“The Spoils of War” among the shortest episodes of Game of Thrones ever
By Corey Smith
With only seven Game of Thrones episodes on offer this year, this week’s episode — “The Spoils of War” — will mark the official halfway point of season 7. And that point will come pretty quickly, as “The Spoils of War” is a mere 50 minutes in length.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly before the start of the season, showrunner David Benioff put that run-time in context.
"One [episode] will be our longest episode ever — it’s coming in around 90 minutes. Another is going to be our shortest episode at 50 minutes."
According to HBO’s website, there’s actually one more episode that’s just 50 minutes long: “The Red Woman,” the season 6 premiere. Then there are a handful of episodes that are only 51 minutes, including season 2’s “Garden of Bones,” season 4’s “The Laws of Gods and Men” and “The Watchers on the Wall,” season 5’s “Sons of the Harpy” and season 6’s “The Broken Man.” But considering the amount on Benioff’s plate, we can forgive the man a a small whoopsie.
By way of apology for the short episode length, the other episodes this season are all overly long, particularly the final two. “Dragonstone” and “Stormborn,” the first two episodes, both clocked in at 59 minutes, and “The Queen’s Justice,” last Sunday’s episode, was a full 63. The as-yet untitled fifth episode is also 59 minutes long , while the final two episodes are a whopping 71 and 81 minutes respectively. That makes both of them longer than any other episode of the show, so we won’t complain about only getting 50 minutes this Sunday…much.
Macall B. Polay – HBO
As for we can expect from “The Spoils of War,” we’re just going to repost this shot:
Get ready.
Next: Callbacks and Easter eggs in Game of Thrones 703, “The Queen’s Justice”
In other news, Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington talked to Entertainment Weekly about the weirdness of being in the same scene together in “The King’s Justice.” “Both of us were going, ‘Ahhh what are you doing on my set!?’” Clarke said.
Harington agreed that it was a little weird. “We were both kind of freaking out,” he said. After all, there was a lot of pressure to get this meeting right, as Harington detailed.
"Usually you start working on a movie and meet [a costar] for the first time and you develop chemistry on screen over time. Here, you know somebody for seven years and you’ve watched their character on screen all that time. So it’s a unique experience as an actor to come together and know the world is watching."
We’ll see Jon and Dany at it again in “The Spoils of War,” which airs this Sunday at 9:00 p.m. EST.
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