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

Episode 606, “Blood of My Blood.” Commentary by director Jack Bender, director of photography Jonathan Freeman, John Bradley (Samwell Tarly), and Hannah Murray (Gilly).

This commentary has a bit more of a serious tone than the others, perhaps because director Jack Bender isn’t a regular crew member, so the Game of Thrones regulars were on their best behavior. In any case, it’s full of interesting bits.

• Film nerd alert: for the opening sequence where Meera is dragging Bran through the snow, Bender says he was inspired by Diane Keaton crossing the tundra in Reds.
• According to Bender, actor Joseph Mawle knew tons of information about his character, Benjen Stark. That was helpful, because the actual script didn’t give him a lot to go on.
• Bradley makes a good point about how the episode cuts directly from Bran’s trek beyond the Wall—where Sam spent a couple season’s worth of time—to the bucolic Reach, where Sam grew up. The contrast shows us “just how displaced he was all that time.”
• Bender praises Natalie Dormer’s work in this episode, noting that she had “to walk a very fine line” of convincing both Tommen and the audience that Margaery’s religious conversion was sincere, but also suggesting the possibility that she was faking it.
• In the original script, Gilly was supposed to be at ease in the scene where she walks out in a dress for the first time. Murray convinced showrunner Dan Weiss that that wasn’t realistic given Gilly’s lifetime of wearing brown sacks and flats, so we got her memorably awkward walk. Good call, there.
• Bender notes something that never occurred to me: a lot of the dialogue scenes on Game of Thrones are still, with the actors not moving around much. For the Tarly family dinner scene, Bender had James Faulkner (Randyll Tarly) do a take where he got up and walked over to Heartsbane as he was talking about it, but Benioff and Weiss liked the one where he remained sitting. I think that was the right call—a powerful guy like Randyll doesn’t need to move around to establish that he’s in charge of a situation.
• Bender on Game of Thrones: “I’m very proud of the emotion that you guys play in this show. I mean, I feel like it really feels very grounded and true and not sentimental.” That’s another good point, and food for thought. How does a drama play emotion without being sentimental? I think Game of Thrones pulls that trick off, but the arithmetic of it is tricky.
• Obviously, the theater scenes in Braavos poke fun at the show. The question is whether they step over the line between light fun and obnoxious, distracting meta-humor. I think they stay on the right side of that line, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. According to Bender, when he asked Benioff and Weiss if he was mocking the show too much, the showrunners encouraged him to go further with it.
• It’s still amazing to think that the show got Richard E. Grant, a famous actor with a long career, to come on Game of Thrones for a bit part as a theater troupe leader. Bender and Bradley crack up during Grant’s brief rant to Lady Crane backstage.
• In gross footage we didn’t see: at the end of the Walder Frey scene, he nibbles the ear of the young girl he’s manhandling. Ew. Maybe it got cut because it would have been redundant, what with Cersei nibbling Jaime’s ear in the next scene. Again: ew.
• Murray went to university with Ellie Kendrick (Meera Reed). Huh.
• The snow in the Benjen-Meera-Bran scene was fake, something I hear a lot of in these commentaries. I’m starting to get an idea of why the production wanted to wait until actual snow fell to film parts of Season 7. Faking it must be expensive.
• Bender was sure that Daenerys had “a glimmer of fanaticism” during her big speech to the Dothraki at the end of the episode. “How far is she believing her power and where will it take her?”

Episode 607, “The Broken Man.” Commentary by producer/writer Bryan Cogman, Ian McShane (Septon Ray), and Natalie Dormer (Margaery Tyrell).

This is one of the better commentaries on the set, thanks in large part to Bryan Cogman. Dormer and McShane are engaging, but Cogman is clearly excited to be working on this show, and his enthusiasm is catching.

• Ian McShane’s resonant voice instantly makes this commentary worth listening to.
• Cogman confirms that the reason for this episode’s cold open was done to keep people from seeing Rory McCann’s name in the credits.
• The optimistic opening scene, where all of Brother Ray’s followers were helping build a sept, was an homage to the barn-raising scene in Witness.

