boojam

I need to give some praise to the New York Times. Unlike the printed page and Mike Hale's (kinda ok season review) there is the electronic Arts Beat Blog by Jeremy Egner. Every week I think. Egner gives a detailed episode run down , it's kinda hip-breezy, Jeremy seems really interested in the show , seems to be a book reader, all in all positive. So the Grey Lady can kind of send mixed messages. :read: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/game-of-thrones-season-5-premiere-recap/?_r=0

Well I blew that! Didn't notice I was looking at the whole series. Well polls can be a hard thing to judge since only have those motivated to vote which only samples those. I find polls interesting but put more stock in the critics ratings. I know you don't like the name Rotten Tomatoes I don't either, but they got a 100/100 over there out of 26 critics 'poll'. What I like about that , and you do it too, is that give an analysis and rational for their rating. (Others on this thread do that to but are only a subset of voters.) I can't say all critics are perceptive , Mike Hale at the NY Times is at least fair to the show, but almost seem grudgingly enthused about his evaluations.(The New York Times has been funny in the head about the show and I can only think it's editorial policy of the Entertainment department.) Metacritic gives a 'meta score' of 91/100 for 29 critics. Both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have some kind of scoring criteria which they don't explain. Still if one has the patience to read the critical essays they do lay out their rational with analysis, and I really appreciate that. One of my favorite critical analyses is by Myles McNutt http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/game-thrones-experts-wars-come-217875 now over at A.V. Club, very comprehensive. Of course maybe the best poll is those who still vote with their pocket books (thankfully that still a majority). Supposedly this year HBO will give even better average gross per episode (maybe even the non USA data too).

For this episode : Over on IMDB the weighted average vote is 9.5 / 10. As always they don't publish what 'weighted' means, but at least they try to compensate for any biases or hanky panky. The sample size is 749262 that's very large.

Apparently the 'many' don't make much of dent in the ~20 million (in the USA) who do, any explanation of that? My wife does not watch not because of dialog or characters, she likes the production values and the characters and even the story. She just can't take such a big story fragmented into so many pieces in 10 hrs of time. I guess that takes a willing-suspension-of-narrative-satisfaction to like the show. Seems a lot of people go with that.

How do you know they are rating it and not just trolling it? (I like Big Bang Theory.)

As usual I give the show 3 points for the acting, 3 points for production design and musical score, 2 points for cinematography* and general visual design and final editing , 1 point for directing and 1 point for adaptation. Adaptation is a subjective thing , since I am a book reader, so it's just vibs , after two viewings I give a 10. I would subtract a point for adaptation if I could figure out how to improve the problem of pounding 1000 pounds of prose narrative into a 5 pound visual narrative bag of ~ one hour. This is a problem I have seen no one present a solution for, given the constraint that there ,seems set in stone, only 10 episodes per season. I have not been able to do better than Dave, Dan and Bryan on this score. Not that I think it could not be done. *There is some yahoo who thinks the cinematography is bad, tho gives no reasons, so don't know what to say since that critic gave no evaluation or rational.

Where does the 'Targaryen loyalist' association come from? That is more in the books than the show. Varys and Illyrio may have associates in the books GRRM has not reveled yet. Yeah George is inconsistent about what Viserys was REALLY going to do, and in all practicality the Dothraki would not have gotten onto ships , at least not 50,000 of them with horse! I can see Varys becoming fond of Westeros , and that seems to be the way GRRM has it, but why Illyrio? Still that's in the book too, at least implied. Why did the Lannisters want Robert dead? He seemed to favor Cersei's issue to the point of thinking they were his , or he didn't care. So the realm was well enough off under Robert and even Joffrey was in a better situation as an heir than a monarch! My way of thinking is only one entity wanted really wanted Robert gone the Iron Bank. If he didn't work get another who would. I don't think the IB anticipated everything would go to hell. Maybe they did and really wanted a Trag back, did they have better experience with them? Varys and Illyrio may really be in the employ of the Iron Bank!

