[No Spoilers] Episode 107 Discussion

[Ran]

Spoiler free discussion here.

[Zorral]

The best episode yet. Lots of good dragon content. Too bad we hate Aemond.  Surely, if Baela gone there first -- but you know, grieving dead mom and all she was careless -- the entirety of Westros would have been happier, and so would be Vhagar, I, for one, am certain.

All built out from the previous ones.  Already I don't notice the actors for Rhaenyra and Alicent changed last ep., just gotten older. I prefer their older selves, who are also more interesting, to their younger incarntion.  Still, those awful wiggy-wigs!

But again, a primary reason for this episode’s quality is it's away from that overwhelmingly depressive rat-infested miserable dreary dark dull King's Landing!  It always improves when we're out of King's Landing.

Liking the consistency throughout so far: Daemon's mere appearance among the extended family  ensures chaotic violence.  Always.

Last episode, dear Laena burned.  This time it’s -- Laenor – burned, but evidently for different reasons.  And … what about his dragon? What happens with Sea Smoke? They did do their best to avoid the fridge for the queer character ... I guess?

Which allows those who are Rhaenyra sympathetic (as far as that goes) to stay that way, in contrast to that quite horrid Alicent, who is getting more horrid by the year.  Whether it is her fault, per se, or her father's, all the way, plus hanging out with the nasty boyz, Criston and Larys, she just hates Rhaenryra.  Worst of all, she demands the mutilation of a child as weregild for her own kid's eye loss. That's very bad. Then she attacks the Heir with Valyrian steel and cuts pretty damned deep. Shouldn't she be put away in a luxurious cell forever for that?

Since she did this with all eyes upon her, rather than arranging for a poisoning or burning, or other form of Rhaenyra’s murder, she seems to have developed a strain of madness – unchecked bitter bile and malice do that to a person.  Don’t know whether this is a heritable trait from her family, but daughter Helena seems to have something non-normie going on, but that could more than likely come from the Targaryan side of her parents.

The consummation of Rhaenyra and Daemon's attraction is the sweetest lovemaking we've ever been given in this universe.  And Daemon's able to perform this time, why?  Because it's a consummation of equals?  But then we never figured out how he could do it with Laena when he couldn't with Myseria, or Rhaenyra before. 

Does appear King V won’t be around for much longer,as his previous episode perkiness has departed, along with much of what remained of his already sparse hair.

Edited October 3, 2022 by Zorral

[Zorral]

A lot of viewers are saying things like this:

Why Did Last Night’s House of the Dragon Look So Bad?

https://www.vulture.com/article/why-house-of-the-dragon-episode-7-driftmark-was-so-dark.html#_ga=2.34773602.235361398.1664826791-1497948549.1664826791

Quote

 

.... I’m explaining this to you because chances are good that even if you watched this episode yourself — even if you sat in front of a large television in a darkened room, carefully avoiding your phone screen and closing the blinds to cut out any street glare — it’s likely you could not see a single, solitary thing happening on the screen.

I first watched this episode via a screener sent to journalists and found myself baffled by what appeared onscreen. I assumed it was an unfinished color-correction issue, which does happen frequently in episodes sent before release. For roughly 18 minutes of the hour-long episode, I couldn’t see a goddamned thing. Surely, I thought, surely that could not be on purpose? Surely it was some kind of error?

So on Sunday night, I fired up the episode again to double-check, first via the HBO Max app on a large TV in my office that’s about six years old. It was utterly unintelligible. In some scenes, I could see the outline of characters but nothing about their facial expressions or performances; in others, I could tell based on sound that someone was moving across the landscape, but I had no information about who or where or why.

Then I watched on a browser on my sizable year-old iMac, on which I took these screenshots:

[screen shots are blank black.  woo!]

Next, I looked on my older laptop, which was perhaps marginally better but not by much. Finally, the next morning, I went down to our massive, fancy year-old OLED TV that has been calibrated by my husband (who is the type of person who reads Reddit posts about calibrating TVs). Lo and behold, a revelation: I could kind of see the characters! I could almost see colors in their clothing! When Aemond snuck up to that dang dragon, I could actually see his body moving occasionally! Everything still looked odd and oversaturated, as though the scene had been processed by an Instagram filter designed to give everyone gray-green skin tones, but I could follow the action. (Spoiler: Still incest.)

