Re:Series 2 - Episode 13

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Re: Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by Canadanne »

HStorm wrote:And the stained glass window room is one of my all time favourite chamber designs; what is causing that sound of footsteps in the background?
I wondered that too. It's weird how nobody even mentions it!

And yes, it does make me laugh how Mogdred's idea of "the ultimate challenge!!" turns out to be a single guillotine blade slowly going up and down. *g*
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Re: Series 2 - Episode 12

Post by rmcintosh1983 »

In my opinion, Julian's team are the least impressive winners of Knightmare. It's a disgrace that they go down as more successful than Leo or Martin in the history books!
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Re: Re:Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by TimeMaster »

Good to see Level 3. Some great artwork in the rooms. I was intrigued how the final section abandons the dungeon setting and is set in the stars. I think that it worked quite well for the climax of the adventure.

Julian's team rarely seemed under any serious threat though. For me, this tinged their victory a little. Nothing against them but I didn't feel that they had the opportunity to overcome as many obstacles as some of the other teams.

Loved the section with Folly in Anthony's game. I like the idea of the team looking for his laughter - it's something a bit different. Poor Folly!
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Re: Re:Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by pjmlfc05 »

TimeMaster wrote:Julian's team rarely seemed under any serious threat though. For me, this tinged their victory a little. Nothing against them but I didn't feel that they had the opportunity to overcome as many obstacles as some of the other teams.
Yes I felt this was an easy quest and the team were not challenged enough. The threat when Mogdread told the team that they had to face the ultimate challenge unaided came to nothing. What was it meant to be?!

The team's reaction when they won the quest was disappointing. When Treguard spellcasts heroes, you hear someone give out a quiet laugh as if to say 'really?'

For me the least deserving of all the winning team's.
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Re: Re:Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by wombstar »

Very surprised I thought they were going to be killed off, lol this is the winning team I've always forgotten about, I can't believe they won when the previous team were unfairly killed off. I kept expecting something to happen but other than Medusa level 3 was so easy.

Both winning teams in series 2 have been poor and pretty much giving the win, not earned. The team were very poor at guiding, almost walked the poor chap off the stage in that Medusa room. They all looked very board and just plodded along, possibly because the lack of a real challenge. Modgread gave it his best.. made a dragon wake up and tried to scare the team...challenging.

New team have duffed up already ;D
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Re: Re:Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by elcondor »

How many times can someone confuse left with right and not go into losing status, seriously - it appears to only be dumb luck with respect to positioning that separates Simon from Julian IMHO in that regard.

Seemed to be a weird effect on the talisman scene, like it was being projected from film, and not synced properly, never saw it at the time, but I guess better quality pictures expose stuff like that now.
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Re: Re:Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by HobGoblin »

I appear to have a very strong false memory of last weeks temporal disruption. I was sure the freeze was going to come just after the cavernwight had appeared in the doorway - I remember having a playground conversation about whether the dungeoneer would be able to get past a monster coming from the front of the room rather than chasing from the back as per usual (this seemed a fiendishly difficult challenge at the time). When disruption came before the wight's entrance I just assumed I was thinking of a different quest but then lo and behold it appeared shortly after game on.

Does anyone know if such a freeze occurs in a different quest?

As for the winning quest itself - yes, a bit of a walkthrough. I saw KM Live on Friday and the team died because they didn't use a spell. It just highlighted for me how much this team were spoonfed by Treguard's heavy-handed hints.
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Re: Re:Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by Pooka »

I'm not sure if I take Julian's victory as such an undeserving one, but it's certainly in the bottom three or so for me. Mogdred was added almost as an afterthought, the dragon was no threat at all, and there wasn't a final encounter scene, really.

I seriously like Becca's hat, though.

I'm surprised at how tense the Medusa scene is! It makes for very exciting viewing, having the team doing a few seconds at a time, Julian behind the shield and Treguard's urgent, strained voice. It's actually quite a boring room in some cases (you don't have the shield and you die, really), but they always managed to make it interesting.
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Re: Re:Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by Mystara »

elcondor wrote:How many times can someone confuse left with right and not go into losing status, seriously - it appears to only be dumb luck with respect to positioning that separates Simon from Julian IMHO in that regard.
As far as I am aware, this whole "losing status" thing is nothing more than an abstract description of a whole bunch of questions and concerns that the production team continually asked.

Unfortunately, with hindsight, we seem to occasionally interpret it as a production rule. In practice, I don't think it's anything more complicated than "Are the current team making good TV *right now*? If not, force them to make good TV or die".
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Re: Re:Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by TimeMaster »

Mystara wrote:
elcondor wrote:How many times can someone confuse left with right and not go into losing status, seriously - it appears to only be dumb luck with respect to positioning that separates Simon from Julian IMHO in that regard.
As far as I am aware, this whole "losing status" thing is nothing more than an abstract description of a whole bunch of questions and concerns that the production team continually asked.

