I'd been waiting for a scene where I could go "Wow okay, they nailed that part from the book" for a few episodes. This was the one.

Last edited by Saniss (2014-05-12 19:44:46)

FUCK i just spit my drink everywhere. I did not see that coming.

….and literally ALL the book readers have known for a while what the literal last SHOT of this season would be…..

….and you will shit.

The fight scene was some of the most poorly-directed material on the show to date. Oberyn's whole style is elegant and graceful, so why is the camera cutting every two seconds to random angles and obscuring the choreography? Lame.

Oh right.

Fifth. Fuck you Peter Dinklage, making me care about the godsdamned beetles.

But no seriously, holy shit that scene was awesome.

Sixth. Jamie's face during the entire fight was so entertaining.

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2014-06-03 00:43:08)

I just watched the fight again. And while that might be the case for some of it, there are clearly a lot of takes where Pedro Pascal can clearly do the move, but the camera still cuts about 5 times in the middle.

Look at his entrance. I actually counted, cause I was curious. For his opening series of spins, there are 15 cuts in 12 seconds. That's more than a cut a second. I'll grant you it's possible that Pedro Pascal couldn't do that entire series himself, but look at the shots, there are only 2 or 3 where we can clearly see his face, the rest are wide to very wide shots. So unless there was some SERIOUS issues with the stuntman they're using there shouldn't be any excuse for having to cut that wildly, even cutting the number of cuts in half. There's also a lot of unnecessary cuts in the middle of moves, where even if it is a stuntman it doesn't matter because we couldn't tell on either side of the cut, it's just a cut to seem stylish but totally breaks the flow of the move. There's also some cuts that are very clearly Pedro doing it, just after The Mountain says "some dead man" and swings, Oberyn does a swing over his head to block, and that single move has 3 cuts, and in all of them we can very clearly see his face, and the move itself is only maybe a second or 2 long. So it's not like Pedro couldn't do that move in one take. (Unless this fight scene has some wicked face replacement and deserves a cinefx edition all to itself).

Actually the more I'm rewatching this, it just feels like the creators didn't trust the tension of the fight and the stakes to be enough, so they needed to just put the audience on edge with the editing, make it feel faster than it is.

I really want to see an unedited version of this fight, even just cutting the number of cuts down by half I think would be a marked improvement.

I saw it as a really existential conversation, actually. Given all his intellect, Tyrion couldn't figure out why his cousin was smashing those beetles. And given all his intellect, there's nothing he can do about his current predicament. What's going to happen is going to happen, even though it's not fair and it makes no sense, and there's nothing he can do about it. It reflects the scene from episode 7 where Arya and The Hound come across that dying man, and they talk about death in very similar terms. I'll have to go back and find the exact quotes.

This too. I've seen a ton of cool interpretations. It's a really layered monologue, some of the show's finest writing to date.

There will be many many frustrated people if GRRM gets kicked by a mule...

Yup. It complicates your feeling about how it ends. Even if you love the character, you love Tyrion, and you know that Oberyn had a valid cause, you have to admit that it was his own hubris that got him killed. That's a running theme in the show, but it's never been more apparent than here.

That definitely adds to the impact, the fact that he is just destroyed in seconds. Comparing them as scenes the red wedding is horrifying more for it being the destruction of the stark cause(and maybe by extension hope overall for any kind of clean ending to the story) whereas the fight is just horrifying in a base physical sense. Obviously both scenes have some overlap in existential and physical horror but this is pretty much how I'd separate them. I was sad at the end of both episodes but only one made me want to throw up.