Trivia / Game of Thrones S8E3: "The Long Night"

• Dear Negative Reader: Cinematographer Fabian Wagner flatly denied the numerous accusations that the episode was too dark, saying everyone complaining must have just screwed up their TV settings (and somehow not noticed it on a single other thing). He was amusingly quickly contradicted by John Bradley in a separate statement, who said it was supposed to be that confusing to make you feel like you were in the battle.
  • In the event that one doesn't have an OLED TV (just as 95% of TV owners), the key to actually be able to watch what's happening in the stark darkness of the episode is cranking up the contrast, color and sharpness all the way, lower the brightness to less than 50 and amp the backlight to more than 50. That way, one can actually notice that the dark lumps fighting in the beginning of the battle are Brienne and Jaime. Turning off automatic black, brightness, and contrast settings (those that automatically adjust the screen to compensate for a change in the currently-displayed picture's brightness and contrast) also helps provide a more stable experience.
• Deleted Scene:
  • Sansa and Tyrion killing two wights to save Missandei and Gilly behind a tomb.
  • Alys Karstark was actually slain defending Bran, but the directors chose not to include the scene as (they felt) it made the episode too grim. Her fate is relegated to the DVD release and its extra content.
• Reality Subtext: The weather was really bad in most of the days during the shooting of the episode, syncing with the episode's harsh and tense nature. In the making-of featurette, Emilia Clarke mentions that there were days in the Belfast set where it was too cold to snow, and Jacob Anderson mentions that by the third week of night filming, no one had their internal clocks adjust to the night filming, and were loopy and wearing a Thousand-Yard Stare on their faces.
• Troubled Production:
  • The episode took over fifty days to shoot due to the bad weather, adding Reality Subtext to the tension on-screen.
  • Iain Glen was about to film Jorah's death scene when he found out his wife had had a near-fatal brain aneurysm, and he took 2 weeks off to be by her bed side as she recovered.
• What Could Have Been: The director of this episode, Miguel Sapochnik, wanted to kill as many main characters as possible in this episode, to make it clear to the viewer that no one would be safe. Particularly, Sapochnik wanted to kill Jorah in the horse charge at the beginning. The showrunners eventually convinced the director to not do that, since a lot of those deaths were being saved for "The Bells".

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