AT RISK: King Joffrey’s Iron Throne is at stake during this week’s battle scene. (
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‘Game of Thrones” is bucking to be the one with the battle scene to beat for all future TV series.
This Sunday, HBO debuts “GoT’s” highly-anticipated “Blackwater” episode — the brutal battle that the fantasy series has been barreling towards since Season 2 premiered last month.
Fans denied a big battle sequence last season, due to budgetary constraints, are all abuzz about the upcoming epic battle.
“The whole of the book [‘A Clash of Kings’] is building to this major battle,” says Elio M. Garcia, Jr., co-founder of Westeros.org, a fansite dedicated to George R.R. Martin’s books, on which the series is based.
“The actual battle in the book goes over several chapters . . . It’s the biggest battle we have in the series to date and [it’s] five books in.”
Although Garcia hasn’t seen the episode himself, “I know people who have [seen it] and they told me it’s incredible,” he says.
“ ‘Like nothing they’d ever seen before on television,’ is the phrase one of them used.”
The battle for control of King’s Landing, fictional Westeros’ seat of government, involves more than 200 ships and 100,000 combatants. It takes place on both land and sea.
To bring this to life, “GoT” built an 80-foot high battle set, complete with working castle walls and gates, in a quarry in Ireland. The episode was shot over the course of a month. (Hour-long dramas typically shoot an episode a week.)
Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss had to beg HBO for extra cash to make the episode and pay for its visual effects.
“We went down on bended knee: ‘Just this once. Please,’ ” Benioff told EW.com.
“It was really a long conversation about how the second season all builds towards Blackwater. You know it’s coming from quite a ways off and for us to [have] all that build up and then have someone running in and saying, ‘The ships are in the bay!’ . . . felt like it was gonna be cheap if we did that.”
Fans would be the first to agree. “People have been waiting for this moment for eight episodes now,” Garcia says, adding that it would be “like having sex without the climax — it’s like, that’s it? Tyrion gets knocked in the head again and wakes up? It doesn’t really work.”
Among the things Garcia expects to see in “Blackwater” are wildfire (flames that can’t be doused with water) in action, a (conscious) Tyrion in the thick of battle and the “very psychological picture of Cersei as she deals with everything coming to an end.”
“The scale is going to be smaller,” he says, and they’re “changing little details to make it simpler, but my understanding is it’s still going to be very impressive to look at.”