We review all the commentaries on the Game of Thrones Season 6 home boxset

Episode 603, “Oathbreaker.” Commentary by director Daniel Sackheim, production designer Deborah Riley, and Dean-Charles Chapman (Tommen Baratheon).

• Per Daniel Sackheim (via Deborah Riley), directing Game of Thrones is “like trying to build a house on a lava flow.” Nice and evocative, that.
• Sackheim talks about the Kübler-Ross model, which posits that people who are dying go through five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The idea behind the sequence immediately after Jon Snow’s resurrection was that he experiences them in roughly reverse order.
• Again, the director references painting. For Jon Snow’s post-resurrection scene, Sackheim was inspired by Renaissance-era painter Caravaggio.
• Unsurprisingly, Sackheim was inspired by westerns for the fight at the Tower of Joy, specifically Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. “That was sort of the idea behind the wide vistas and the tight closeups and the low angles…what you’d call gunslinger angles, sort of over the hilt of the sword, as opposed to over a gun belt,” he said. They also shot the Vaes Dothrak scenes in the same area where Leone shot several of his movies, so westerns in general had an influence on this episode.
• The intertwining roots in the Three-Eyed Raven’s cave really are roots. Specifically, they’re Rhododendron branches that have been individually sanded, painted, and hung from a grid in the ceiling. As the Raven, Max von Sydow is sitting on an office chair that rolls in and out of position.
• Sackheim talks a bit about the comedy scene in Meereen, the one where Tyrion tries to get Grey Worm and Missandei to engage in conversation. He mentions that, because comedy isn’t something the show does a lot, it’s challenging to find a rhythm. That might explain why this scene is so, uh, bad.
• Dean Charles-Chapman says very little during the episode, although when he does speak, we learn that his ordinary accent isn’t nearly as posh as Tommen’s. He thanks his dialect coach at the end.
• Qyburn’s laboratory is shot in Shane’s Castle in Northern Ireland. Reportedly, it’s real, it’s authentic, and it’s really gross. The area where the High Sparrow hangs out under the Sept of Baelor is also shot there.
• The production tried getting Maisie Williams to wear contacts during Arya’s blind phase, but she found them “intolerable,” so a lot of it ended up being done with CGI.

Episode 604, “Book of the Stranger.” Commentary by Nathalie Emmanuel (Missandei), Iain Glen (Jorah Mormont), and Jacob Anderson (Grey Worm).

• It’s kind of hard to tell when actors are being serious on these commentaries (the three of them admit this is the first time any of them are watching the episode, although they all have good knowledge of the show), but Nathalie Emmanuel says she’s read the books. “They’re good.”
• The lot of them weren’t thrilled with having to lie about Jon Snow’s resurrection during the time between Season 5 and 6. Anderson: “I’ve lied to pretty much everyone I care about in the last year.”
• Anderson, Emmanuel, and Glen consider themselves “the Targaryen crew.” They may not be an official family like the Starks, but they represent their queen.
• Anderson would love it if Littlefinger and Varys “discovered powers” and had at each other like in Harry Potter. “And Littlefinger rides in on a unicorn. Cause there’s unicorns on Skaagos, I was told.”
• Emmanuel went to a Star Wars-themed Christmas party thrown by one of the actors playing the slavers. “I dressed as a Sith Lord. It was great.”
• Look, this commentary is a good time. The actors have a lot of fun remembering how hard it is to keep a straight face when working with Peter Dinklage and Conleth Hill on set. But this quote from Glen kind of sums up a lot of it: “I just apologize to all the viewers that we haven’t actually mentioned one plot point the entire time.”
• It seems that scene in Daenerys’ throne room where Missandei, Grey Worm, and Tyrion meet with the freedmen was very difficult, because no one could get the Valyrian lines right. Glen: “I have seen the best of actors undone by Valyrian.”
• Michiel Huisman is apparently as attached to Daario’s prop knife as Daario is to the real thing.
• These three have an interesting discussion about the moral underpinnings of the High Sparrow’s fanaticism, disentangling the good intentions from the harmful execution. Anderson: “This show is so good at just fully expressing the fact that the world is grey.”
• Anderson gives close to giving us a spoiler when he talks about wandering in to the set for Dany’s throne room in Meereen, which he says is “storage” at the moment. He’s about to say something else he saw, but stops himself.
• As I mentioned, none of these three had seen the episode before watching this commentary. Emmanuel is very happy to see Osha again during her scene with Ramsay, and is crushed when…you know. Things improve when she reacts to Dany frying the khals, though.
• Anderson on the showrunners’ restraint in keeping plots and characters apart for so long: “It’s almost like they do the best kind of fan service in that that don’t do fan service. And then because they hold things back, and they withhold, then when things do come together it’s so much more satisfying.”
• Anderson’s final question to the group: Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or a horse-sized duck? Discuss.

Next: Two sides of the door