Game of Thrones is the most successful show in the history of HBO, rising from humble beginnings in 2011 to become the biggest TV drama on the planet. In 2019 the show wrapped after eight seasons and 73 episodes to deliver one of the most negatively-received final seasons in recent memory. Journalist James Hibberd, who was allowed on set of the show every year from the second season onwards, has written a behind-the-scenes account of the commissioning, writing and making of the show, referring to hundreds of interviews he undertook whilst the show was on air and more undertaken since. Among the people he's spoken to are George R.R. Martin, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, and vast numbers of the cast, from the smallest bit-part player to leading actors Kit Harington, Peter Dinklage and Emilia Clarke. This is the oft-contentious story of the making of the show that changed television.
TV companion books are a bit of a dying art these days, with the Internet and its plethora of fan blogs and wikis making them feel a bit redundant. Game of Thrones is so huge - and controversial - that it can overcome that problem and James Hibberd is well-placed to write such a companion volume given his access to the writers, the sets and the actors (via his work at Entertainment Weekly covering the show). He starts at the beginning, with George R.R. Martin starting writing the Song of Ice and Fire novel series in 1991, and proceeds through David Benioff and Dan Weiss picking up the books, wooing Martin to letting them and HBO have the rights, and their difficult struggle to get a pilot made, and the difficult process of admitting that they'd messed up the pilot and had to hope that HBO would give them a second chance. From there things proceed roughly chronologically until the end of the show.
The first thing that has to be noted is that this is not an "unauthorised" guide to the making of the show, but a HBO-approved product (complete with HBO-provided photographs). If you're expecting to find dirt and gossip, you're not going to find it here. Anything majorly contentious has been finely exercised from the text. Hibberd also doesn't add much in the way of authorial opinion, letting events stand for themselves and quoting other critics in determining if a plot twist or story turn was successful or not.
Despite this, the book's fact checking clearly left something to be desired. On the very first page of the book we're told that the Battle of the Bastards was filmed in October 2014; it was actually a year later (my friend, who was a weary extra on the set of Hardhome, noted that was when they were filming that battle). A few pages later we're told that George R.R. Martin started writing A Game of Thrones in 1993 but it was actually in 1991. A few other, similar errors crop up through the book and it does feel like a bit more attention to detail would not have gone amiss.
Once that hurdle is overcome, there is much to enjoy. Hibberd is a solid writer who knows how to handle and place quotes, and how to interview subjects, and to his credit he does avoid repeating a lot of stories and information that close watchers of the show have heard a thousand times already. Some of the familiar anecdotes do get trotted out yet again but there's a lot more information here that I hadn't ever heard before, such as director David Nutter almost dying in Iceland when his car crashed during a blizzard on a location scout and it if had rolled in a different direction, it would have plummeted off a sheer drop. Other stories are less dramatic but amusing: the weather in Iceland during Season 2 was so bad that scenes were often shot right outside the hotel the cast and crew were staying in, with constructive camera angles being used to hide that fact and actors having to perform in full view of all the guests in the dining room. During Season 1 they didn't have any security and David Benioff had to personally stand guard over Robert Baratheon's tent to stop curious bystanders from making off with props. And so forth.
These stories are amusing bits of trivia but somewhat inconsequential. Meatier are the controversies. The book doesn't shy away from many of these, spending a surprising amount of time debating the merits of Daenerys and Khal Drogo's relationship at the start of the show with the writers and actors, and the different ways they approached it in both the pilot and the reshoot with different actresses, and on the depiction of the Sansa-Ramsay-Theon relationship in Season 5. There's also a lot of open discussion about the weak Dorne storyline in Season 5 and how it didn't work and they had to scramble to try to fix it later on. Other controversies are completely ignored though, with a particularly criticised Cersei/Jaime scene in Season 4 getting no mention at all.
Even more interesting are the moments when people get a bit too honest. It's clear from the writing that some of the producers encouraged something of a "fratboy" relationship with other cast and crew, and sometimes pushed things too far, resulting in tense moments on set. The most honest and outspoken actor in the book is Liam Cunningham, who cuts through the normal Hollywood PR banter (which to be fair most of the cast try to avoid, but sometimes fall into it by rote) to deliver some real honesty on some of the conditions of shooting. His pointblank refusal to film some scenes because he felt they betrayed his character and made Davos less of a relatable figure is quite startling. He also stands up for Stephen Dillane, who played Stannis Baratheon and had made some dismissive comments of the show (Dillane didn't take part in the new interviews for the book), noting that Dillane always did good work, had a strong work ethic and a withering sense of humour that didn't always come across well in interviews.
The thing most people will be interested in is the reception to the finale. Benioff, Weiss and Martin don't really talk about it, but plenty of the actors, several HBO executives and Bryan Cogman do, and note how things may or may have not worked as well as they'd hoped. However, there is a bit of a disappointing PR answer that maybe the ending will be looked upon differently in another ten years.
Hibberd has certainly written an above-average TV companion book here, with plenty of interesting stories and funny moments of trivia, but it's one that also has some glaring holes. Ramin Djawadi's memorable score (the one thing almost uniformly praised about the series) goes almost completely unmentioned, the work of Elastic and Angus Wall on the memorable title sequence is also disregarded and the CG teams tasked with bringing the locations and creatures to life are also not quoted. It's good to see the writers and actors being self-deprecating and owning various problems and mistakes, but there's also a few moments when it feels like the book pulls its punches and doesn't delve deeper into behind the scenes issues. The book's real achievement may be in getting Benioff and Weiss to admit what many had suspected all along: they really wanted to be making movies all along, they always planned to prioritise big battles and effects over character and theme (Benioff's daft assertion that themes are only for eighth-grade book reports is mentioned several times) and that without Martin's books to rest on, they lost confidence in how to proceed and struggled more without source material.
Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon (***½) is readable and fun, packed with fresh anecdotes and interesting trivia about the making of Game of Thrones. In some areas it is insightful and revelatory, getting further into why certain baffling decisions were taken, but in others it leans back and goes out of its way to avoid criticism or controversy. It certainly doesn't trouble the quality of The Deep Space Nine Companion, which twenty years after release still represents the gold standard of a TV companion volume. But it's certainly worth reading if you're interesting in what happened behind the scenes on the biggest show of the decade. The book is available now in the UK and USA.
Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have announced their first project for Netflix: an adaptation of Chinese author Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy, better-known by the name of its first book, The Three-Body Problem.
The Game of Thrones showrunners bailed on their Star Wars movie project last year in favour of a development deal with Netflix, reportedly worth $200 million. Benioff and Weiss will produce and may write for the series, although day-to-day showrunning will reportedly by handled by Alexander Woo, who most recently helmed The Terror: Infamy.
The project has a number of producers and backers, including Breaking Bad, Star Wars and Knives Out director Rian Johnson and actress-producer Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl, The World's End, The Wheel of Time), who's been branching out into producing in recent years. It's unclear if Pike is considering acting in the series, although her schedule will be full of The Wheel of Time for Amazon for the next few years.
Liu Cixin and his English-language translator, Ken Liu, are also consultants and producers on the project. The Three-Body Problem (2006) is one of the biggest-selling Chinese language works of science fiction of all time and has picked up considerable critical acclaim since it was published in English in 2014. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015 and has won critical plaudits from Barack Obama, Kim Stanley Robinson and George R.R. Martin, amongst others. It tells the story of an alien world, Trisolaris, that is caught in a problematic orbit around three stars which periodically causes the total collapse of civilisation. The current Trisolarians have launched a series of massive colony ships towards Earth to help escape their predicament, leading to the prospect of interstellar war.
The Three-Body Problem was followed by The Dark Forest (2008) and Death's End (2010), as well as a sequel by another writer, The Redemption of Time (2011) by Li Jun.
