Game of Thrones Season 7: Major battle to comprise up to a third of an episode

WARNING: THIS POST WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR GAME OF THRONES SEASON 7

As we continue to watch the production film scenes for Game of Thrones Season 7, we’re getting a better idea of what kind of a year we’re in for. That’s not limited to SPOILERS about what will happen. We’re also getting information about how it will flow and what shape it will take. Pacing is very important when making good television, and it’s something that Game of Thrones has both excelled at (the one-two punch of “Battle of the Bastards” and “The Winds of Winter”) and whiffed (the relatively uneventful stretch from “Blood of my Blood” through “No One”).

Right now, most of our attention is focused on the filming at Los Barruecos in Spain, where the production is shooting a major battle scene. Here’s a brief description of what will go down: the Lannisters, having just sacked Highgarden, are marching home with their loot when they’re ambushed by Daenerys and her Dothraki horde. Randyll Tarly (James Faulker) and Dickon Tarly (Tom Hopper) will also be involved. The production will be filming in the area through mid-December, much longer than it usually stays in an outdoor location, and the shoot will involve hundreds of extras and over a hundred horses. It’s going to be a big deal.

We learned a couple days ago that this sequence will feature in Episode 4, smack dab in the middle of this seven-episode season. Now, Watchers on the Wall reports that “[t]he battle alone” will take up somewhere between a quarter and a third of the episode. Assuming the episode is about an hour long, as per usual, that’s between 15 and 20 minutes of fighting, and possibly some additional time for preparation and aftermath, assuming that’s not already factored in.

It’s interesting to locate this in the context of previous Game of Thrones episodes. It doesn’t look like this is going to be an episode like “Blackwater” or “The Watchers on the Wall,” concerned entirely with a battle and what leads up to it. It’ll be closer to “Hardhome,” where Jon’s arrival at the wildling village and the subsequent battle with the White Walkers took up the last half of the hour.

Game of Thrones has had a lot of success with this kind of set-up, wherein it treats the first chunk of the episode like any other, zipping around between various storylines, and devotes the final section to one event. It did this in “The Rains of Castamere,” where the Red Wedding took up a little over a quarter of the hour; in “The Lion and the Rose,” where Joffrey’s wedding to Margaery dominated the last half; and in “The Laws of Gods and Men,” where over a third of the episode was devoted to Tyrion’s trial for regicide.

That sort of structure allows the show to take care of side business in the early going and focus the audience’s attention on a major event later. It’s a solid set of bones that will probably be used again here. But remember that the show is willing to flip the script and put the big set piece at the beginning. This happened in “The Winds of Winter,” where Cersei’s pyromaniacal attack on the Sept of Baelor took up the first 20 minutes.

In any case, Episode 4 is shaping up to be a barn-burner. And by putting it in the middle of the season, the production has given itself a natural pivot point. With the giant battle out of the way, the finale will likely have a different sort of climax, probably involving a ton of important characters—Cersei, Jon Snow, Daenerys, and others—meeting at the Dragonpit in King’s Landing.

From a production standpoint, Game of Thrones is the most complicated TV show in existence, and if the writing doesn’t provide a solid structure, it can all fall apart. From this distance, the construction looks solid.