‘Game of Thrones’ season 4 spoilers: Information on last ‘shocker,’ Red Wedding follow-up
Every season of “Game of Thrones” follows some sort of pattern, and they typically always lead to the ninth episode of the season being the one that the vast majority of people choose to check out and remember. Last year, it was the Red Wedding that occupied this space, and the year before that, you’re dealing with the Battle of Blackwater.
So what is going to be taking place on the show this time around? The simplest way to put it is that we’re going to be looking at something that is again shocking, action-packed, and something that could cause your hair to stand on end for weeks. While Red Wedding comparisons for now are useless (given that the show could always interpret something different from the book), what we know is that this is directed by “Blackwater’s” own Neil Marshall. In an interview with IFTN, the man was keen to at least give you a few generic details about what this episode will contain … including one of its primary settings:
“What I can say is that it’s a huge episode – a huge production. As far as I know the episode hasn’t been named yet but someone online suggested it might be called ‘Castle Black’ but all I know is that it’s called episode nine! It’s kind of the same as ‘Blackwater’, in a sense, in that these episodes are bigger than most of my films! They’re on the same scale as something like ‘Centurion’, if not bigger. We have huge sets that they build – in the case of ‘Blackwater’ it was a section of King’s Landing. For this episode we didn’t have to build Castle Black, we already had it. But it’s an amazing set. They built another inside the Paint Hall for the top of the Wall, and that was so big it took up the entire studio. We got a special backdrop made for it and one of the things about Paint Hall that makes it quite unique is that it’s much taller than most film studios. The backdrop went around almost 360 degrees and it turned out that it’s the biggest backdrop in Europe. The outside stuff for the battle was shot at the Castle Black set, which is built on the side of a huge quarry North of Belfast. We had about 200 hundred or so extras. We also had a very large team of stuntmen including this amazing bunch of Hungarian stunt guys, and they were absolutely fantastic! Really great. This episode is loaded with stunts, effects gags and visual effects. It’s a very, very action-packed episode!”
Is this reason enough for you to be excited? It should be. Without spoiling anything, the questions you should of course be asking yourself right now are if the invaders to Castle Black are the White Walkers, the Wildings, or some other army of people, and also whether or not Jon Snow is going to be battling in the front lines. Let’s hope that he is fighting from some sort of secure position, mostly because we know already that these things can otherwise end pretty badly.
This is not the only major “Game of Thrones” news this week; earlier, the man behind Joffrey in Jack Gleeson made headlines for saying that he may leave acting when his role on the show is over.
Photo: HBO