How Game of Thrones pulled off the biggest spectacle in TV history

Thwack! The time for talking is over. Here was the ultimate rebuttal to any complaints about the chat-heavy nostalgia-fest of this final season’s first two episodes, a clonking great feature-length instalment that flew by in a flurry of limbs and severed heads. Game of Thrones is back to sticking them with the pointy end.

We had been warned, of course. Advance buzz over what was then being called The Battle of Winterfell, but is now known as The Long Night, had centred on the sheer heft of the thing: the fact that it was easily the most expensive single episode of television in the history of the medium; that it featured a battle scene longer than anything seen in Lord of the Rings; that it required several months and a cast equivalent to the population of a small Balkan country to film.

But even whispers from little birds couldn’t prepare us for the finished product. In its CGI-lacquered ostentatiousness, this felt like a new high water mark for TV, a dragon roar of a challenge to competitors from showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss: “top that”. Though you could argue that those competitors might not come from TV at all – it’s telling that The Long Night aired on the same weekend that another giga-spectacle, Avengers: Endgame, stomped into cinemas.

Read more on The Guardian