In surprising news, former Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have parted ways from Lucasfilm after being announced as writing and possibly directing the next Star Wars movie after The Rise of Skywalker, due for release in 2022.
Benioff and Weiss signed with Lucasfilm and Disney eighteen months ago to develop a fresh Star Wars film series that would be set in a time and location far-removed from both the nine-part main "Skywalker Saga" and the stand-alone spin-offs. Director Rian Johnson is also developing a trilogy with an eye to setting up a new setting and cast of characters for the films. According to other reports, either setting may be a revamped version of the popular Knights of the Old Republic setting, with writer Laeta Kalogridis developing early concepts for the idea, including possible direct adaptations of the popular video games.
Benioff and Weiss's departure appears to be due to their massive $200 million development deal with Netflix for new TV series and projects. It is unclear what these new projects will be, or if the money was well-spent; Benioff and Weiss experienced a critical drubbing this week after an interview in which they seemed to suggest they didn't know what they were doing with Game of Thrones, ignored the primary themes of the novels and admitted they were more interested in adapting set-pieces and stand-out scenes than the story as a whole. Benioff and Weiss's former partners at HBO also seem to have distanced themselves from the producers, refusing to even bid with Netflix to retain their services, quietly dropping their Confederate TV pitch into a dumpster after the negative publicity it received and pivoting hard to supporting and working with George R.R. Martin on other projects.
The critical opprobrium and disdain may be overstated - Benioff and Weiss did bring the books to television and made it the most popular contemporary fantasy series in the world, as well as giving HBO it's biggest-ever TV hit - but it seems that the industry has certainly cooled towards the writing team who, just a couple of years ago, could do no wrong.
The news won't help the headaches over at Lucasfilm either, who have been experiencing a lengthy run of directors dropping out or even getting fired on Star Wars projects. They will now have to either accelerate plans for Rian Johnson's next Star Wars movie or they will have to find a new team to step into Benioff and Weiss's shoes to bring the next film to the screen.
So, the second half of Game of Thrones' final season. Those were very definitely three episodes of television.
Game of Thrones is a series that, at its best, was impeccably acted, beautifully atmospheric and boasting tremendous production value and a soundtrack to die for. At its worst, it was over-melodramatic, confused in theme, badly-written, lacking in direction and relied too much on CG and spectacle to overcome its weaknesses. A perennial problem with Thrones is that it could be both of these things in the same episode. This has been going on since at least the first season, which managed to cram two of the best scenes in the series - Cersei and Ned Stark's confrontation in the garden of the Red Keep, and the thwarting of Ned Stark's attempted "coup" - with one of the very worst - Littlefinger explaining his character motivation and objectives to two random prostitutes for absolutely no reason - into the same hour.
But as the show continued, the ratio of strong material to weak tilted more firmly towards the latter. It would be simplistic to say that the show was great whilst it followed George R.R. Martin's novels closely (as it did for the first four seasons) and awful when it moved away (in the latter four seasons), rather that the show suffered when it not longer had a clear direction. The producers' hesitancy in whether or not they were going to adapt storylines from the fourth and fifth novels in the series is a clear example of this, resulting in the dire mangling of both the Dorne and Iron Island storylines because of a failure to commit to them early on, as they instead half-heartedly nodded at them in Seasons 5 and 6 and then rapidly retreated from them, to the confusion of fans and actors alike. The show needed a firm plan for the final four seasons to map out character and story arcs, and its failure to do this (or to stick to any such plan if it existed) irrevocably weakened the lead-up to the finale.
The final two seasons of Game of Thrones have suffered from a related problem: rushing. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss chose to end Game of Thrones in just thirteen episodes in the final two seasons rather than the standard twenty. This part of the story is one that George R.R. Martin envisages taking (at least) two thousand-page novels totalling just under a million words; for comparison the first four seasons of the show covered about 2,300 pages totalling just over a million words. Even taking into account that the show has pulled out hundreds of characters and dozens of storylines, it was clear that this was going to be rushed. I just don't think anyone was expecting it to be this rushed. Some episodes in earlier seasons could be criticised for a slow pace and lack of story development as characters sat around talking to one another; but often those same episodes were praised for their dialogue, acting and for firmly establishing relationships and setting up important worldbuilding and story elements for later on. Game of Thrones was never as subtle in its storytelling and characterisation as HBO forebears such as The Sopranos, Deadwood and The Wire, but at its best it wasn't far off.
These final three episodes show the consequence of rushing your story and prioritising the plot resolution over characterisation. In this sense Game of Thrones makes the reverse mistake to Lost (another show with a problematic final season), which chose to focus on characters over plot and provided (mostly) satisfying character finales whilst providing only perfunctory story resolutions: after six seasons of setting up intricate mysteries, the show ended with...a fistfight on a clifftop and then the characters chilling out decades later in the afterlife? Game of Thrones goes in the opposite direction and provides all the big battles, last-minute betrayals and bittersweet moral dilemmas fans might have been hoping for, but to get there it has characters being either much stupider or much smarter than they usually are or going through torturous character development that really needs about two full seasons to unfold convincingly in about three scenes (or in Daenerys' case, mostly offscreen in the gap between the fourth and fifth episodes, which was a...bold choice).
Going into specifics, The Last of the Starks may not be the worst episode of the entire series, but it is cheerfully the dumbest, featuring a fleet of medieval-era ships equipped with advanced ground-to-air missile capabilities (including the ability to fire through or around solid matter) and cloaking devices. What should be a shocking and upsetting moment instead turns into a moment of outright, laugh-out-loud comedy, undoing the good work early on of a fun post-battle celebration scene.
The Bells, by contrast, may be the most visually impressive hour of television ever filmed. Both the CGI and the practical effects are overwhelmingly impressive, Ramin Djawadi's score elevates everything to the next level and Miguel Sapochnik's ground-level camera work as a city dies is frequently breathtaking. There are problems with logic (the high-tech AA wooden missile system from the previous episode is now apparently non-functional because reasons) and character, but the brute force of visual spectacle and atmosphere almost overwhelms it. This is television created through brute force shock and awe, with all subtlety and nuance pounded into rubble. It's undeniably impressive and, with better character work and build-up, it could have been one of the show's finest hours. Instead it has to settle for being an undeniably visceral experience that completely rewrites audience expectations for the level of production value television is capable of achieving.
The Iron Throne ends the series and has to satisfy eight years of audience expectations. How much it succeeds will vary tremendously by each viewer, but I found it to be a mixed bag. Some characters have note-perfect endings, others have reasonable endings but without a lot of good setup for them and others just end in an extremely random (verging on non sequitur, in the case of Bronn) place. It isn't the unmitigated disaster it's been described as in some places, but neither is it satisfying overall, nor hitting the bittersweet tone it's clearly aiming for. If anything, the ending for quite a few of the characters feels a bit too neat and happy, which is not something Game of Thrones should ever be accused of.
In the final analysis, these last three episodes again represent Game of Thrones at its very best and its very worst. Fantastic casting, acting, production value, effects, music and costumes let down by sloppy planning and extremely variable writing. But for better and worse, it is done and it has completely rewritten the rules of television as we know. The coming decade of television will be written and produced in Game of Thrones' shadow, and it will be interesting in an increasingly fragmented landscape if another show can come along and ever have the same kind of impact.
804: The Last of the Starks (*½)
805: The Bells (***½)
806: The Iron Throne (**½)
Disney have confirmed that the next Star Wars movie after J.J. Abrams' Rise of Skywalker will be written, directed and produced by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.
It was previously known that Benioff and Weiss had been contracted by Lucasfilm to produce a new Star Wars film "series," along with The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson who had his own full trilogy to make (although Johnson is only contracted to write and produce, and may direct one of the films). The news today from Disney and Lucasfilm confirms that Benioff and Weiss's first movie is up first, due for release in 2022.
