Before the seventh season of Game of Thrones premiered, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) said that everything in the new batch of episodes “happened quicker than I’m used to… a lot of things that normally take a season now take one episode.” His words turned out to be prophetic: characters covered large distances in short amounts of time, especially the world’s speediest runner Gendry, and Euron built his replacement fleet at an implausibly fast pace. The pacing was a big problem for many viewers, who became accustomed to characters taking episodes (if not seasons) to move around the map, but that was a deliberate choice for the Thrones creative team.
“We made a choice to ‘just get on with it’ last season. You can sit at home and do the math on how long it took to get the boats from Point A to Point B and whatever that was, yeah, that’s what it was. There’s always something everybody has got to graft on to and I guess that outrage was better than others, so I’ll take it,” co-executive producer Bryan Cogman told Entertainment Weekly, getting dangerously close to “shut up, nerds, it’s just a show” logic.
Co-showrunner D.B. Weiss also chimed in.
“We don’t read a lot of that stuff. If somebody says, ‘I don’t like the way you do this,’ I have no idea what percentage of the people watching that opinion actually represents. If that opinion happens to surface louder on the internet, I still have no idea… But there’s no way of telling — nor am I interested in finding a way of finding out — how accurate those thoughts represent the broad spectrum of people watching. If you start thinking about that you’ll drive yourself crazy.” (Via)
Writer Dave Hill acknowledged that although no one ever likes hearing criticism, “with all the things we were balancing to set things up for season eight, sometimes we had to speed things up within episodes.” He joked that Thrones could have used “TWO WEEKS LATER” cards, but “we did not. Sometimes when moving pieces around you’re going to cheat a little bit. [For season eight], we tried to keep more of the time logic rather than jet packs.”
Now there’s an idea: give the dragons jet packs. Now, you may be asking yourself, why would a winged, fire-breathing creature need a jet pack? That’s for George R.R. Martin to figure out. He’s not busy, or anything.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)