Game of Thrones just got very, very dark

Team Daeneyrs at Dragonstone — (Image credit: Helen Sloan/courtesy of HBO)

If you spent last night squinting at your screen and impotently trying to increase its brightness, you aren't alone. Game of Thrones has gone dark. Very, very dark. Here's a collection of scenes taken from various points in "Stormborn":

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It's not exactly novel that Game of Thrones chronically underexposes. People have complained about it for years. Here's a sample article from last year listing some scenes that were too dark. But it's gotten worse. Reading that article, I sighed enviously looking at the selected screenshots. They might as well be in HDR compared to what the show has become. And I laughed out loud during the first few shots of "Stormborn" because I thought the show was joking about its own tendency to do this. Here's an early shot of Dragonstone:

But the other reason has to do with the prophecy. If the prince (or princess) who was promised will bring the dawn, you have to make it night first. If you want the viewer to long for deliverance the way the people of the Seven Kingdoms do, make that "darkest before dawn" thing literal. Dress virtually everyone in black, set almost every scene at night, throw in a storm, some fog, and the darkest fight sequence ever filmed.

There's some support for this theory: Several scenes in "Stormborn" begin with an establishing shot that has huge dark things obstructing it. Only after the camera slowly slides out from behind them is the focus of the scene revealed. This is annoying. It makes us want to bob to get out from behind the darkness. Here's our first shot of Jon Snow's speech to the lords in Winterfell. We start in the back of the room, with its lowliest members — which nicely emphasizes the point that this desire for dawn belongs to the people:

There are limits to this, of course. It's telling, for one thing, that the two people lit differently are Cersei and Arya. Cersei certainly doesn't share this desire for the new dawn, and neither, arguably, do the nobles she's addressing. Consequently, she's a little more normally lit. Same with Arya. Her chat with Hot Pie is in a typically dark interior, but the candle they're sitting in front of lights them reasonably well.

As experiments linking ethics to optics go, this is an interesting one. This was an episode about the Lord of Light: what he can offer, what he demands. Melisandre's appearance follows Varys' claim that he's an advocate for the common people. Whether any of this maps onto anything like salvation, or virtue, or good, is an open question — one literalized by the episode's use of light. Deprive folks of a true white for long enough and their eyes will embrace a version of it that's objectively gray.

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.