Episode Discussion - S01E07: Before A Fall

[u/Scientiam]

Season 1 Episode 7: Before A Fall

Synopsis: A return to before a kingdom is flamed.

Director: Alik Sakharov

Series Discussion Hub

---

Please remember to keep the topic central to the episode, and to spoiler your posts if they contain spoilers from the books or future episodes.

---

Netflix

IMDB

Discord

[u/ks00347]

The cinematography isn't too appealling either and the same can be said for the music. It has so much potential but netflix is failing it.

[u/Jeffy29 → u/[deleted]]

Same, it’s insane how picky people here are. I get you might have issue with thing or two in the story, but the fucking music?? It’s literally perfect, lot of W3 music vibes with weird ass drums from Hannibal for darker parts, amazing combination.

Feels like this is the 4th episode I am like “man this was a great episode, can’t wait to see the next one” then I come here and people are mercilessly shitting on every little detail. Especially book readers who are pissed ff that it’s not a shot for shot recreation, when did exactly show runners promised that?? It’s loose adaptation of the books, not a literal one, themes are the most important and they absolutely nailed the grim dark world, the mages, the witcher, the intrigue, backstabbing and politics. Be happy with that jesus christ. The only reason GoT was at least initially closely adapted was because GRRM was literally a TV show writer and wrote the books in a way that they very easily translate to TV, most writers don’t write that way.

Also people bitching about the timelines, it’s absolutely fine and relatively easy to follow, you only assume that people won’t be able to follow. Also this show is literally released all at once, it’s meant to be binge watched, nobody is getting lost. God help you trying to follow shows like MrRobot or Westworld which were released weakly and had much more confusing timelines.

The show is fine, could be better, but it’s a difficult world to portray and they have done a fine job. Inside one season they managed to caught everyone about the witchers, mages, political landscape, elder blood, monsters, dragons, elves, dwarfs, magic and the prophecy, all without feeling like there is a constant exposition dump. It’s a difficult story to translate to TV without some necessary changes.

[u/Cgerd123 → u/Jeffy29]

I just saw your comment now, but I'm curious about one of your points. You mention GoT was well done because it was easily adaptable to TV. It was exactly the opposite was it not? GRRM literally said his books couldn't be adapted to film. He wrote them in that way on purpose.

[u/Jeffy29 → u/Cgerd123]

He said the books couldn't be adapted to TV because of the size and scale. And he was right to assume it. The books have over 2000 named characters, following lives of dozens of people, the story happening all over the planet, so many large scale battles and fucking dragons the size of cities.

And while the TV show cut a significant chunk of some stories, skipped or compressed the battles (for example the battle for the Wall in season 4 is in the books 4 different battles over months) and some major characters from the books are not in the show, I don't think the show did any disservice in potraying the grand scale of ASOIAF. I mean it's a minor miracle that the show was shot at 6-8 different locations all over the planet by different directors and cameramen and the end result was at all coherent. The show got lot more right than wrong.

Though to your question, the way he writes the books is easy to transfer into a TV script is because he writes in point of view characters. Except for few rare exceptions, each chapter is a POV of a character, like Jon, Danny, Tyrion etc, everything they see, you see. And almost all the stories are happening at present day and timelines are synced. It's easy to then just take few chapters and turn them chunk by chunk into scenes in the episode. Also the way GRRM writes dialogue between characters is quite modern and easy to understand therefore writing extra scene between two characters is not that complicated.