[Book Spoilers] where is the chain?

[sennahoj]

Maybe for budget reasons they link the Blackwater chain and Tyrion's chain of office into one and push the whole thing back to another season, so that Tyrion can kill Shae (and his father for good measure) with an impressive morningstar consisting of linked iron hands. Or Tyrion forces the Goldcloaks to strip and tie their chainmail together so they can use that to close the Blackwater.

[DirtyRobes]

Hey all, long time, first time, and so forth....

How about this: The chain is already there as an existing defense mechanism. Tyrion's having the chain forged is not the truly brilliant part; rather, it is his idea to use the chain to trap the fleet INSIDE the harbor so the wildfire can do its work. As Stannis' fleet approaches, Joffrey (would rather say Cersei, but everything on tv is Joffrey's idea so whatever) orders the chain raised to slow their attack, but Tyrion refuses the order. Joffrey brands Tyrion a traitor for this (still upset about the post-riot scene) and orders Ser Meryn to kill his uncle. By the time he gets to him, the wildfire/chain combo has decimated the fleet, but Meryn still tries to kill him, Pod saves the day, Tywin and the Tyrell host rout Stannis' remaining troops and receive all of the credit. Basically everything in the book storyline is set right by this change, but the chain sequence is a little less telegraphed. Thoughts?

Ok my only problem with this is then Stannis and his WHOLE fleet would have to know about it as well! IF it was already a part of KL's defense system then there is NO WAY Stannis would not know about it, having lead a lot of Roberts armys. Its very important that the chain is a New defense, while yes Tyrion did not invent the idea, he did spring it on Stannis' fleet combined with wildfire.

While I'd take this over No chain, we still have Davos leading the stupid headlong attack. Also if thats the case he doesn't notice those little towers off in the distance, a nice shot of their demise. There are soo many reasons the chain is important, not only to Tyrions character but to the whole events of the Blackwater. I dont except that there just wasnt time to insert a very short scene(thats all it needs) as obvious as Tyrion commissioning a blacksmith to make him metal rings or even another character saying the Blacksmiths are all backed up with orders from the Hand with the big reveal in ep 9.

I'm still hopefull... but less.

P.s. Welcome

Edited for Welcome

[Balefont]

Ok my only problem with this is then Stannis and his WHOLE fleet would have to know about it as well! IF it was already a part of KL's defense system then there is NO WAY Stannis would not know about it, having lead a lot of Roberts armys.

Yep.

[Impish]

What the audience needs to see is Tyrion's cleverness, that's what this season should've built up.

Very true, and I will certainly be disappointed if there is no mention of how long Tyrion has been working on the chain. I'm just saying they can easily cover this with a handful of lines during the actual battle. All it'd take is Bronn saying something like "and I thought you were crazy when you put all the blacksmiths on that weeks ago" or whatever.

Much more economical to do it that way, than devoting screen time showing its actual manufacture. Of course the downside is we lose the whole "what the heck is this chain for" mystery element from the books.. or rather, the mystery will be compressed into a few minutes, between Davos noticing the towers and the chain being raised.

I can't imagine them not having the chain at all... it MAKES the battle. And isn't GRRM himself scripting this episode? No way he'd cut one of the most (if not THE most) crucial elements of the battle.

[Lord Balbi]

I'm amazed nobody mentioned this so far but i'm sure I read somewhere that during Martin's visit to Portugal this month he said, for budget reasons, they would have to cut one "thing" from Blackwater. He didn't say what was that but I guess is pretty clear for me he is talking about the chain.

No one heard that? I will look for a link.

Edit: Here it is. Sorry, it's in portuguese:

http://www.gameofthronesbr.com/2012/05/george-r-r-martin-visita-portugal-parte_03.html

Roughly translating... Martin is asked what to expect of this battle in the series and in his answer he says "We need a lot of special effects for the "trebuchets" and the wildfire, and we also need boats and horses. Some of these elements needed to be eliminated, I won't say which".

Now that I re-read maybe he is only talking about horses..they are difficult to control.

[Davos55]

CoK is so focused in Tyrion that here in Brazil the book cover is him walking through alleys in King's Landing. Such an awesome cover. It depicts the aura of the book perfectly.

I am not gonna lie.. I really want that cover!! It sounds pretty epic, do you have a link to a picture of it by chance? I just haven't bought ACOK yet and would like to, and that cover sounds right up my alley.

[RoamingRonin]

They're probably going to put more emphasis on Tyrion's battle strategies during the actual battle. The chain could already exist in the bay, Tyrion could just suggest that they use it. We know he has access to the fire so he's probably already set up a plan for that...