The subject matter of the new films is unclear, although head of Lucasfilm Kathleen Kennedy has confirmed that both new film series will be unrelated to the Skywalker Saga (as the numbered episode films are now being called) and will be set in different parts of the Star Wars universe, in time, space or both. Some Star Wars fans have speculated that some or all of the new films will be set in the popular Knights of the Old Republic era, the setting for multiple video games and comics, but this remains speculation at the moment.
Great armies are gathering at Winterfell. The White Walkers have breached the Wall and are marching south, planning to wipe out humanity. The scene is set for a great confrontation, a war which will determine whether anyone lives to see another dawn.
Originally I'd planned to wait until the season was complete before reviewing the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, as with the past few seasons, but structurally the final season is panning out in a way that seemed more rewarding to review it as two halves. So here we go.
Way back in 2007, when it was confirmed that HBO was developing George R.R. Martin's fantasy book series A Song of Ice and Fire for television, they also almost immediately confirmed that the show would be called Game of Thrones. It made sense: Game of Thrones is a more concise, faster-to-say title that fits onto merchandise better and is more memorable. Many of the spin-off media from the books had used that title for years for much the same reason. Watching Season 8, it strikes me that the title change may also reflect a much more fundamental and philosophical shift in the focus of the story.
A Song of Ice and Fire is a title rooted in mysticism, prophecy and thematic conflict, the struggle between the ice of the Others (the books' analogue of the White Walkers) and the fire of the living, as championed by the dragons of House Targaryen. It suggests that the core struggles of the series will culminate in a confrontation between humanity and the Others, as personified by the Prince That Was Promised, the singer of the Song of Ice and Fire, who in the books may be Jon Snow or Daenerys Targaryen (or both). Game of Thrones, on the other hand, emphasises the Machiavellian realpolitik of the story, the ground-level struggle between differing political factions for a more mundane goal, control of the Iron Throne of Westeros.
Season 8 of Game of Thrones suggests that the producers had another reason beyond conciseness for changing the name. Season 8 breaks the remaining part of the story into two and addresses them separately, focusing in the first three episodes (surprisingly) on the struggle against the White Walkers at Winterfell and the latter three on who gets to claim the Iron Throne in King's Landing. This suggests that, in the view of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the final conflict is a mundane, human one, focusing again on the conflict between Stark and Lannister, which is where we came in during Season 1. It's not an invalid take, given the lack of the source material, but it feels like it's at variance with the thematic conflicts and ideas established in the books, where very much it is presented that the mundane political conflict is a dangerous distraction from the true threat gathering to the north (despite the Others' relative lack of screentime - or pagetime - in the books versus the TV show).
As such the first three episodes of Season 8 form more of a three-and-a-half hour movie. The first episode, written by Dave Hill (soon to be tackling a new fantasy TV show as a writer on Amazon's Wheel of Time series) sees the gathering of forces at Winterfell and both long-awaited reunions (particularly Jon with Arya, whom he hasn't seen since the second episode of the entire series). It's a fairly standard "catching everyone up" opening episode for a season, with some nice callbacks to the first episode of the entire series.
The second episode is set immediately before the arrival of the White Walkers and is penned by Bryan Cogman, the writer responsible for many of the show's finest episodes and moments. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a love letter to the characters, delving deeply into character moments and conversations between them on the eve of an apocalyptic final confrontation. It's also a huge nod to book-reading fans, referencing the legend of Ser Duncan the Tall (the star of Martin's spin-off series of novellas about a hedge knight wandering Westeros ninety years before the events of the main story) and his likely status as an ancestor of Brienne.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is in fact probably the best episode of the entire series since at least Season 4. It sets up character conflict down the line (such as Jon's claim to the Iron Throne, which clashes with Daenerys') but also explores interrelationships between characters. It's also quite funny, warm and human, which is something that Game of Thrones can sometimes neglect in favour of cynical backstabbing and death.
The slow build-up ("the deep breath before the plunge" as another fantasy figure said) explodes in The Long Night, an 80-minute episode revolving almost entirely around the battle for Winterfell and for the dawn. Humanity is on the line and the enemy has an overwhelmingly impressive force, but our heroes have some aces up their sleeve as well.
Unfortunately, what is supposed to be Game of Thrones' most climactic and thrilling battle is let down on a number of fronts. The first is that the episode feels like it hasn't been colour-corrected properly. It's hard to make out what's going on, even on a properly-calibrated television. Game of Thrones has done night battles before - at the Blackwater in Season 2 and at the Wall in Season 4 - and it's always done a great job of keeping things clear and visible even in bad light. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy did the same thing at Helm's Deep. But in this case the action is often muddled and hard to parse. Things are better when the action switches inside - Arya stalking a bunch of wights in Winterfell's library may one of the show's best moments in terms of tension and stealth - but most of the exterior scenes are blighted by poor visibility.
It also doesn't help that it's very much a "TV battle" with very little thought made to genuine medieval battle tactics, hence the bemusing scenes of a light cavalry force (complete with specialised horse archers, who aren't used at all) being sent to directly attack a much larger and stronger infantry formation head-on, followed by powerful siege weapons being mounted outside defensive fortifications and in front of an infantry formation (instead of behind it). The siege weapons fire off two or three salvos and are then immediately disregarded and destroyed. Game of Thrones has done very well in portraying tactics before (particularly in Blackwater and Watchers on the Wall, still the shows' highwater marks in terms of battle episodes), but it's also done incredibly poorly, such as in Battle of the Bastards, and this episode is definitely on the latter side of the scale.
At 80 minutes, with a battle lasting almost twice the length of Helm's Deep, the episode outstays its welcome, with the scenes of people killing wights getting boring much earlier than that. Continuity is a problem as well, as on multiple occasions we see groups of characters being completely surrounded by insane odds, but after a camera cut we see the group is now standing in more open ground fighting off a few wights, who are politely lining up before attacking. The "unstoppable horde" of the wights feels somewhat contrived as a result.
The battle ends in exactly the manner you expect (even if the people delivering the killer blows to crucial enemies are not who you expect) with a far lower casualty count than you'd expect from such a hard-fought engagement. We don't need to see a bloodbath with 75% of the cast wiped out or anything, but it does feel like our heroes got off easily and won a stunning victory at relatively little cost (at least in terms of characters the audience is invested in, the actual body count seems immense).
Still, this opening trilogy does leave some interesting questions for the latter half of the season. The battle for the Iron Throne should be incredibly one-sided, as Team Daenerys/Jon have two dragons and Cersei's side have none, which raises the question of what curveballs can be thrown by the writers to make this final struggle more interesting. We will find out soon enough.
801: Winterfell (***½)
802: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (*****)
803: The Long Night (**½)
Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy has confirmed that there will be a "long hiatus" for the Star Wars movie series after the release of Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker this December.
Exactly how long the hiatus will be is unclear, although Kennedy suggested it may be a "couple of years," which isn't a massive gap but it certainly seems to signify Lucasfilm retreating from their plan of producing between one and three Star Wars movies a year, echoing sister studio Marvel's approach to their superhero series.
It is known that Lucasfilm were actively considering multiple films to follow The Rise of Skywalker, including a side-trilogy to be directed by Rian Johnson (The Last Jedi), a side-series to be directed by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (Game of Thrones), possibly one or more films focusing on individual characters from the Episode VII-IX trilogy, and further "Star Wars Stories" focusing on characters like Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi, to be directed by James Mangold (Logan) and Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliott) respectively.
However, the surprising commercial failure of Solo: A Star Wars Movie (2018) has put development of all future movies on hold. How quickly the series resumes may depend on the box office performance of The Rise of Skywalker in December.
