“The only thing that could tear down the House of the Dragon was itself.”
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Roll up, roll up, for the Big Autumn Battle of the Fantasy Epics! In the blue corner, Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, reportedly the most expensive TV show ever made! And in the red corner, it’s HBO’s younger upstart, House of the Dragon, a prequel to their ratings juggernaut Game of Thrones!
Continue reading “House of the Dragon: season 1, episode 1 – The Heirs of the Dragon”“Love is the death of duty.”
“Sometimes duty is the death of love.”
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So. After 8 years and 73 episodes, the biggest TV show of the last decade has finally come to a conclusion. It’s fair to say that, even with the last couple of years admittedly reducing and simplifying the show’s multifarious convoluted plotlines, tying up every loose end satisfactorily was always going to be a tall order. Expectations for a series finale have rarely been higher – and harder to meet.
Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 8, Episode 6 – The Iron Throne”“Men decide where power resides, whether they want to or not.”
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Dracarys indeed. Lots of it. If Missandei’s final word was an instruction, this week saw it obeyed to the letter, and gave Game of Thrones fans the spectacle they’d always wanted from the final battle for King’s Landing.
Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 8, Episode 5 – The Bells”“I’m here to free the world from tyrants. That is my destiny. And I will serve it no matter the cost.”
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After all the storming excitement of last week’s episode, I think Game of Thrones showrunners Benioff and Weiss thought we needed a bit of a breather before moving on to the remaining battles for Westeros. So this week we got The Last of the Starks, a satisfying but curiously schizoid episode which came across as nothing so much as two individual eps glued together.
Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 8, Episode 4 – The Last of the Starks”“The Night King is coming.”
“The dead are already here.”
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Been waiting for a battle? Well, this week’s Game of Thrones should have satisfied, delivering the show’s longest ever ep, and it was pretty much all battle, all the time, from beginning to end. Exciting though that sounds, it does run the risk of being pretty one note; even carnage gets dull after an hour or so.
Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 8, Episode 3 – The Long Night”“Do you want me to apologise? I won’t. We were at war. Everything I did, I did for my house and my family. I’d do it all again.”
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If you’re chafing for the first of this last season’s Big Battles, you may well have been disappointed this week. For the second week in a row, we were stuck at Winterfell as yet more characters came together in readiness for the Impending Doom of the White Walkers attack.
Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 8, Episode 2 – A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”“We don’t have time for all this. The Night King has your dragon. He’s one of them now.. The Wall has fallen. The dead move south.”
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So, I’ve been quiet on the blog of late, I know. The CELTA course was so intensive that I spent all my time writing lessons and assignments, teaching and planning. As I’ve moved into the real world of doing this for money, I’m still spending all my creativity putting lessons together, rather than writing here.
But more about my life in Barcelona will follow! For now, though, Game of Thrones is back for its very last season. I’ve been blogging every episode since season two, so teaching work aside, I’m going to see it through to the end 🙂
Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 8, Episode 1 – Winterfell”“This isn’t about living in harmony. It’s just about living.”
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This truncated season of Game of Thrones has often seemed to move at a breakneck pace, sacrificing the nuance and complexity of earlier seasons in favour of tying up the multiplicity of plotlines as fast as possible. This has led to a lot of tick-box exercises in plotting, as with last week; it’s also led to a lot of artistic licence to keep things rattling along, particularly in terms of distances. Many people have been pondering how, last week, Gendry ran all the way back to Winterfell, a raven was dispatched to Dragonstone, reached it, and Dany’s rescue party arrived in what could only have been a few hours. Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 7, Episode 7 – The Dragon and the Wolf”
“We’re soldiers. We have to know what we’re fighting for. I’m not fighting so some man or woman I barely know can sit on a throne of swords.”
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Obviously this season’s tightly focused showpiece, this week’s Game of Thrones took us into classic war movie territory as we followed the Men on a Mission in their suicidal quest beyond the wall to capture a wight. The Dirty Dozen, perhaps, or more likely Snow’s Seven. Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 7, Episode 6 – Beyond the Wall”
“So we fight and die, or we submit and die? I know my choice.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
For a wonder, we got through this week’s Game of Thrones without a single epic battle. To be fair, it looked like everyone was still pretty shellshocked from last week’s dragon holocaust! Jaime Lannister, in particular, looked like the crestfallen Nazi generals in Downfall, who’ve realised there’s no way to win but can’t seem to communicate this to the oblivious Fuhrer (ie Cersei). Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 7, Episode 5 – Eastwatch”
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