One thing, finally, an episode where we know Natalie Dormer was actually in Croatia season 5. Even tho we knew that.

We don' really know if Pate is Jaqen, but then we don't really know who Jaqen is! Anyway we will never see Pate again, even if that was him the first time.

We never really know 'who' the Kindly Man is, for matter Jaqen, is that the real Jaqen's name day face? As far as the books go the Kindly Man could be Jaqen! I know when TW was hired back before season 2 D&D told him he was to be Arya's 'teacher' , not much of that went on season 2, so not surprising Tom was brought back, seems that was the idea all along but they did not tell Wlaschiha , I guess? (With one year contracts I don't know how they expect the actors to plan long term.) The bit is one of those quirky surprises D&D like, but then they have surprised me by not always picking those. I am surprised sometime by how much story they do get into a short amount of time so the best parts of Arya's five chapters may be in season 6.

Arya's story in Feast and Dance was most entertaining to me. We shall see. There is the Waif too, know she is cast , and the actress, a peculiar character in the book but a FM (faceless person?) Arya has almost as much interaction with her as with the KM. It seems a modified 'Mercy' story will be towards the end of the season, I wonder about Arya's training in the Braavos docks goes, which was in two parts in the books. Will they even have it? It's only five chapters across two novels and can be compactified ... most of Arya's Braavos story does not need much rejiggering but where it lands in episode 10 may spoil Winds. I also wonder will Arya's language training be done? Will we see he FM 'council'?

After an unexplained mystery-ness we know that Tom Wlaschiha is back, but won't be called Jaqen or Kindly Man. Kindly Man never called himself 'Kindly Man' in the books.

HBO Go, Inside the Episode. Cersei's 'prophecy' included because Cersei has a big story this season. Sigh ... my least favorite story from Feast and Crows.

From previews for next week, uhh..., are the CGI-VFX complete? The House of Black and White does not seem to be in Braavos! Sitting the suburbs? What's the deal?

Illyrio Mopatis mentioned but absence unexplained, did I miss a line of dialog? Would have liked to have seen Roger Allam , for continuity, even if he only stood around.

The Cliff Notes history reminder gives us Lancel but no Kevan. Sort of expected a longer 'gouge' flash reminder for unsullied covering seasons 1 - 4. So, opening credits , the Eyrie, a stand in for the Vale... .... well ...still, what the hell happened to the Eyrie season 4? The Dreadfort because it's mentioned in dialog ... OK, so what happened to the Eyrie in season 4?!

Even knowing she was not in episode 1 , still surprises me , considering the ending of episode 10 last year of season 4, there was no segue to Arya , even if it was only seconds long. It may have been mentioned , I must have read two dozen reviews of Ep1, but don't remember mention of Ian Gelder being in it. I knew we knew he was there but I remember a lot of speculation about where was Kevan , or that he was not going even be in season 5.

I guess Cogman said , in story conference, "You know it's been five years and only Drogon got a name." A beat... "O gosh!"

Just why does Stannis need the Wildings for Winterfell? He seemed to have a VERY LARGE army of mounted men in season 4. By the by where the hell are about 5000 horse quartered anyway, what do they eat? That army camped outside Castle Black? Well that was never exactly explained in Dance either!

Not the first time we have seen un-helmed Unsullied , don't think any from season 4 where there. First time an Unsullied had a spoken line besides Grey Worm?

Glad to see it was more like her first visit in Dance , where they acted up but didn't attack her, still scared her. Reviews made it sound like they did more than that.

I am still getting this weird page load on my PC, my IPAD and Mac Air. A page reload usually clears it but it sure is persistent.

Everything went with season 5 filming, they are in post production now.