The official status of the previously announced movies is that Benioff and Weiss's series remains in active development, and they will move over to it full-time once Game of Thrones' final season finishes airing in May and they have completed all outstanding work with HBO (including any material they still have to shoot for the DVD and Blu-Ray box sets for the final season). Disney and Lucasfilm will then consult with them on the ideas they are developing before greenlighting anything, which puts any film from that quarter likely 3-5 years away.
The official status of Rian Johnson's trilogy is that it is still being developed, but after the all-encompassing task of making The Last Jedi he chose to take a break to work on a stand-alone thriller, Knives Out. Shooting on that has been completed and the film is due out later in 2019, after which Johnson will start developing the new trilogy in full. Again, that seems to put any new film from that quarter also out by several years.
The Boba Fett movie is officially toast. The failure of Solo seems to have left Lucasfilm dubious that a stand-alone movie about a far more low-profile character had any merit to it. Rumours suggest that some of the ideas from the film may have been translated to the new Star Wars TV series, The Mandalorian, although the title character is not Boba Fett but a new character to be played by Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones, Narcos).
The status of the Obi-Wan movie is murkier. Fans who were very derisory about both Solo and the Boba Fett project seem to be much keener to see Ewan McGregor return as Obi-Wan in a film set between Revenge of the Sith and the original Star Wars movie. However, Stephen Daldry is no longer involved. The latest rumours are that Lucasfilm are still strongly considering this project, but potentially as a mini-series for Disney+ instead.
This rumour also strengthens the idea that Lucasfilm are considering a strong pivot to television for the future of Star Wars, at least in the short term. Animated series Star Wars: Resistance is already airing on Disney XD and The Mandalorian, to debut on Disney+ in November, will be the franchise's first-ever live-action TV show. A further season of The Clone Wars, the CG animated show that was cancelled back in 2014, is also in production for Disney+. A mini-series focusing on the character of Cassian Andor and the events leading up to Rogue One is also in development.
There will be more Star Wars movies in the future, and probably not as far off as some may think, but it remains to be seen what form they will take.
The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones will begin airing on 14 April 2019, HBO have announced.
The final season of Game of Thrones consists of just six episodes, although these are all expected to be at least partially longer than the standard 50-odd minutes in length. Assuming no mid-season breaks, this means that the last-ever Game of Thrones episode will air on 19 May 2019.
The last season of Thrones will be written by Dave Hill (episode 1), Bryan Cogman (episode 2) and the team of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (episodes 3-6). It will be directed by David Nutter (episodes 1, 2 and 4) and Benioff & Weiss (episode 6), with Miguel Sapochnik handling the apparently "big" third and fifth episodes.
The season may mark the end of Game of Thrones, but not the franchise as a whole. HBO are already developing a spin-off prequel series, with the working title The Long Night, which has a pilot in pre-production.
Filming on the eighth and final season of Game of Thronesconcluded yesterday, according to fan site Watchers on the Wall.
This news marks the end of a journey that began on 24 October 2009, when HBO began shooting the show's pilot episode in Scotland. A crowd of mostly-unknown young actors and a few seasoned hands like Sean Bean and Mark Addy arrived at Doune Castle to begin work on a speculative pilot based on a series of (relatively) obscure fantasy novels. The script was promising and, of course, HBO's involvement intrigued everyone, but it still felt like a shot in the dark.
Twenty-six days later, shooting on the pilot was complete, following additional location shooting in Morocco (for the Pentos scenes) and set filming in Belfast, Northern Ireland (which became the show's primary production base). HBO was sent the completed pilot a few months later and, well, they didn't like it. Mortified, producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss sat down with HBO to go through the problems. Impressed by Benioff and Weiss's willingness to admit their mistakes and find workable solutions, HBO greenlit the show itself, with production on the rest of Season 1 resuming on 23 July 2010. The series debuted on 17 April 2011 with a heavily recut and partially-reshot version of the pilot, which immediately garnered a positive critical reception.
Even so, no-one could foretell that Game of Thrones would become an international sensation, the biggest drama show in the world for most of its duration. Everyone from Snoop Dogg to Prince William is a fan and the show has generated online discussion on a scale that's truly remarkable. It's also made stars of young actors including Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington, Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner, propelling them into the Star Wars and X-Men universes, among others. The size and scale of the production has also peaked with this last season, with each episode officially costing over $16 million on paper (but in practice the budget appears to have no upper limit on it, as long as it's justifiable) and the shooting schedule running the longest of the entire series, from October 2017 to July 2018. Officially there are just six episodes in the final season, but it appears these episodes have no cap to their run time, so they may run significantly longer than the hour each episode has (mostly) clocked in at previously.
George R.R. Martin has also seen his personal fame explode as a result of the show's success, which has blasted sales of the Song of Ice and Fire novels from 12 million (in 2011) to almost 90 million today, making it possibly the biggest-selling epic fantasy series since Tolkien* (the series now has approximate sales parity with the Wheel of Time sequence, but far more actual readers) and dramatically increasing fan hunger and demand for the sixth book in the series, The Winds of Winter, to fevered levels.
It's been a hell of a ride since the start of filming (which I was privileged to experience a little of, as related here, here and here) and we'll see how it ends next year. Although the actors and extras can now relax (barring possibly some dialogue looping and of course promotional duties), the directors, producers and VFX crews are still working full-tilt on post-production, visual effects and scoring to bring the episodes to life. Game of Thrones' final season is currently due to air in Spring 2019. It will be followed, a year or two further down the line, by a possible spin-off series from a different creative team.
* Assuming you don't count Harry Potter as an epic fantasy, as some people do.
As we heard last week, the Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have been tapped by Disney to write and possibly direct a new Star Wars movie series. Benioff and Weiss will start work on the films the second they finish up on the final season of Game of Thrones (which is shooting until the late summer, probably to air in February or April 2019).
This is a logical decision on several levels: Benioff and Weiss have delivered the biggest and most successful television show in HBO's history and the biggest drama show on the planet right now. They have made HBO an insane amount of money and (albeit helped by the simultaneous rise of Amazon TV and Netflix Originals) raised the bar for the scale and scope of television in a way that has completely redefined the medium, possibly forever. The impact of Game of Thrones on television may eventually be seen as being analogous to the impact the original Star Wars had on cinema back in 1977 in terms of scale, visual effects and cultural impact.
There are, however, two reasons to be cautious about this news.
Between 1977 and 2005, Lucasfilm released exactly six Star Wars movies, three cartoon series (none of which lasted more than a single season's worth of material) and three TV movies. They authorised a lot of other content - novels, video games, comics, board games and RPGs - but for the core Star Wars canon that was it. They released a six-season CG series after 2005 (which had an ill-advised movie spin-off), but generally speaking, the amount of core Star Wars content produced in the first 30 years of its existence was relatively modest for what was arguably the worlds biggest SFF franchise.
Since October 2014 - less than three and a half years ago! - we've had another three movies (The Force Awakens, Rogue One and The Last Jedi) and a four-season animated series (Rebels). Another movie (Solo) is due out in just three months. After that we've got one movie in pre-production (Episode IX) and at least six more in the formal planning stage beyond that (Rian Johnson's trilogy and the Benioff/Weiss project), plus one more "Star Wars Story" that's very likely to happen (the Obi-Wan movie) and two movies at the proposal stage (a Boba Fett movie and allegedly a Yoda one). Lucasfilm have also apparently put a further core Skywalker trilogy (Episode X-XII) into the earliest planning stages. In addition, Disney are planning "several" live-action Star Wars television series for their new streaming service. This new Star Wars canon has also been expanded by dozens of new novels and comic series, as well as several video games.
That's an awful lot of content to take on board. Disney are clearly putting Star Wars into the same bracket as their Marvel Cinematic Universe, a setting that can sustain multiple, high-grossing movies per year.
