Episode 3 Opinions

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Overall as impressive the undertaking was to film such a large scale battle I found the finished product a little lacking compared to the standards of previous seasons. I have two major gripes with episode 3, one is the execution and choices of production that I find hurt the story telling, and the other major gripe is to do with the lack of explanation for the Night King.

The episode started out great with the dothraki disappearing in the darkness. WhenMelisandre arrived and lit the swords of fire, I for the first time in a few episodes thought, hey maybe this will be a fair fight. Sure had she not shown up the dothraki would have been fighting with normal steel weapons, but I was willing to overlook this one of many tactical errors, because it worked emotionally for me. And when these flames went out, i was overcome with a sense of dread, I loved the way this made me feel. This was the closest thing to the horror elements that were hyped at the end of episode 1.

After that opening, I feel the army of dead failed to be scary. The majority of the initial battle was disorienting and hard to follow, people keep saying the darkness was the problem , but to me it was the way it was edited. The camera would quickly switch between different cuts and there was no time given to process what I was seeing. Are we winning ?are we losing, greyworms dead no wait he’s alive? The main argument for the poor lighting and the quick editing is that it conveys the disorienting nature of the battle, but usually these techniques are routinely used in action movies when the filmed fights look bad or are uninteresting. Like when a horde of cgi zombies are attacking.

Even if that’s not the reason, there’s plenty of ways to show disorientation without sacrificing the legibility of the battle. In Battle of Bastards towards the beginning there’s a sequence where the camera stays on Jon as he stumbles around after the cavalry charges, he is dodging attacks, getting hit with arrows, is in constant danger from all direction. Here the camera is focused on Jon and it lets his acting and reactions to the chaos around him convey the overwhelming and disorienting nature of the battle. I feel this is more effective and I wish I had more scenes of following characters around, sure we had arya being chased and Jon and Dany, but most of the minor characters served very little roles beside grunting and almost dieing. Normally in a battle episode there are “mini missions” with a small conflict within the greater battle, like Tyrion’s plan to sneak around in Battle of Blackwater. This gives the viewer something to root for or something to focus on. Outside of Arya being chased I often had no sense of what was happening, and whether anything was being accomplished.

I was disappointed in the lack of horror in this episode, I felt like the Ned Umber scene set new expectations for the army of dead. I mentioned the dothraki scene worked but I feel there were a lot of missed opportunities to make the army of dead scary. For instance the library scene with Arya. You get Arya alone in a room full of wights, and the wights turn into waking dead zombies, bumbling around with no sense of purpose. It was comical at best and only may have been scary when George Romero did it 50 years ago. Where were our favorite characters turned wights that I feel was promised, how terrifying would it be to watch our favorite characters being tormented by the undead version of their friends. Sure we saw lady Mormant and Ed turn to wights . But no one was put in a position where they had to kill them. Lastly I think the crypt scene was ripe for horror, you had a bunch a defenseless people down there unaware of the danger they were in, and when the wights show up its just people running and screaming.

Perhaps my biggest gripe with this episode was the Night King and what his quick death means for the story. I hate that I still have no fucking idea what he was doing? In episode 2 Bran says he wants to erase the memory of the world in reference to killing Bran, and every accepts this like it makes sense. Does this mean Bran is a god, that if Bran dies the world ceases to exist, or does this literally mean that people will forget what happened in the past? Why does that matter? If the Night King is a Force of Nature, why have they been hinting at a mythology, why does he have a personality, why does he have intelligence? It just seems unsatisfying that the big bad just goes out like this.

I really enjoyed episode 2 and after watching all the previous battles a few weeks ago I was super hyped for this episode, but upon viewing I’d probably rank it as my least favorite battle episode. Though It’s still better than anything else on tv.

Keep up the good work guys.

Eric B

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