Based on promotional images, what’s happened here is a day-for-night shoot gone horribly, horribly wrong. Much of the episode was shot in broad daylight, as is obvious in the very first House of the Dragon promotional photo: [Cannot post photo]

The trouble is that it obviously looked like jack shit on many, many viewers’ home screens. It was frustrating enough that HBO’s Twitter Help account came up with careful wording for how to respond to some of the complaints.

[ explanation from HBO twitter which says this blankness is intentional screenshotted into the article]

But that explanation is already self-defeating — is it a TV-calibration problem, or is the blackness an intentional creative choice? And if it is a calibration problem, or a TV technology issue, it’s very difficult to nail down what combination of specific brightness setting and viewing platform would’ve been ideal. My OLED TV seemed to be okay, but I’ve seen tweets from other viewers insisting their OLED was awful. Some laptop users seem to have been fine; others were deeply frustrated. Compression rates only add to that confusion: If you watched via an app, it’s likely the episode was encoded differently than if you watched over a cable setup, and who knows whether a Roku has different settings for how to display true blacks than an Apple TV?

It does not ultimately matter. If your TV series is not visible to most viewers under most common viewing arrangements, something has gone seriously awry. If it’s so bad that your streaming service has to come up with specific language for how to address the complaints on social media, even after you’ve already made an entire episode of this franchise that was roundly criticized for being unwatchable, something is very obviously amiss. ....

 

 

[Darzin]

I seem to be the only person in the world whose TV displayed this in a visible fashion so lucky me I guess.

A very good episode. Dragons, murders and characters living their lives with the choices they've wrought. Rhaenyra having her dutiful husband murdered shows that Alicent is not the only one who time and duty have soured a little. And Alicent projecting her bitterness and unhappiness onto Rhaenyra is a very human failing even as she runs to the actual cause of her misery her father. As the daughter of a second son Alicent's marriage was not terribly important and her father could have easily let her choose the heir to a minor house or landed knighthood or the second son of a great house, that would have been appropriate in Westeros but it was his ambition that saddled her with the king and all for a son who is not the heir and a bit of a prick. 

I do wonder if Rhaenyra will regret murdering her dear husband, he might have drank a bit but he was a fighter and stable. Daemon while hot, heterosexual, and claim-boosting, might prove to be a mercurial ally and lover can he get it up next time? that's the stuff we really come for. 

[BlackLightning]

14 hours ago, Darzin said:

I seem to be the only person in the world whose TV displayed this in a visible fashion so lucky me I guess.

A very good episode. Dragons, murders and characters living their lives with the choices they've wrought. Rhaenyra having her dutiful husband murdered shows that Alicent is not the only one who time and duty have soured a little. And Alicent projecting her bitterness and unhappiness onto Rhaenyra is a very human failing even as she runs to the actual cause of her misery her father. As the daughter of a second son Alicent's marriage was not terribly important and her father could have easily let her choose the heir to a minor house or landed knighthood or the second son of a great house, that would have been appropriate in Westeros but it was his ambition that saddled her with the king and all for a son who is not the heir and a bit of a prick. 

I do wonder if Rhaenyra will regret murdering her dear husband, he might have drank a bit but he was a fighter and stable. Daemon while hot, heterosexual, and claim-boosting, might prove to be a mercurial ally and lover can he get it up next time? that's the stuff we really come for. 

Laenor is not dead.

Qarl, Rhaenyra and Daemon faked his death (and Laenor agreed with it) so as to get him out of the way. Yes, because Rhaenyra wants Laenor to be happy and safe...but also because Laenor, frankly, is a bit of a liability. Laenor is a good man and an accomplished warrior, but he is not cut out for the political minefield that his wife has to navigate.

Edited October 8, 2022 by BlackLightning

[Zorral]

On 10/7/2022 at 7:23 AM, Darzin said:

I seem to be the only person in the world whose TV displayed this in a visible fashion so lucky me I guess.

I could see it too, though clearly it should have been lighter and detail sharper.  But I watched it on my big computer monitor not a tv.

Rhaenyra didn't murder Laenor. They made a deal that made him happy.  He lives.  He escaped with his lover.

[Darzin]

8 hours ago, Zorral said:

Rhaenyra didn't murder Laenor. They made a deal that made him happy.  He lives.  He escaped with his lover.

I'm definitely going to rewatch this before this week's episode because I totally missed it was a fake death, well fake for Laenor anyway they still had a body.