GoT S7E6: Let's Ignore Time & Space!
Nov. 5th, 2022 02:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerGame of Thrones S7E6, "Beyond the Wall" involves a climactic battle: "The Battle of the Frozen Lake", as people call it. While the battle is narratively powerful, the writers took a lazy shortcut the writers took broke my suspension of disbelief. A heroic rescue that's shown arriving in 12-16 hours really should have taken more than two weeks to arrive, if time, distance, and the reality of traveling speed mean anything.
This is not the first instance of the TV series's showrunners playing fast-and-loose with time. As they've condensed carefully plotted but overly long storylines from the books, sometimes the timelines don't match up. For example, did a character ride 500 miles through a war zone in 2 days? Did an army seemingly sail or march halfway around the continent in a week? Until now these plausibly could be hand-waved away. A few weeks could pass between episodes or even between scenes in one episode. The endangered heroes' predicament is clearly urgent: they're surrounded by an enemy horde in sub-zero weather with no food or shelter. They have hours to survive. Yet somehow, in that time, a raven flies 1,000 miles with a written plea for help strapped to its leg, and help comes.
You might ask why unrealistic flight speed for a common bird is what suspension of disbelief falls apart on in a story where we've accepted that there are dragons and hordes of undead animated by dark magic.
There's a bedrock principle in the genre of fantasy and science fiction that a writer only gets a small number of "freebies" in setting up their story. Small being, like, one or two. In fantasy, that's typically the presence of magic and fantastical creatures. In scifi it's often faster-than-light travel and certain other bits of fantastical technology like hoverbikes, matter replicators, or instantaneous communication.
Beyond the basic existence of these 1 or 2 freebies everything else must be earned. And to be earned it must follow rules that are internally consistent. In this story it's an unforgivable shortcut to say, "Surprise! After 65 episodes, we're just now revealing that ordinary birds actually fly at the speed of light."
I am, of course, not the only fan to criticize this aspect of S7E6. Nor am I even the first. I mean, I watched this episodes five years after it dropped. Lots of critics are 5 years ahead of me.
It's interesting to see how the showrunners responded to this criticism. Director Alan Taylor sneered in an interview with The New York Times, "I've only looked at one review online, and it was very much concerned with the speed of the ravens. I thought, that's funny — you don't seem troubled by the lizard as big as a 747, but you’re really concerned about the speed of a raven."
Yes! We are bothered by that! We accept that huge dragons exist but not that ordinary ravens can fly 500 mph (nor even that said dragons can fly that fast) because of that bedrock principle of the genre I explained above. The director's response isn't an explanation at all but a Twitter-quality retort making fun of the critics instead of addressing their actual, valid point. The director either is a complete idiot about the $10-million-an-episode genre he was hired to direct, or he thinks his audience are complete idiots.
This is not the first instance of the TV series's showrunners playing fast-and-loose with time. As they've condensed carefully plotted but overly long storylines from the books, sometimes the timelines don't match up. For example, did a character ride 500 miles through a war zone in 2 days? Did an army seemingly sail or march halfway around the continent in a week? Until now these plausibly could be hand-waved away. A few weeks could pass between episodes or even between scenes in one episode. The endangered heroes' predicament is clearly urgent: they're surrounded by an enemy horde in sub-zero weather with no food or shelter. They have hours to survive. Yet somehow, in that time, a raven flies 1,000 miles with a written plea for help strapped to its leg, and help comes.
You might ask why unrealistic flight speed for a common bird is what suspension of disbelief falls apart on in a story where we've accepted that there are dragons and hordes of undead animated by dark magic.
There's a bedrock principle in the genre of fantasy and science fiction that a writer only gets a small number of "freebies" in setting up their story. Small being, like, one or two. In fantasy, that's typically the presence of magic and fantastical creatures. In scifi it's often faster-than-light travel and certain other bits of fantastical technology like hoverbikes, matter replicators, or instantaneous communication.
Beyond the basic existence of these 1 or 2 freebies everything else must be earned. And to be earned it must follow rules that are internally consistent. In this story it's an unforgivable shortcut to say, "Surprise! After 65 episodes, we're just now revealing that ordinary birds actually fly at the speed of light."
I am, of course, not the only fan to criticize this aspect of S7E6. Nor am I even the first. I mean, I watched this episodes five years after it dropped. Lots of critics are 5 years ahead of me.
It's interesting to see how the showrunners responded to this criticism. Director Alan Taylor sneered in an interview with The New York Times, "I've only looked at one review online, and it was very much concerned with the speed of the ravens. I thought, that's funny — you don't seem troubled by the lizard as big as a 747, but you’re really concerned about the speed of a raven."
Yes! We are bothered by that! We accept that huge dragons exist but not that ordinary ravens can fly 500 mph (nor even that said dragons can fly that fast) because of that bedrock principle of the genre I explained above. The director's response isn't an explanation at all but a Twitter-quality retort making fun of the critics instead of addressing their actual, valid point. The director either is a complete idiot about the $10-million-an-episode genre he was hired to direct, or he thinks his audience are complete idiots.