[Lord Balbi]

I am not gonna lie.. I really want that cover!! It sounds pretty epic, do you have a link to a picture of it by chance? I just haven't bought ACOK yet and would like to, and that cover sounds right up my alley.

Well, Iam not the one who mentioned but here is brazil cover for CoK:

http://www.google.com/search?q=furia%20dos%20reis%20capa&rls=com.microsoft:*&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=pt-BR&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi

Edit: As far as I know all brazil covers were done by the same artist who created the french ones. They are all beautiful.

[Davos55]

Lord Balbi, thank you very much! That is an excellent cover. Very beautiful indeed.

[Eddard Sand]

So we have gone back and forth for awhile now with some decent discourse concerning the chain, and well truth is we will never really know till we see the episode so how about we switch to another question.

Will another of Tyrions brilliant maneuvers be displayed? Are we going to see the old derelict merchant cogs stuffed full of wildfire?

I'd love to see the ridiculously well endowed swordfish or whatever it is called slam into the cog causing the enormous emerald inferno that engulfs stannis' fleet. That chapter remains one of my favorites of all time. The helplessness of Davos and his sons was superbly depicted.

[Humphrey Plantagenet]

especially since it's tyrions main contribution. not having the chain would reduce his role in the battle to little more than a dwarf who got his nose cut off. also, i bet they don't cut off his nose. hopefully at least a significant scar though.

They must include the Chain. Tyrion won the battle of the blackwater twice. First with the chain and secondly with his courageous sortie once the hound snapped.

I completely agree. I didn’t like Tyrion getting knocked out and missing the Green Fork in series 1. It would be much worse if both his tactics & bravery are left out in this series.

[Humphrey Plantagenet]

So we have gone back and forth for awhile now with some decent discourse concerning the chain, and well truth is we will never really know till we see the episode so how about we switch to another question. Will another of Tyrions brilliant maneuvers be displayed? Are we going to see the old derelict merchant cogs stuffed full of wildfire? I'd love to see the ridiculously well endowed swordfish or whatever it is called slam into the cog causing the enormous emerald inferno that engulfs stannis' fleet. That chapter remains one of my favorites of all time. The helplessness of Davos and his sons was superbly depicted.

Battles haven't been shown yet, because the budget clearly doesn't stretch. Hence Robb's spent series 2 walking around fields and making eyes at a nurse. Maybe they've been saving their coin for this moment, but I have some nagging doubts about that. Things have generally been small in scale. 13 people and a dozen unsullied outside a gate = Dany sees Quarth for the first time. its all been indoors and gardens since. And Renly's "massive army" was a bit tiddly to be honest...if you take my meaning.

So I can't see the battle of the Blackwater being Helm's Deep tastic

[DirtyRobes]

Battles haven't been shown yet, because the budget clearly doesn't stretch. Hence Robb's spent series 2 walking around fields and making eyes at a nurse. Maybe they've been saving their coin for this moment, but I have some nagging doubts about that. Things have generally been small in scale. 13 people and a dozen unsullied outside a gate = Dany sees Quarth for the first time. its all been indoors and gardens since. And Renly's "massive army" was a bit tiddly to be honest...if you take my meaning.

So I can't see the battle of the Blackwater being Helm's Deep tastic

Very true, the whole season has had a real lack of action. Besides a few Short shots of dragons i'm not sure they've spent that much yet, so i'm really hoping the Battle of the Blackwater is really as Big as expected, it took Over a month to film!!! With ALL that money spent on one episode(D&D went back to HBO to get Extra $$ for this ep) We can Squeeze one little Gigantic Harbour Size Chain in, cant we?

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

On the show so far we haven't had a clear measure for the passing of time or for distances travelled, so the forging of the chain could be done very quickly on the show but still be ready in time.

I suppose, but they should've already had the scene with Tyrion and the blacksmiths. Seems to me they're just going to pass it over. :angry:

[Impish]

Still from "Blackwater" released!

http://www.accesshollywood.com/content/images/i/articles/64/64924/header_167799.jpg

Looks like Bronn is about to kick off the wildfire party! :D

Source: http://www.accesshol...d_article_64924

[spork]

Also, if you look closely it looks like something is stretched out across the water behind him...

[Impish]

Here's a larger version:

http://winteriscoming.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/blackwater.jpg

Is that... a chain on the rock face behind Bronn?? And/or possibly making a faint line in the water leading to the little gate??

