he the only cast member to win an Emmy Award for his performance? (Googling, he was nominated seven times and won three.)

657

I really have no problems with the accents. Westeros isn’t precisely Europe. I think having ambiguous accents that don’t quite line up with any real world Earth accents is a nice flavor to make them seem not quite human and from their own world, just as different styles of architecture or dress would. If anything, I would prefer that more of the accents be less British and sound not quite like any accent on Earth.

658

So…14 pages of thread. Sorry if I repeat what someone else has said, I can’t wade through more than the start.

Anyone remember the flak D&D kicked up with the Theon and Sansa stuff back in season 5 ? How it was said they got so focused on Theon story and journey that they totally steamrollered Sansa? I don’t think they learned much from that.

Brienne reduced to crying in her shirt about her man leaving her. Way to undercut the great moment of her knighting.

Jon brought up, not just as a rival claimant to Daenrerys but as someone who would be a better ruler. Seems highly contrary to Daenerys history, and to Jons abysmal performance.

Also, it would have been much more reasonable if Tyrion and Varys had admitted that Jon would be better for them because he his incredibly dim, and easy to manipulate. I can see Varys salivating over a well-intentioned ruler with such obvious handles and no brain.

Kind of feels like D&D think they are writing book Jon who is actually quite bright and an out-of-the-box thinker. The character they have presented through the show though, is very much an intellectual minus-variant.

And he is supposed to be a maxed-charisma person that people are drawn to? But all he does is sit in corners and mope, mixed with the occasional depressed sounding few words. (actually, he could have been suffering from depression since being murdered.)

Then the stealth fleet with the +5 repeating giant siege crossbows. Well, that came from nowhere, managed to avoid detection by both the fliers and the fortress, as well as staying out of reach of any coastal defenses of the fortress.

Bron came from nowhere too. So he managed to sneak into a highly defended enemy castle with a not-very-concealable ranged murder weapon? Its that easy to get into the chambers of enemy leaders with crossbows? What were all the battles about then?

Scene on the walls… you know, your entire leadership and fighterjet/Dragon is within range of the AA or Anti-Dragon artillery?

Missandrei couldn’t have thrown that chain around Cerseis neck and jumped?

The more they leave Martins plots behind, the more the characters and plotting seems to skewer towards cliche. I feel they are trying to hammer home the whole “Secret heir is the rightful king who will rule” no matter what previous characterization may think.

659

You made a lot of good points. But I’ve seen people make this same comment and that is not what happened. The scene opens on an inn. You can see Winterfell off in the distance. Of course, there is really no reason why Tyrion and Jaime would be drinking at an inn. Except to have that scene with Bronn.

660

Ah, didn’t notice that. A lapse of security in the celebrations after the victory is a bit more believable. Tyrion should have known better, but he is no Tywin.