However, it's questionable if that is true. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is based on almost sixty years' worth of comic books, encompassing thousands of characters, hundreds of titles and thousands of storylines that can be mined for the cinema. The eighteen movies in the MCU to date really only consist of one major comics storyline (the Thanos/Infinity Stones arc) and a dozen or so smaller stories (such as Civil War, Planet Hulk and Age of Ultron). That's barely scraping the surface of the potential on offer in the Marvel universe, especially now that Marvel can tap the Fantastic Four/X-Men/Deadpool arm of the comics universe as well. In addition, Disney has been careful to vary both the tone and content of the MCU, slowly allowing writers and directors greater freedom to innovate and improvise as long as they remain within the confines of the greater roadmap of the universe.
Or to put it another way, the secret of the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been that it allows for much greater individual freedom per film (which is how we ended up with Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther, all with radically different sensibilities) whilst retaining to a tightly-orchestrated, over-arcing masterplan which will culminate in Infinity War II in 2019.
Star Wars hasn't really had that as yet. Each film has been tightly controlled and the merest sign of the director deviating from the perceived brand message has been met with swift firings (Colin Trevorrow, Phil Lord and Chris Miller) or the film being reshot and recut at the last minute (Rogue One). This is at the same time that it was confirmed that there was no over-arcing storyline in place for the new trilogy, meaning that nothing J.J. Abrams set up in The Force Awakens actually had any kind of solution in mind, allowing Rian Johnson to engage with that material or just ignore it in The Last Jedi.
Or, to put it another way, the Star Wars universe is allowing for much less greater individual freedom per film whilst not having any kind of tightly-orchestrated, over-arcing masterplan at all.
In addition, the Star Wars movie writers show little inclination to tap the wider Star Wars universe of novels, comics and games for ideas. Rebels cleverly used Ralph McQuarrie concept art and elements from the novels and video games (like Grand Admiral Thrawn and Imperial Interdictor Cruisers) to strengthen its storytelling, but the makers of the films seem to hold this other material in much greater disdain. There's a reason why Mike Stackpole and Aaron Allston's X-Wing novels are so highly regarded, why Matt Stover was picked by George Lucas to write about the corruption of Anakin Skywalker and why Knights of the Old Republic is not just the most beloved Star Wars video games of all time, but one of the best-rated Star Wars stories full stop of all time. Yet, unlike Marvel, there seems to be a lack of willingness to engage with this excellent material of proven, massive popularity.
I would argue that, until Lucasfilm can find a way of telling a much greater variety of stories in the Star Wars universe (and yes, that includes romances, comedies, hard boiled war stories, small and intimate stories as well as big ones), they're going to run into problems of repetition and getting stale much faster than the MCU has.
Are D&D a Good Fit for Star Wars?
On one level, this sounds like a dumb question. Benioff and Weiss took a (relatively) obscure fantasy book series and turned it into the biggest TV show on the world, bar none. They revived HBO's fortunes at a moment when it appeared to be flagging. They have brought more "watercooler moments" to the screen in the last seven years than any other TV show or film series. Disney tapping that ability for their films seems a no-brainer.
There are, however, some pretty big caveats to that. Game of Thrones is based on George R.R. Martin's novel series, A Song of Ice and Fire, and - at least up until the TV show overtook the books in Season 5 - was an unusually close and faithful adaptation. Most of the big, most memorable moments from the TV show, such as the Red Wedding, the Blackwater, Ned Stark's execution, Tyrion's trial, the battle at the Wall and so forth, are straight out of the novels. Even the battle at Hardhome is alluded to in the books, and director Miguel Sapochnik was primarily responsible for the staging. It's arguably not until the sept explosion in the Season 6 finale that Benioff and Weiss started creating their own major set-piece events for the series. Some of their set pieces have also been pretty risible (the Battle of the Bastards, although visually impressive, makes zero sense and is pretty badly-written).
So in that sense Benioff and Weiss's strongest moments came from adapting George R.R Martin's work and since they haven't had the books to draw on, the show has become much more uneven (Season 5 being pretty heavily panned up until Hardhome, for example) and has certainly suffered from more issues with dialogue, pacing, structure and characterisation.
There's also the fact that Benioff and Weiss have also shown a remarkable tone-deafness to the nuances of Martin's work - bizarrely claiming that Arya only sees Needle as a symbol of revenge rather than a remembrance of family and loyalty as her Stark identity is stripped away from her by the Faceless Men; or whitewashing Tyrion and stopping him from doing any of the more heinous things he does in the books because they don't want to damage the popularity of the character - and also to external factors. Their handling of sexual abuse and torture has been pretty heavily criticised (so has Martin's, to be fair) and they were criticised in Season 2 when it was revealed that they had been urging directors to put more nudity into scenes than even the script called for, to cater for the "pervs in the audience".
Their proposal for a TV series named Confederate also seemed extremely under-cooked and ill-thought-through (and if they wanted to do an alternative-history story in this vein, Harry Turtledove has a whole raft of much more interesting takes on the idea), and resulted in significant blowback on HBO which the network was not impressed by. Confederate has been quietly dropped as a proposed series and HBO's attitude to working with Benioff and Weiss again seems slightly cooler than it was previously. On the other hand, they have gone to some lengths to retain both George R.R. Martin's services and those of Bryan Cogman (the best-regarded other GoT scriptwriter) for the proposed Game of Thrones spin-off shows.
Or, to put it another way, as writers Benioff and Weiss have so far proven themselves to be better as adapters of other people's work than originating material on their own. When they have worked on their own, the results have been far more variable. This is proven by their track records: Benioff's solo work of note amounts to two middling novels (The 25th Hour and City of Thieves). His other film work has been adaptation of other people's work, such as Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, or Homer's mythological take on the Trojan War. Weiss's work is even less notable; before GoT he'd spent many years in development hell on Peter Jackson's Halo movie.
As producers however, Benioff and Weiss are on another level. Their work ethic and commitment to the job is undoubted. They delivered 10 hours of material every year for seven years straight, juggling multiple filming units in up to three countries for six months at once and navigating HBO's complex corporate politics. They knew when to roll over (rewriting and re-shooting the pilot) and when to stand their ground (getting the money they needed for the Battle of the Blackwater). They have also shown a frankly near-supernatural instinct when it comes to picking people to work with them. Their choices for directors have almost been wholly outstanding, their set and costume designers are the best in the business and the world owes them a huge vote of thanks alone for giving Ramin Djawadi the job as the show's composer. Their employment of David Petersen massively increased the profile of the global conlang (constructed languages) scene, and their decision to tap Nina Gold as casting director was an incredible stroke of good fortune, from which the show's unbeatable casting has flowed. And of course, it was their reading of the books in early 2006 and early commitment to working with both George R.R. Martin and HBO that got the show on the air in the first place.
It remains to be seen if Benioff and Weiss will do a good job on Star Wars, but on previous form I would be more intrigued by them acting as producers and facilitators on a Star Wars movie, or acting as writers if they were adapting someone else's work. Their form does not preclude them making a terrific Star Wars movie or three, but if I was Disney I'd perhaps be a bit cautious about giving them a free hand with a mega-budgeted movie without some more oversight and consideration of their ideas.
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David Benioff and Dan Weiss have signed up to produce a "new series" of Star Wars films. They will start work on the project as soon as work on the final season of Game of Thrones wraps later this year.
Disney have confirmed that the new movies will not be related to the core Skyalker saga (which will end with Star Wars: Episode IX in 2019), nor to Rian Johnson's in-development trilogy.
The news seemingly confirms that HBO's Confederate, an alternate-history story about the South winning the American Civil War which Benioff and Weiss had been tapped to helm immediately after Thrones, is now on indefinite hold.
