Game of Thrones’ Ramin Djawadi saw “The Long Night” a year before we did

When crafting an episode, sometimes it’s wisest to take as much time as possible, and it sounds like Game of Thrones did that with “The Long Night.”

If you’re interested at all in the making of the music of a television show and how it can affect the story, Variety‘s entire story on Ramin Djawadi is worth a read. But one detail sticks out more than the others.

As Variety tells it, Djawadi saw a “first cut” of “The Long Night,” also known as the longest episode of Game of Thrones ever, “over a year ago, and it was the first footage he had seen [from season 8].” So not only did Djawadi skip “Winterfell” and “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” he went straight to this?

As we’ve previously discussed, the sound of “The Long Night” is just as important as the visuals. All of those tiny choices, from when to use an orchestra to when to only have the barest hint of music, add up to a full-fledged experience. However, what’s also important is augmenting the story through music — callbacks, call-forwards, uses of leitmotifs, and so on. To drop right into the midpoint of the season and start there means that fans should listen very closely to the upcoming three episodes.

For those who heard the piano, it’s meant as something as an intentional callback to the season 6 finale and what should probably be the theme song for Cersei Lannister from now on: “Light of the Seven.” Though Djawadi touches on the emotions it’s meant to evoke (“‘it’s over for our beloved heroes'”), it also presages a game-changing event, pun not intended, to hear the piano in Game of Thrones. It’s deployed that sparingly, after all.

What is game-changing if Arya killing the Night King doesn’t count?

But we keep coming back to the amount of time that Djawadi had with this episode. After all, it’s not like he’s right there from the beginning; all of that long shooting had to be done first, and then he got some footage to work with.

For all that we mourned the time we spent without Game of Thrones, we have to say that to hear something like “The Long Night,” it was worth it in the end.

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