Dolorous Gabe

I find the love for S4 strange. I would describe it as the one that had the most even mix of good stuff and bad stuff, which makes it better than the subsequent seasons but not as good as the first three, although I can certainly understand the argument that it could be on a par with S2 as that wasn't far off having a near-even mix of good and bad stuff too. But S4's version of Bran's story was absolute shit with the skeletal wight attack, the fireballing "actual child" of the forest version of Leaf and the most underwhelming version of Bloodraven and his cave imaginable. It began the ruination of Jaime's character arc (which had been so strongly done in S3), the Arya/Hound story was poorly handled (although it had some good moments), Sansa at the Eyrie was a mess of utter pointlessness, Dany's story was entirely tedious in a simplified yet still badly rendered presentation of Slaver's Bay. Shoehorning Shae back into the book version didn't work because it was entirely at odds with the show version, then Tyrion's motivations during his escape became muddled and confused without the Tysha revelation (why would he flip at Tywin saying Shae is a "whore" when it is entirely accurate?). And finally of course, we were subjected to the trite inventions of Olly and Karl "fooking" Tanner. 1>3>2>4>6>5>8>7 I put S3 in second but that made terrible choices too, like showing Theon's torture which was basically a huge waste of time that would have been better spent on other things. We don't need to see that shit, the way we find him as he re-enters the story should be enough.

Nothing is done organically in this show. Everything is contrived. Dialogue is for exposition or telling the audience what we should think about characters, which is often at odds with the way they have been written or portrayed. Storytelling is about skipping the actual story elements for the sake of "shock and awe", at the expense of good build-up. Character arcs are all over the place, always malleable so the shock moments are as surprising as possible. It's sort of like how I imagine two penny dreadful writers would do trying to adapt War And Peace.

I didn't think I could love a man as much as I love Vincent Kompany! How in the fucking world did that go in? About 20 people around me shouted "don't shoot!"

What makes me laugh is the irony that the shot is actually relatively well lit for once.

So much this! Shows just how out their depth the writers are.

Absolute tripe!

I don't personally see these as being satisfying to the story.

The problem is that there is no way that one singular main adversary could be ultimately defeated in a way that is satisfying to the story.

It has become appallingly obvious that having the focal point of one "night king" as an adversary was always a terrible mistake, completely at odds with what the elemental threat from the land of always winter was supposed to be about. It's just another "king" looking to take control of Westeros, just in a different way.

"I guess it was worth it for the fuckin' visual, right?"

Thank you, this was wonderful A comment on the video made me laugh out loud: "the night is dark and full of terr... ible writing" "the episode is dark and full or errors" is also hilarious

Love it!

The DoP's work is finished once the shoot is over. He or she has no say in the editing process. If it is a style choice by the Ds then what is "arseholey" is letting the DoP take the heat without coming out and taking responsibility for it.

I agree because I think very little of what has happened in the show is indicative of the books.

There is a slight possibility that the DoP is carefully criticising the post-production process backhandedly here. They may have engineered that level of darkness in editing. The compression of the data in the footage is unlikely to be the cause but speaking as someone who has done lots of editing work I know film crew members who have complained about darkening in post-production: I know a guy who worked on The Libertine for example who told me the shoot wasn't anywhere near so dark as the edited product suggested. I'm tempted to think it may be a deliberate style choice from D&D. Wouldn't surprise me.