mariness

So tonight I sat down to watch HBO's Game of Thrones with SP, a fantasy fan who has never read the books, and N, who's seen a few fantasy movies. Much to my surprise, all three of us had the same, deep, almost visceral reaction:

BAD SOUND EDITING.

So terrible, in fact, that we decided to try to turn on the closed captioning, which, on Brighthouse HBO, turned out to be not as simple as, say, turning on the closed captioning. In fact, after you turn on the closed captioning, you must then perform a number of other steps, including contacting Brighthouse, spending some quality time with a Brighthouse representive, resetting the cable box, and then attempting to convince the TV that, really, yes, everyone watching speaks English, not Spanish. This in turn led to me spending some time translating the Spanish subtitles into English and then all of us rewatching bits of the show with the English closed captioning. At which point the viewing experience decidedly improved. However. These were not, as you can imagine, optimal viewing conditions, and I sincerely hope that HBO improves the sound quality on future episodes especially for those of us not viewing the show in surround sound conditions without multiple speakers.

On the bright side, kudos to HBO for providing what seems to be quite accurate and occasionally even poetic Spanish closed captioning! Moving on.

( Spoilery for the first episode and mildly spoilery for the first book. )