Westeros

There was more than one interview conducted during Eastercon with A Song of Ice and Fire writer and creator, George R.R. Martin. While George took part in various panels and an official interview for the convention, he took time out to talk with Geoff Lloyd, the host of Sky Atlantic’s Thronecast.

Here’s what he had to say on a number of topics—including which characters in the show are quite different from his own representation of them in the book (one of them is somewhat of a surprise to me!)

Speaking of Thronecast, you can find every episode for this season linked in the Extras section of the various Season 2 episode guides, as well as our own videos plus our contributions to MTV News’ “Watching the Throne” program.

Word just in on the ratings for episode 3, “What is Dead May Never Die”, and the results (as reported by EW) are rock solid: a 3.8 million rating, just like last week.

Now lets see if this episode and the next, and the buzz we expect them to generate—it’s really good television!—will start seeing the ratings climb.

Almost a year ago, we first had a long chat with writer and keeper of the mythos, Bryan Cogman, about his role in the first season, which included writing the episode, “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things”.

Bryan was there almost from the ground floor, helping during the time of the pilot, and becoming the right hand man to David and Dan as they developed, wrote, and produced the show. Going into the second season, he received the title of story editor… and he wrote the extremely well-received third episode of the series, “What is Dead May Never Die”.

In the interview below, Bryan discusses various aspects of the episode, his overall role on the show, and more. Insightful as always!

Read the interview!

While everyone’s still reveling in the great episode, “What is Dead May Never Die”, HBO’s decided to be generous and put out a couple of new videos filling in background related to the religious environment in the novels. It certainly provides more context to what Stannis was doing on Dragonstone when he burned the statues of the Seven!

And as a bonus—and since we missed it when it was initially put up, HBO decided that Maisie, Isaac, and Sophie signing along with the Game of Thrones theme—which you can find on their commentary on the DVD/Bluray—was worthy of being a video in its own right. We agree!

HBO has released its recap and inside look into the latest episode, “What is Dead May Never Die”, with executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss discussing several of the key scenes and characters. We’ve added the recap to our own recap section, and the Inside the Episode to our analysis section—check them out!

And because we forgot this last night, we’ve also made public our “Bonus material” for episode 3 in the Extras section of the episode page, where Linda and I provide some background that isn’t apparent in the novels for those who’ve not read them, as well as discuss what we consider the high and low points in the episode.

While HBO was at it, they also released the preview for the fourth episode, “Garden of Bones”, which will see the return to Daenerys Targaryen’s story and that of Stannis Baratheon. It’s a good one, written by new staff writer Vanessa Taylor. We’ve written up our own brief preview of next week’s episode, as well, which teases some of what you’ll see.

We’ve posted our full recap, analysis, and scene-by-scene breakdown of the latest Game of Thrones episode from HBO, “What is Dead May Never Die”. Great episode, our favorite so far—and it contains our favorite sequence in all four episodes (in fact, it’s probably one of our favorite sequences in the whole series to date!)

Once you’ve looked that over, please feel free to join fellow fans in discussing the episode—both from the perspective of those familiar with the books and those who aren’t, in separate threads—at the A Song of Ice and Fire, and rate the episode while you’re at it! Membership at the forum costs nothing and, hey, you can use FB or Twitter logins to make it easier.

In the wake of the announcement of Game of Thrones being renewed for a 3rd season (which George R.R. Martin also commented on), Northern Ireland Screen has confirmed that the production will continue to be based in Northern Ireland. Th show will receive funding from the Northern Ireland Screen fund supported by Invest NI and part funded by the European Regional Development Fund. Shooting will take place in the Paint Hall film studio, the new sound stages in Belfast, the Linen Mill Film Studios in Banbridge and various other locations throughout Northern Ireland.

George R.R. Martin has posted about the Season 3 renewal, and he adds some interesting information: the number and working title of the episode he’ll be writing for that season, while apparently confirming that it’ll be a 10 episode season:

Having planned to run this last week just before the premiere, and then just after the premiere, and then when we had the renewal news, and then this past weekend… and, look at that, there’s renewal news!

Well, it’s finally live: the last interview from our trip to the international press junket in London in late February, where we talk with executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss. I’d met David before when I visited the set back during the filming of the first season, and I’d spoken to the both of them during an interview around that time as well, but it was the first time meeting Dan… and yes, he’s just as much One Of Us as you can imagine, geek boys and girls; check out the question regarding the shirt he was wearing!

Read the interview!

This just in from HBO:

If you consider yourself a “super-fan” of Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire—if you can recite the names of all of Walder Frey’s sons while standing on your head, or have an amazing costume as Mord the Jailer, or have made up a tune to “The Rains of Castamere”, or have painted Jaime Lannister riding a horse down a cliff while declaiming epic poetry as he plays the high harp with one hand and cuts down a White Walker with the sword in his other hand, have covered yourself in house sigil tats, or had a wedding where “The Rains of Castamere” also featured —then Sky Atlantic’s very cool Thronecast program wants you to get in touch to possibly be featured in a future episode.

And if you’re in the London area? Probably even better for your chances to get on! If you’d like to volunteer and be considered for the program, contact Thronecast at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Please read for more information about the issues the forum and the wiki have been having lately.

As you probably know, the TV show leads to spike in traffic that lead to intermittent outages. We have slowly been working to reduce the frequency of these. However, last Friday new problem cropped up: msnbot spiders were slamming the server with hundreds of requests per second. If you Google, you’ll see that this is a common problem that other webmasters have had to deal with for their own servers, but it was a new experience for us. We thought we had mostly fixed the problem… only to have something new crop up, which may be connected to potential hardware failure.

The last few days we and our host have been spending a huge amount of time trying to track down what is going wrong, but as of yet we have not found a solution. We’ll keep trying, but right now we do not have an ETA for when the problems may be fixed.

The second episode of season two, The Night Lands, pulled a 3.8 million viewership on the initial airing according to James Hibberd of Entertainment Weekly. This is a very slight dip from the 3.9 million for the first episode, and given that it was a holiday weekend as well as typical post-premier drop-off it has to be considered a good sign.

Our detailed recap, analysis, and book-to-screen breakdown—plus some extra material in the form of a short video Linda and I have prepared providing some background for those who haven’t read the books and our take on the highs and lows of the episode—can now be found over at our episode page!

It’s almost done, alas, but catch the last minutes of this panel from Olympus Eastercon featuring George R.R. Martin—as well as David Anthony Durham, Tricia Sullivan, Joe Abercrombie, Genevieve Valentine—as they discuss the nature of heroism in genre literature:

They should be posting the full recorded panel soon after it ends, so we’ll update accordingly when that’s available.