[Impish]

A collection of quotes regarding Blackwater:

Last season, large-scale battles unfolded off-screen. Producers knew they couldn't pull off that [offscreen] trick with this year's Battle of Blackwater, a big rebel siege that begins on a river and spills over into the capital city. "We came to [HBO] on bended knee to plead for more money," says Mr. Benioff. The producers declined to discuss the scale and costs of the Blackwater sequence; inevitably it involved some concessions.

Source: http://online.wsj.co...2008018946.html

DBW: We decided that we really wanted to do the Battle of the Blackwater. We tried to really protect it, and set aside dollars and time. In the end we still had to beg HBO for more money, though.

DB: Luckily they were very generous.

DBW: But also we feel that grand spectacle is not really the feeling of the show. It’s more of a worms-eye, ground level view, with all the point of view characters.

Source: http://www.telegraph...id-Benioff.html

Taking a full month to shoot as opposed to a standard ‘Game of Thrones’ episode’s ten days, George R.R. Martin even penned the episode himself to ensure proper adaptation of such a challenging story.

In an interview with the Vancouver Sun, Martin says of the battle, which features two factions warring for control of the Westeros capital King’s Landing, “I’m on tenterhooks to see what sort of production values (were used) and how much they were able to capture on screen. The Battle of the Blackwater is a gigantic set piece in the book; it occupies 12 chapters, or something like that. It fills up the entire episode, and we had to cut certain elements of it, or it would have demanded a ‘Lord of the Rings’-style budget.”

Source: http://screencrush.c...tin-blackwater/

Benioff: As far as the Battle of Blackwater goes, there was a danger at the top of the season, when we were doing the budget, that we thought that we just wouldn't be able to do it. And that we might just have to have Cersei and Sansa holding fast in that sort of panic room in the Red Keep getting reports from the outside, from the front. Which was more or less the way Shakespeare handled battle scenes when he knew he could do anything on stage. And that's kind of a time-tested way of doing things. Whether it was Rome, or even I, Claudius. But at a certain point, that felt like a cheat. Because it was one thing to do it in Season 1 when we did it with the battle, but this whole season is kind of building to the Battle of Blackwater Bay. And for us to not show any of that felt like it would have been cheating viewers. At the same point, we knew we didn't have the time or the money to do a prolonged Peter Jackson-style or Ridley Scott-style battle, so it came down to trying to figure out what we could do to have real dramatic impact. And visual impact knowing our limitations. And there was a lot of stuff we couldn't do.

There's rarely a time that I wish we were making these as features because we would lose so much and we wouldn't get to spend nearly as much time with the characters. And there would be so much pressure to make everything PG-13. Tyrion couldn't curse. And there wouldn't be any nudity and the violence would be too toned down. But this is one of the few moments when you do wish you had, like, a month to go out and shoot the full battle. And take that time to do it exactly the way George wrote it. And we couldn't. So it became about making strategic decisions about what we could show and what was going to be amazing. And luckily we have incredible VFX teams.

Source: http://tv.ign.com/ar.../1221315p2.html

When you say that to me and you say that they were worried about the finance, and that it wouldn't be big enough, that kind of scares me because from what I saw I had never been on a set with such perfect attention to detail. [...] So they really, really decided to use every bit of finance they had available to them. I think it would be wrong for the fans to assume that they are not going to get the battle scenes that they want because what they have done has been fantastically well organized and perfectly, perfectly put together.

Source: http://ca.eonline.co...x_family/312254

So... I think it's clear we are definitely going to be getting an extensively realized visual representation of the battle, complete with "incredible VFX", they're definitely NOT going to cop out and just have characters describing it offscreen. They say they had to make some concessions (one of the above interviews says they were only able to build a single boat, presumably the rest will be CG), and that the action will be more "worm's eye" than sweeping vistas... but that's true to the book's POV format anyway.

[turdle]

Here's a larger version: http://winteriscoming.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/blackwater.jpg Is that... a chain on the rock face behind Bronn?? And/or possibly making a faint line in the water leading to the little gate??

yeah, i think you're right, i see what looks like could be a line going from that door/gate directly toward where bronn is. perhaps they'll justify the chain with a scene in this upcoming episode where cersei barges in on tyrion demanding to know why the black smiths aren't busy making swords and shields as she commanded them, and tyrion says he's been having them working on something else, or something like that, so it's established that this has been going on for a while.

[CrypticWeirwood]

They were alotted 2.5x the budget for "Blackwater", it will be epic.

Not quite sure how that works out. Are you saying they spent like, hm, $15 megabucks on a single one-hour television episode?

If so, I wonder whether that’s a new record... anybody got comparative data?

No wonder HBO is posting a special “The Making of Blackwater” short a weekish from now!