This news also seemingly confirms that Disney are going to be aiming to release multiple Star Wars movies per year, like their Marvel franchise. Assuming the Benioff & Weiss movies will alternate with Johnson's, this means that the further Star Wars Story stand-alone movies (including an in-development movie focusing on Obi-Wan Kenobi between the first two trilogies) will now be sharing release years with these new trilogies.
HBO have confirmed that the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones will not air until 2019, confirming previous reports.
The final season of the show is the shortest, consisting of just six episodes, but these episodes are expected to all be notably longer than normal, so the amount of airtime may actually exceed that of the seventh season (which only had seven episodes). The final season has also had significant production requirements, including the need for winter filming in Iceland and epic-scaled scenes involving large numbers of extras and CGI. Shooting is not expected to wrap until early summer. It looks like HBO had been holding out hope for a late 2018 publication but they realised it would not be feasible given the extensive post-production requirements.
A date for transmission is not currently known, but given how HBO normally arrange their shows I would not bet against April 2019 being the date to look out for.
Season 8 of Game of Thrones has been written by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, Bryan Cogman and Dave Hill and directed by David Nutter, Miguel Sapochnik and David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (who will co-write and co-direct the series finale). HBO are currently developing several potential spin-off series ideas.
Although Thrones may not be back for a while, HBO will be airing the second season of their hit science fiction drama Westworld this spring, possibly starting in April.
When it comes to boosting tourism, hosting a major and popular TV show or movie series seems to be a reliable way of getting visitors to show up. New Zealand is still enjoying a tourism boost from the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. Northern Ireland has been getting in on the act for a few years now, promoting locations from Game of Thrones as destinations for visitors.
Tourism Ireland has now got a step further and commissioned an enormous tapestry which tells the complete story of Game of Thrones (so far). The tapestry is currently 77 metres (just over 250 feet, or over a third the height of the Wall!) in length and takes the story right up to the end of Season 7. It's on display in the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and I visited it this past weekend as part of the annual TitanCon convention for SFF fans in and around Northern Ireland.
Handily, you can also view every part of the tapestry in detail here.
The tapestry will be displayed at the Ulster Museum until next spring, when it will be moved to another location. It will also be updated and completed when Season 8 of the show airs. Photos and the website guide are helpful, but if at all practical I would recommend trying to see it in person. It's absolutely worth it.
Season 7 of Game of Thrones has attracted some criticism for being a bit...dumb, compared to previous seasons. Defenders have suggested that almost every criticism levelled against the show this year can be dismissed with an explanation, even if it is not explicitly given on the show. In the interests of fair play and cheap page hits, I'll attempt to do just this with the GAME OF THRONES SEASON 7 FACT CHECK.
1. Why didn't Cersei blowing up the Great Sept of Baelor in the Season 6 finale have a bigger impact in the Seven Kingdoms?
In the final episode of Season 6, Cersei Lannister overcame her enemies in King's Landing by tricking them into all gathering in one place - the Great Sept of Baelor - and then blowing it sky high with titanic amounts of wildfire. The High Septon, Ser Kevan Lannister, Ser Lancel Lannister, Lord Mace Tyrell, Queen Margaery Tyrell and Ser Loras Tyrell were all incinerated. King Tommen Lannister, distraught at the deaths of so many innocents (including his wife), killed himself shortly afterwards). In the aftermath Cersei crowned herself Queen of the Seven Kingdoms and took the Iron Throne for herself, despite having no real claim to it.
This is an easy decision to criticise: we know from Seasons 5 and 6 that the wanton slaughter of the War of the Five Kings has driven millions of Westerosi back into the worship of the Faith of the Seven. The new High Septon comes to power from being genuinely a man of peace, faith and vision (and also a fundamentalist martinet out to slaughter all enemies of the Faith, but still). Cersei blowing him and most of the Faith sky-high might be satisfying in the short term, but realistically it would enrage millions of followers of the Faith, lead to her being denounced as a monster and usurper by septons and septs up and down Westeros and would drive lots of lords from her cause. Because she also murders her uncle, cousin and daughter-by-marriage, she would also be dubbed a kinslayer, a horrendous curse in the Seven Kingdoms. We don't see any of this in the show.
However, Season 7 does suggest that Cersei's grip on power is very shaky (Jaime says as much several times). The Lannister army and the Westerlands remain Cersei's primary support and pretty much everyone else has already sided against her. The show doesn't have any reason to delve into the little people living in the Crownlands and Stormlands (the other regions more or less loyal to King's Landing at this point) so their viewpoint is unknown, and we don't know how many other people decamped from her side after the massacre. Season 7 does show other lords being wooed back to Cersei's side once the dust settles and she's still alive, so political expediency likely won over a lot of support lost in the Septocalypse.
"Now I'm king, let's go plane some wood! Bring me my lathe!"
2. How did Euron Greyjoy build a new fleet so fast?
Back in Season 6, Episode 5 (The Door), Euron Greyjoy wins the Kingsmoot to be crowned King of the Iron Islands, only to find that Yara and Theon have fled with most of the ironborn fleet. They wind up in Meereen and swear fealty to Daenerys. Euron pledges to build a new fleet, vowing to have a thousand ships to take into battle.
In Season 7, Episode 1 (Dragonstone) this fleet shows up at King's Landing to join forces with the Lannisters, to Cersei's delight and Jaime's disquiet, and is deployed in the very next episode to destroy most of Yara and Theon's forces.
With this one, I think we have to assume that, despite indications to the contrary, Yara and Theon only took a small portion of the total ironborn fleet to Meereen and Euron thus inherited an already-substantial force which he later augmented with a relatively small number of new ships - built or perhaps seized on the Summer Sea and in the Stepstones during the long journey around Westeros - rather than that he built hundreds upon hundreds of pretty large warships from scratch and sailed them thousands of miles right around the coast of Westeros in the space of a few months.
"How did you get here so fast?"
"We opened a warren."
"Isn't that a different fantasy series?"
"...maybe."
3. Why didn't Daenerys blockade Blackwater Bay?
At the end of Season 7, Episode 1, Daenerys lands on Dragonstone with a substantial force: 100,000+ Dothraki and their horses, thousands of Unsullied (originally 6,000 but many were lost in Meereen) and a fleet of at least 350 warships and transports, not to mention three huge dragons. Due to the need to carry both Dothraki and their horses, this fleet would need to actually be considerably larger, or used in ferrying operations (perhaps only some Dothraki went with Dany and the rest rode to Pentos and were ferried across the Narrow Sea in shifts).
Dragonstone sits at the mouth of Blackwater Bay, where it meets the Narrow Sea, and is highly defensible. The only way in or out of the Bay is the Gullet, a narrow stretch of water to the south of the island (the channel to the north, between the islands of Dragonstone and Driftmark and the mainland of Crackclaw Point, is apparently too rocky and too narrow for large fleets to traverse). In the novels, the Gullet is about sixty miles wide; however, due to the fact that TV Westeros is significantly smaller than Book Westeros, the TV version of the channel must be significantly smaller and thus easier to blockade.
However, in Season 7, Episode 2 (Stormborn) Euron's fleet is able to leave Blackwater Bay and pursue and destroy Yara and Theon's fleet as it sails down the coast to pick up the Dornish army. It would seem to be strategic folly for Daenerys to leave Blackwater Bay unguarded; even if Dany's fleet is half or less the size of Euron's armada, it should be still be possible to deploy her dragons and sink the fleet. The only assumption I can make here is the Daenerys did not bother to scout King's Landing and didn't know that Euron's fleet was present, and most or all of Dany's military fleet was sent to Dorne and the ships that were left behind were not sufficient to challenge Euron. Dany may also have chosen not to deploy the dragons and risk them in battle at this time.
