Rough Drafts versus Final Copy

Three episodes into the current season of Game of Thrones, my opinion of the show has solidified: this is the rough draft of the story George R.R. Martin will hopefully finish.
It's a very promising rough draft. I like the basic outline of the plots the show pushes beyond the cliff-hangers of "Dance of Dragons," the last version of the book we know about in completion. The characterizations make sense and the action moves along at a good clip. We're seeing mysteries solved, inevitable developments and a few genuine surprises. The fights have all been been better than anything in the Watergardens.

But I can't shake the feeling something's missing...

This is not me giving up on the show. Far from it. The second episode, "Home," gave plenty of great GoT moments and, after surviving last years slog, I think I'm in for the long haul.

But think back to the high moments of the show. The truly surprising, shocking, and amazing moments: The Red and Purple Weddings, Daenyrs saying "Naejot memēbātās!" and even last season's "Hardhome." There was depth in those moments. The audience could enjoy the scene on a myriad of levels. The Purple Wedding, to pick just one example, was the end of a hated villain, a major shift for half a dozen main characters, and an amusing exercise in 'whodunit.'

Compare that to one of the high moments from the current season - the final witnessing of the Tower of Joy fight from last Sunday's "Oathbreaker." After years of speculation about what happened in the battle and how Ned survived the fight and whether or not the fight even happened, what we were left with is a well-staged but fairly straight-forward sword duel.

I was left underwhelmed. Not disappointed exactly but personally certain that when this scene finally appears in Martin's prose, it will be better and resonate more deeply than anything this show can put on air. Maybe the way the fight goes down is exactly how Martin envisioned it but I just don't think so.

Also, this:

Comments

Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted. O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation. Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl...

Ancient Logic

Search This Blog