Showrunner says they cut off the episode before the battle to reduce costs. Looks like It’s $20 million an episode but they only do 6 episodes, not 10 or 8.
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Most House of the Dragon fans were not very pleased about the extremely anti-climactic season 2 finale this past weekend, given that it felt like it should be leading into a big battle next week, not two years from now.

Showrunner Ryan Condal has responded to that feedback and offered some level of an explanation to journalists at a virtual press conference. What it ultimately comes down to? Budget, and the use of it spread across multiple seasons.


“One of the challenges of making television at any scale [is] nobody has infinite time and resources. When you’re a showrunner, you’re always in the position of having to balance storytelling and the resources that you have to tell that story.”

Condal says that he wants to give the Battle of the Gullet the “time and space” that it deserves. Though some fans would argue the “time” would have been the entire eight episode season. But here, you can see the results of what may change when you cut down ten episodes of season 1 to eight in season 2, no doubt yet another budget-based movie with episode costs estimated at under or around $20 million an episod
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Fucking HBO is as much to blame as the writers for the decline in quality this year. Making the writers to cut back to 8 episodes instead of 10 was a huge mistake. They told them to cut it back a month before they began shooting, so then they had to rewrite things.

I had seen something that showed what had went on with the script and everything. It seemed like a huge clusterfuck.

Hopefully they can get 10 episodes this season and it really shouldn't take them 2 years to get to season 3. There were the strikes that fucked up everything.
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They had approximately 8 1/2 hours to tell a full arc and decided that it costed too much when they had carte blanche
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I listen to the guys at BaldMove for their recaps. They’ve been pretty adamant this is an HBO thing. And they usually don’t hold back on the writing.

Even besides the fact. There’s just no reason we should have to wait 2 years for a new season. This is a show that had zero chance of being cancelled. They should have been filming multiple episodes at the same time.
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They don't even have the script done.
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And why is that? HBO going cheap.
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So cut out half of the harrenahll wandering shit and give us some more fucking action.
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For me the lack of action isn't a big deal, but the dialogue was pretty much the same exact thing every single episode. Harrenhall was supposed to be about Daemon realizing that he needed to be on his wife/niece's side, but that's not what happened at all. All you get is him being a jackass and having visions until he touches the tree and sees the prophecy. We could have done with one episode having these dumb shit dreams, because he was going to betray Rhaenyra up until the very last second until he sees the prophecy. The dreams had jack shit to do with anything and we got like half a season of just that.

Also this quote is from an interview with Sara Hess, one of the main producers for the show.

"I know Ryan felt like we were a good team because Ryan obviously is very steeped in that world and is a huge fan of George [R.R. Martin]. And you know, I mean, I read the books a long time ago so you know, I'm familiar with the world and all that stuff, but I didn't necessarily feel a whole bunch of loyalty to like the story because haven't seen it. So it was just more about like, 'How do we tell this story that's on the page right now? And how do we make that into the best show that we could?"

I don't care about not following source material word for word, but that's only if the show is good. This season was not very good.
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That’s a hilarious tidbit.

How do you hand over the reigns of a hundred million dollar investment to someone who “read the books a long time ago” and “doesn’t feel loyalty to the story”? Lol.
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I thought it was fine.
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