For spoilering.
Ye have been warned.
Judging from the trailer, some variation of Blood and Cheese has been confirmed.
We are about a week out from the show losing my wife as a viewer for good and all. Looking forward to it.
Episode 1 ‘Son For A Son’ should be uhh…not fun? But uhhh…horrible? In the best Game of Thrones-y way possible.
Also, I kinda hope the Dragonseed montage is set to some Benny Hill music as everyone tries to ride a dragon and is killed terribly. But in a fun way!
it’s also pretty clear from the trailers we’ll see the sacking of Kings Landing as well.
Early reviews are trending positive. The lack of time jumps and recasting is a positive, allowing characters to grow. Alan Taylor is back and he helms at least one major dragon battle in the first four episodes released to critics. Given the timeline, I suspect it will be the Sack of Duskendale and the battle of Rook’s Rest, where Rhaenys and her dragon Meleys are killed, and Aegon gets fuuuuuucked up.
Oh hells to the yeah.
Renewed for season 3.
Congrats to those who enjoy it!
This is what I was predicting/hoping since the first season. Which was pretty good, but this one has potential to really kick up a notch, with the war underway and excuses for unwieldy timeline hopping nonexistent.
I just realized that they are going to air “A Son For A Son” on Father’s Day.
Have a good one, Aegon!
You HATE time jumps!
They can be great! LOST, FARGO, BREAKING BAD and BSG have all employed them to great effect, just to name a couple.
Buuuut, the time to employ them is not early in the first season of an ongoing show. If we haven’t gotten our bearings fully in place*, then further displacing them is not exciting, it’s just frustrating and confusing.
*which is itself a more difficult process in Westeros than most genre settings, given its “no side is fully good, no side is fully bad” ethos
Time jumps are especially bad when they’re jumping away from the better actors and characters in the story to that point…
While horrific still, I think the Blood & Cheese murder was actually scaled back from the book. For starters, the ‘is it a boy or a girl?’ debate was…weird, because isn’t there another boy? And while Helena still chose, the ‘she chose this one, but they kill the other’ was particularly horrible.
Solid enough reintroduction.
Yeah, there was a younger Boy that Helena picked and they killed the Heir. That way the younger child would always know his mother picked him to die.
Plus Alicent was present while it happened, not off riding Ser Criston (that affair itself is an interesting change).
I will say, the sawing sounds were pretty rough compared to what I think was a quick slice in the book.
I wish they had left Blood & Cheese untouched, but at least they sorta did the scene.
Production values feel like they’re on yet another level.
Yeah, production values were top notch on this episode.
I’d have to go back and watch but I’m pretty sure Daemon told Blood and Cheese that their target wore an eyepatch. And you’d think a guy who actually works in the Red Keep would know who Aemond was.
But I am looking forward to more shit hitting the fan next week!
Yeah, my first thought was that the scene in the book was so much worse. Not that this was a bed of roses, and kudos to the actress playing Helena, but still…muted. Show looks great, nice premiere for the season. Did Alan Taylor do any episodes last year or is this his first one in quite a while?
This was Taylor’s first directing gig with HOTD.
How much did you love the added scenes on the Wall and the ongoing effort to connect HOTD with GoT.
I liked them quite a bit, actually!
I thought you might.
Opinions are mixed on reddit (the season eight hate gets to be a bit much), but the original novella length work is only about 175 pages long. Fleshing out the characters and doing more world-building is needed. I personally like most of the additions thus far.
Cregan should have a beard, though.