It must be hard for HBO , I know they spent 100 million (part of that BBC and others money) on 12 episodes of ROME ... but got bitten so bad the BBC dropped out and season 2 was shortened to 10. Of course HBO did get a surprise from DVD sales but I don't know how one can anticipate that. So risking 60 million on that first season was chancy for HBO... still they structured things such that if the show went bust ... well 10 episodes was not too bad a write off. Now its Catch 22, contracts are written, all production planning is framed around 10, and it would be a big knot to cut from a biz stand point, if the show climbs again I can see Time Warner with enough gold in their chests to restructure ... but probably not going to happen. Dave and Dan complain they are over their heads with 10 episodes but I would like to hear what Bruno Heller has to say about that , he and his 6 producers were ready to forge ahead with 4 seasons (and maybe 5) of 12 episodes... but even the movie extension of ROME never happened. Still, I think I have said this 5 or 6 times, why does an episode have to be , generally , packed into ~60 min. ? Might have to add more resources (and more money) to do 10 , say 70 or even 80 min. episodes, but seems plausible to me. Dave and Dan would need more help, but are they against that? HBO really have a fixed time slot for the show and re-runs? ... When HBO shows 90 min. to 3 hours movies in irregular time slots?

FYI Wrapping up ratings from elsewhere. Episode 10 IMDb 9519 votes weighted average vote of 9.7 / 10 Episode content seemed to have some influence on the voting, Episode 2 had ~16,000 votes, Ep.7 ~ 11,000 votes, Ep 8 ~ 14,000, Ep 0 ~ 10,000 Rest of the episodes ~ 6,000 ... Not sure why since for a week counting all HBO airings and On Demand , I guess DVR viewings, HBO hit a record of 18.4 million for the season. Note: As far as I can tell these are all USA figures , compiled by Nielsen. As to say Canada (it's it on simultaneously?), or the UK (we used to get UK numbers, but I can't find them anymore), ... the rest of the world... we never seem to find ... except for Time Warner qualitative yearly report , but that will just be words like "Time-Warner's HBO big profit last year". Rotten Tomatoes 100 By RT subjective judgment 36 out of 36 critics liked it. Many of these reviews are just summaries , sometimes interspersed with a thumbs down or up about a certain sequence. James Hibberd at ET seems , among these to give most lengthy summery with some analysis.(Hubbard seems to be a real fan of both the books and the show, and has the press connections to deliver interesting news items during a season, heck during the year.) As always I recommend the episode overview and analysis on this web site, plus the reviews by Myles McNutt , for this episode he had two essays , well worth a read. We don't ,I guess, have a overall season rating thread, but here are some of the others elsewhere. IMDb Seasons 1,2,3 and 4: 598914 users voted a weighted average of 9.5 / 10. (I can't find an IMDb season by season score.) Rotten Tomatoes ... season 4 ... critics average 98 , from 47 critics. At RT 1664 'users' gave a 98 for season 4 (not sure where or if there individual 'user' ratings of episodes.) At Metacritic there was a weighted average score of 94, 29 critics , but their summary of critics seems even more subjective than RT, they do have a 'user' score 838 Ratings gave it a 9.2. So Season 4 critics and viewer (users?) all put it in above 90 at these 'media' sites. Those who voted with their pocket books broke HBO's previous record for a series , so HBO-wise has their votes! (I am not going to speak about the pirating...) Have to see what next year brings, HBO may have topped-out , if not, that will be a first for HBO. Observation: The New York Times again started the season with a mostly 'down' review by Mike Hale , as he did for seasons 2 and 3. Yet there were 10 episode reviews by Jeremy Egner , all a bit breezy but positive , but that's a NYT blog and not a printed feature, I don't think the NYT does a review of episodes of any show in print form. Dave Itzkoff of the NYT and who I know is genre friendly gets in a handful of feature articles every season but no reviews, I wish they would let him do the season write ups. O... and one more thing. Besides George mentioning it, read enough reviews to find several instances of frustration about the 10 episode HBO limit..