• Cogman admits that the Brother Ray character was a blend of a couple different characters Brienne meets in A Feast for Crows, which we figured. Interestingly, he also says that, while it’s hinted that the Hound is still alive in the books, they weren’t sure where George R.R. Martin was going to take it. “We took that kernel and fashioned this storyline.” So who knows if anything like this will show up in the books?
• Casting Ian McShane as Brother Ray was Cogman’s idea. McShane: “That’s because you wrote a two-page speech.” Cogman is very proud of it, and rightfully so.
• When Ian McShane agreed to do Game of Thrones, he was looking forward to coming on set and seeing old buddies like Stephen Dillane and “Charlie” (Charles Dance). “And then you killed them all!” His nickname for Clive Russell (the Blackfish): “Big Clive.”
• Cogman, Dormer, and director Mark Mylod approached Margaery’s scenes very carefully. As Cogman said, Margaery has to fool the High Sparrow into thinking he’s successfully brainwashed her, and Dormer has to play that in such a way that the audience isn’t sure where her head is at. She did different versions of her scenes where she revealed more and less to the viewer, and it was blended together in the edit.
• The final scene Natalie Dormer filmed was the one where she slips the note into Olenna’s hand. She was sad about leaving the show, so the emotion came naturally.
• Hilariously, McShane straight up asks Dormer if the show killed off her character because she had another gig. Cogman: “Sadly, it was purely for story reasons.” That also provides an excuse for Cogman to ruminate on the structure of Seasons 5 and 6, with the former being about bringing the characters to their lowest point, and the latter being about rebirth and reclamation. In this episode, both the Hound and Theon experience kinds of rebirth.
• Cogman on the book-show relationship: “We’ve essentially adapted the first five books…and George gave us sort of broad strokes about stuff that’s gonna happen ultimately in the books, but it’s very much become its own thing in a lot of ways.”
• Cogman reiterates the company line on timelines: different subplots move at different rates. For example, even though they occupy space in the same episode, Jon and Sansa’s tour of the North takes a couple of weeks, while our trip to Brother Ray’s camp happens over the course of a few days.
• All of them fall over each other praising Bella Ramsey (Lyanna Mormont), for obvious reasons.
• At least for this commentary, the group is recording before “The Broken Man” aired on TV, which may explain why so many of the actors on these tracks haven’t seen the episodes yet.
• Originally, Jaime and the Blackfish were both supposed to be on horseback during their parlay scene, but for safety reasons that idea was dropped.
• Cogman points out that the scene in Volantis is the only brothel scene in Season 6, and it was specifically set there to make Theon feel uncomfortable, as he can’t partake. “For anyone who wants to accuse me of writing a gratuitous brothel scene, there’s actually a character reason for it.”
• A funny exchange happens after Yara’s line about “fucking the tits off that one.” McShane: “Then you lose the evangelicals on that one.” Cogman: “Oh, they’re watching, they’re just not admitting it.”
• Cogman calls Brother Ray’s speech to his followers “a bit of a paraphrasing version” of a speech from the books, by which I assume he means the broken man speech from A Feast for Crows. McShane describes it as “sort of an AA for serial killers.”

• A good line from McShane to end on: “It’s a shame you can’t go to the movies and see stuff as good as this.”

Episode 608, “No One.” Commentary by director Mark Mylod, Essie Davis (Lady Crane), and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister).

• The episode starts with a look at Lady Crane playing Cersei during Joffrey’s death scene in “The Bloody Hand.” I didn’t think about how weird this bit must have been for the actors. Obviously this is a scene in a TV show, but there’s a real audience of extras watching that fake play. So Davis, who’s playing Lady Crane playing Cersei, had to balance her instinct to act for the stage, which involves projection and wide emoting, with he instinct to act for the camera, where the emotions can be much smaller. Twisty.
• Mylod identifies parentage as a key theme in this episode. Obviously, that applies to the scenes between Arya and Lady Crane, but Mylod also pulls it out of the Jaime-Blackfish scenes.
• As noted elsewhere, one of the guys the Hound kills—the young one—achieved notoriety by doing Game of Thrones impressions on YouTube. The show gave him this role “as a thank you for supporting the production.”

• David Benioff’s favorite line from the episode was Cersei’s “I choose violence.” There’s a reason it was such a hit when it appeared in promos.
• Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, who plays the Mountain, has to be very patient while shooting this show. “The character spends a lot of time standing in the back of shot looking threatening and it’s not like we can use a stand-in.” Good point from Mylod—it’s not like 6’9”, 400 lb bodybuilders grow on trees.
• Nikolaj-Coster compares Jaime’s conversation with Edmure Tully to Jaime’s bathtub conversation with Brienne back in Season 3, on account of how rich and layered both are. Agreement all around.
• In taking Riverrun, Jaime achieves what Mylod characterizes as “a great victory.” “It sets him up so beautifully for the episodes to come, to see that he actually has become the leader that his father wanted him to be.”
• Originally, every part of the Battle of Meereen took place in “Battle of the Bastards,” but Mylod complained that he didn’t get to direct any action, so they moved the start of it into “No One.” Helpfully, Coster-Waldau is on hand with an impression of Mylod as a petulant child. “I want a battle!”
• Mylod enjoyed the comedy of the scene where the Hound and Brotherhood Without Banners haggle over which of the turncloaks they each get to kill, and suggested that it would be possible to make an entirely different, comedic version of the show. Elsewhere, Benioff and Weiss have suggested the same thing. Basically, Game of Thrones is always just a few beats away from becoming a Monty Python sketch.
• These three get into an interesting discussion about “horse dick continuity” during the scene where the Hound and the Brotherhood eat near a stream. Also, Rory McCann wore a prosthetic penis for the bit where he peed. Yet more movie magic.
• Like everyone else who watched the Arya-Waif chase scene, Nikolaj-Coster was reminded of The Terminator.
• Mylod says the show was trying to misdirect the audience into believing that Arya was going to die at the end of the episode. She does get pretty beat up, but…really? Did anyone believe they were going to kill off Arya before she got back to Westeros and started crossing names off her list?

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