To be honest, none of this really washes. Dany has enough competent military advisors to know that scouting King's Landing to learn the disposition of Cersei's forces (particularly her navy; it's worth remembering, unlike in the books, the Royal Fleet has not been destroyed or stolen in the TV series) is essential, and the geography makes impossible for even a small detachment of Euron's fleet to simply sneak past Dragonstone without anyone noticing.
"Good thing the Tyrells don't have the biggest army in Westeros or anything!" *fistbump*
4. The battles of Casterly Rock and Highgarden don't make sense.
They don't, and this plot point really can't be salvaged. Nevertheless, we'll make an attempt.
In the case of the attack on Casterly Rock, the Unsullied sail from Dragonstone to the Westerlands, disembark and besiege the castle. Grey Worm leads an infiltration of the fortress, opens the gates and the Unsullied take the castle with relative ease: the Lannisters have abandoned the fortress. Euron's fleet then closes the trap on the Unsullied and destroys their fleet, blockading them by sea.
This plan has a lot of holes, most notably allowing your enemy to gain control of an impregnable, well-stocked fortress on the mainland. A great house losing their stronghold is also always seen as a titanic display of weakness: Robb losing Winterfell to the Greyjoys in Season 2 is enough to spark his decision to return home in Season 3 and we know how that turned out.
We can assume that Grey Worm and his fleet left Dragonstone before the ironborn/Dornish armada. This explains why Euron simply didn't destroy them at sea, they were too far behind and didn't catch up until the Unsullied had already taken Casterly Rock. We can also assume that the Lannister plan to turn and besiege Casterly Rock didn't happen; given that the Unsullied army is back at King's Landing in the Season 7 finale, it's likely the Unsullied sortied ASAP and headed north and east through the Riverlands (where no effective resistance is left) before circling back down towards the capital, preventing the Lannisters (too far to the south at Highgarden) from intercepting them.
Unfortunately, whilst the Casterly Rock campaign can be (sort of, if you squint a bit) salvaged, Highgarden cannot with some major logic leaps.
We know from Season 2 (and not even touching the books, with their much more detailed military numbers) that King Renly Baratheon commanded an army of over one hundred thousand troops, most of them from the Reach. Ser Loras Tyrell is noted as an incredibly impressive warrior (even if we never see any evidence of it on the show) and Lord Randyll Tarly, a Tyrell loyalist, is noted as an impressive battlefield commander. The immense power of House Tyrell later on, with the Queen of Thorns and Margaery Tyrell able to use the threat of House Tyrell withdrawing its support for the Lannisters to force concessions even from Tywin Lannister, is reiterated quite a few times.
But in Season 7, Episode 3 (The Queen's Justice), the considerably smaller (and battle-worn) Lannister army routs the Tyrell host and seizes Highgarden. The only nod to the Tyrell's previously-established military superiority is Jaime saying that the Tyrells aren't great fighters, which feels a bit unconvincing. The Lannister host was originally 60,000 strong (in Season 1, Episode 7). Half of this army routs at the Whispering Wood. Another Lannister host is raised, but this is destroyed at Oxcross in Season 2, Episode 4 (Garden of Bones). This leaves the main Lannister army (the one Tywin commands from Harrenhal in Season 2 and, allied to the Tyrells, saves King's Landing at the Blackwater) at only 30,000 in strength. We can assume that Jaime eventually rallies some of the survivors of the other armies and increases this in number, but at best the Lannister army is half the size of the Tyrell one.
There are several equalising factors. The most notable is when Lord Tarly and several other Reach lords betray Highgarden for Cersei. This would both reduce the Tyrell strength and increase the Lannister's. We can also assume that some other lords would stand aside and not take the field rather than choose sides. This could reduce the Tyrell strength significantly, although still not enough to result in a massacre rather than a pitched battle which would reduce the Lannister strength quite considerably even in victory. The speed of the Lannister advance and their decision to strip Casterly Rock bare to support the attack may make a surprise attack plausible, but whichever way you cut it, this is a massive stretch of credibility.
5. How did Daenerys's army take Jaime's by surprise?
At the end of Season 7, Episode 4 (The Spoils of War), the Targaryen army, backed up by dragonfire, catches the Lannister-Tarly host strung out along the Blackwater and utterly destroys it in a spectacular display of Daenerys's power. However, some have questioned if it is plausible that Dany's forces could arrive undetected. In the medieval period it was very rare for armies to catch one another by surprise: large armies moved very slowly and single outriders and scouts could easily stumble across an enemy force and retreat to give warning of their approach.
This point is debatable. First of all, we need to locate the battlefield. We know it's on the Blackwater and we know that leading elements of the convoy have already reached King's Landing. Jaime wants the rear of the convoy through the gates before nightfall, so assuming that scene is near dawn (which makes sense, the convoy is breaking camp and getting ready to move) King's Landing is probably no more than thirty miles away.
Dany's ground force in this battle is exclusively made up of Dothraki, a fast-moving cavalry army. Although this army would move very quickly compared to one made of footsoldiers, it would still be slower than individual scouts and outriders. It is possible that Jaime did not send out scouts, or if he did he kept these oriented to the south, fearing an attack by Tyrell loyalists. However, given Jaime's superior generalmanship, this seems unlikely. More possible is that the Lannister scouts were spotted and killed by the Dothraki (or dragons) before giving warning.
More problematic is how the Dothrkai landed on the mainland unimpeded. We'll assume that not all 100,000+ Dothraki were sent and a much smaller force landed, one that could be sailed across Blackwater Bay and landed south of the Blackwater Rush in one go, quite quickly. The southern banks of the Blackwater are heavily forested, which is not ideal cavalry country, but we can assume that over the course of a few days the Dothraki were able to land, cut their way through the woods and then circle around to attack the Lannister force in the nick of time before it escaped. This does all suggest that the entire ironborn fleet went west with Euron and the royal fleet remains AWOL, leaving King's Landing and the approaching sealanes completely defenceless, which is a bit weird, but okay.
6. Operation Wightcatcher: like, how?
The sixth episode of GoT's seventh season features the Westerosi All-Star Rumble Squad (Jon Snow, Tormund Giantsbane, Jorah Mormont, Thoros of Myr, Beric Dondarrion, Sandor Clegane, Gendry Boatrower and a conveniently vague number of extras) being formed to capture a wight and use it to convince Cersei Lannister to agree to a truce so everyone in the Seven Kingdoms can team up against the Night King and his army of White Walkers. We'll gloss over the fact that whoever came up with this plan was clearly tripping balls and focus on how the operation unfolds.
Our heroes set out from Eastwatch-by-the-Sea and head north for a vague distance, but clearly hours/many miles. As they head north, they engage in #bants and learn more about each other as people, whilst fighting off a zombie polar bear (potentially some kind of Lost reference, I don't know). Eventually, they capture a wight and are then attacked by the entire goddamned Army of Darkness. Gendry runs off to the Wall to get help.
At this point logic checks out and some very weird things happen. Gendry runs back to the Wall, apparently in just a few hours, and sends off an emergency raven from Eastwatch to Dragonstone. Daenerys heeds the call and rockets north with her dragons to supply a dramatic rescue. During all of this, our heroes are stuck on a frozen lake surrounded by extras from The Walking Dead.
Subquestion 1: How far can ravens fly in one day?
The answer seems to be that no-one really knows. However, the greatest distance covered in one day by a racing pigeon appears to be 750 miles, from Lulea to Malmo in Sweden, and 720 miles, from Nantes in France to Fraserburgh in Scotland, both done in about fourteen hours. That puts their speed at approximately 50-55mph.
Dragonstone is approximately 1,500 miles south of Eastwatch in a straight line using the book maps, but recalling that TV Westeros is smaller than Book Westeros, we can assume that it's certainly less than 1,400 miles. Ergo, a raven from Eastwatch could plausibly reach Dragonstone in two days (possibly less if there is a relay system with the raven resting at another castle along the way and a maester relaying the message to a fresh raven).
Subquestion 2: How far can dragons fly in one day?
Assuming Daenerys sorties immediately, how fast could her dragons get back to the scene of the action? Obviously dragons don't exist, so this is a bit more open to argument, and of course that argument ends only one way: they fly at the speed of plot.
More satisfyingly, we know from A Dance with Dragons that Drogon can traverse half the width of Meereen in a few seconds and Meereen is one of the largest cities in the ASoIaF world. More specifically, in The Rogue Prince it is said that Syrax and Caraxes could fly the distance from Dragonstone to King's Landing - about 400 miles in a straight line in the books so less in the TV show - and back again in less than a day. That suggests that the dragons can at least match the ravens/racing pigeons in velocity.
Given a dragon's much greater strength, wingspan and the fact that they are inherently magical (because to really exist a dragon would need a wing/body ratio far out of keeping with most depictions of the creatures), it is not unreasonable to suggest that they are twice as fast as a pigeon, which would indicate that the dragons could reach the site of the battle in as little as one day after leaving Dragonstone.
Thus, the total time that Team Snow spent on the island would be around three days. This is not completely implausible and is also backed up by the need for the lake to refreeze: at minus 20 degrees, it takes approximately three days to form ten inches of ice, which is what will be needed to support the weight of individual wights crossing the ice.
Ergo, and maybe surprisingly, this one is actually pretty plausible.
7. Is it plausible that the Night King could kill Viserion?
Only if the Night King is Superman.
Although let's back that up a bit. The Night King throws an ice spear which punctures Viserion's throat mid-fireblast and causes him to partially explode before plummeting out of the sky and crashing through the ice to his icy death.
I had some satisfaction from predicting very early in my time on Westeros.org (a dozen years ago now) that the only thing that could pose a threat to Dany's dragons was an AA missile launcher. I just wasn't quite expecting this theory to turn out to be so accurate.
The Ringer called in Olympic javelin thrower Kara Winger to analyse the Night King's form. Her analysis was that the Night King did not put sufficient force into the throw for it to be convincing on its own merits, or to put it another way, despite some good aiming technique the Night King basically hurled the ice javelin a bit off-handedly. The javelin travelled easily more than 100 metres (the world record javelin throw is 103 metres, achieved by Uwe Hohn at the 1984 Olympics) and was still going fast enough and with enough force to kill Viserion. Even given that Viserion was flying at high speed towards the javelin (so the dragon's own velocity played a role in the blow being fatal), this was a hugely impressive feat.
To put it another way, the Night King is basically Superman. The White Walkers seem to have superior strength to normal humans anyway, and the Night King seems to be an order of magnitude above that. If the Night King ever gets into a swordfight with someone (which is entirely possible), he'd probably be able to split them in half with a flick of his wrist. I wouldn't even put Gregor up against him.
8. Where the hell did the wights get those chains from and why did they carry them hundreds of miles?
This is actually a more involved question, leading into both why the White Walkers took forever to get from Hardhome to Eastwatch (a trivially tiny distance compared to the distances traversed by everyone else this season alone) and what the Night King's original plan was to get through the Wall, given that the book-maguffin that everyone expects the to bring the Wall down (the Horn of Joramun) effectively does not exist in the TV show.
In order for this all to make sense we need to rewind. The Night King seems to be preternaturally aware of supernatural stuff going on in the world. He knows when Bran is spying on him and can disperse his ravens as well as "marking him" through their shared visions. This may be a result of the obsidian sword being plunged into him near a heart tree, and may have given him some of Bran's powers. As such, it is not implausible that the Night King has sensed the return of the dragons and knows they are (relatively) close by on Dragonstone. He also knows that dragons are magical creatures and may be able to overcome the Wall's own magical defences. Those defences seem to prevent both the White Walkers and wights from climbing, passing through, under or over the Wall (although they can be carried through and reanimate on the other side), so he needs some more firepower.
So if his plan is to bag a dragon, he knows he'll need chains. Hardhome, being a port with ships tying up, likely has a ready supply of chains so he makes sure his minions grab those (he might have been thinking to restrain a dragon rather than having to get it out of a frozen ice lake, but he can adapt his plans on the fly, which is why he's king). Then it's just a question of waiting for Jon to return and try something which he can use to lure the dragons in, kill one and turn it.
It's a bit of a stretch (cough), because it requires the Night King (whom we don't have much solid info on in terms of abilities) to have some pretty advanced magical knowledge, but it's not impossible.
Subquestion 1: Why kill Viserion and not Drogon?
It's possible that if the Night King killed Drogon - and thus Daenerys - the other two dragons would go psycho and burn the Night King before he can get a second ice spear ready. Bringing down Viserion and making Team Dany flee therefore makes more tactical sense. The Night King is playing the long game here and the most important thing for him is securing a Wall-destroying weapon, not wiping everyone out at this point. Plenty of time for that later.
Convinced? No, me neither. Still, you can kind of make a half-hearted nod at there being an explanation, which also encompasses why the White Walkers didn't make a beeline for Eastwatch straight from Hardhome.
Why don't the White Walkers advance straight on the Wall after securing Viserion, since weeks must elapse whilst Jon and Daenerys are visiting King's Landing, planning on Dragonstone and heading back to Winterfell? Er, pass.
Feels like another line is...missing.
9. Why does Daenerys think she's infertile?
Because of Mirri Maz Duur's prophecy, that she is effectively infertile and cannot bear a living child until the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, the mountains blow in the wind like leaves and the sea dries up etc.
Look at this scene from Season 1:
Wait, where's the line?
Oh, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss edited the line out because...reasons. Okay, we'll assume that Mirri Maz Duur told Daenerys she was infertile off-camera. Or something.
Erm.
10. Can you really get to Winterfell from King's Landing in two weeks?
No. The show firmly established that it's a one-month ride from King's Landing to Winterfell (and more like two months in the books) in the very first episode of the entire series. The Dothraki might be able to shave a few days off that since they are so rad, but halving the time is implausible. It would require them to do almost 100 miles a day, every day, through winter weather, continuously for two weeks and the Dothraki are not particularly equipped for long winter rides.
The wording of the scene is a little anomalous; it might be that they were intending to land the Dothraki further up the coast, so they'd have a bit less to ride than the full distance from King's Landing, before the boats return to pick up Dany and Jon.
11. Do a million people live in King's Landing?
In the books the population of King's Landing, when it's swollen with refugees and soldiers during the events of A Storm of Swords, is said to be half a million. Logically, during peacetime, the population would probably be more like 350,000 to 400,000. That's still on the high side for a medieval city, but hey, it's fantasy.
Crucially, the line giving the population of King's Landing in the books is missing from the show, so the population being a million is, with the internal consistency of the show, not impossible. It seems a bit ludicrous, especially given how small the city appears (a hold-over from them filming in Dubrovnik, Croatia, and basing the city on Dubrovnik's Old Town, which is very small indeed), but perhaps the official population of the city includes some surrounding farms, towns and villages and Tyrion is rounding up a fair bit.
12. Do more people live in King's Landing than the North?
No. Robb Stark took 20,000 men south when he went to fight the Lannisters, and Jon and Sansa have managed to raise about another 6-10,000 men for their conflicts. Given the vagaries of medieval supply and army size, an army of around 30,000 would require a minimum supporting population of about three million (in the medieval period the ratio of soldiers to the rest of the population was about 1-99). Ergo, the North cannot have a population as small as one million. It should be noted that the North, even given the smaller size of Show Westeros, would still swallow three million people scattered across its area and still be quite sparsely populated.
So there you have it, some of the issues with Season 7 aren't really problems, others are hand-waveable and others actually really are just nonsense. Let's now look forwards to Season 8 when we can do this all over again.