Unfortunately, with hindsight, we seem to occasionally interpret it as a production rule. In practice, I don't think it's anything more complicated than "Are the current team making good TV *right now*? If not, force them to make good TV or die".
I'm starting to think that I have been very naïve :-[ I genuinely thought that the outcome of adventures was mostly based on the skills of the team and that each adventure was more or less mapped out beforehand (subject obviously to the team taking the right objects, answering the riddles correctly etc).

Do we know to what extent the production team made decisions to kill off teams that didn't make good TV?
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Re: Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by Drassil »

It seems that a lot of people with patchy childhood memories of Knightmare have grown up wondering whether it was ever won. This never happened to me because one of my earliest recollections of Knightmare is of Julian winning. I knew it was significant because Treguard's voice went high. Watching it again last week, it felt far less momentous. In fact, it bordered on uncomfortable. That was partly because we now know how much better Knightmare was to become in the following series.
Pooka wrote:I'm surprised at how tense the Medusa scene is! It makes for very exciting viewing, having the team doing a few seconds at a time, Julian behind the shield and Treguard's urgent, strained voice. It's actually quite a boring room in some cases (you don't have the shield and you die, really), but they always managed to make it interesting.
I felt the opposite. It should have been tense but the advisors' laughter at the outset, even if it was nervous laughter, undermined that. I also found it frustrating how Treguard saying "Stop!" worked both as a changeover instruction and as an instruction to Julian, reducing the challenge of guiding him to safety.

Ironically, Leo in Series 3 found the shield after meeting Medusa. Considering what the Medusa room did to the first team to encounter it, I'm sure a lot of watchers regarded it as anything other than a boring prospect.

Wild speculation, but I wonder if they ever considered giving Medusa a voice. It would have given Mary Miller something to do beyond Level 1.
Annie wrote:It does make me laugh how Mogdred's idea of "the ultimate challenge!!" turns out to be a single guillotine blade slowly going up and down. *g*
"Ultimate challenge" was a definite case of overhyping. Also woefully inaccurate was Mogdred's use of the word "unaided". I can quite believe that after the quest was over, Hugo Myatt was instructed to accompany the team to the canteen and cut their food into little pieces for them. And there'd have been no shortage of salt to go on it, given the massive bag of the stuff that Julian had left over at the end of Level 3 for some reason.
Alan wrote:As far as I am aware, this whole "losing status" thing is nothing more than an abstract description of a whole bunch of questions and concerns that the production team continually asked.

Unfortunately, with hindsight, we seem to occasionally interpret it as a production rule. In practice, I don't think it's anything more complicated than "Are the current team making good TV *right now*? If not, force them to make good TV or die".
Tim Child's own comments about losing status can be found in this post: http://www.knightmare.com/forum/viewtop ... =309#p4898

I wonder if Anthony Haigh ever went by the abbreviated name A-Ha in 1988. I suppose not, otherwise his advisors would have been "Hugh, Arthur, Juan".
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Re: Re:Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by Mystara »

TimeMaster wrote:I'm starting to think that I have been very naïve :-[ I genuinely thought that the outcome of adventures was mostly based on the skills of the team and that each adventure was more or less mapped out beforehand (subject obviously to the team taking the right objects, answering the riddles correctly etc).
I get the impression that the very early series are much more of a mapped out dungeon.
This would explain why, for example, a team might die even when they do well in the clue room questions - they simply take the wrong item. Or conversely if a team survives after doing badly in a clue room - purely by complete luck, they happen to take the correct items.

Considering the comments below about this team being "less deserving to win", I suspect this is the ultimate cause of that.
TimeMaster wrote: Do we know to what extent the production team made decisions to kill off teams that didn't make good TV?
As mentioned by Drassil, there is a quoted email from Tim Child: http://www.knightmare.com/forum/viewtop ... =309#p4898. However, whereas some people seem to read that as a definitive and clad-in-stone explanation of exactly how the production process worked, I see it as more of an abstract explanation formed retrospectively.

The explanation I recently received from Tim was more or less as I previously stated it and approximately corresponds with the explanation quoted by Steve in the post that I just linked to (but is a little less precise and much more general). Basically, it's a tradeoff between the desire to make good TV and the practicalities of having a filming schedule, probably also considering other complexities such as actor contracts and availability, prop availability, pre-filmed sequences, etc:

Obviously you don't kill off a team (even if they just walked off a cliff) if you have to stop filming for a day for the next team to show up. Similarly, team introductions are slow, and you don't want to have more than one per episode (I think this was an actual issue that Tim raised when I spoke to him). Hence, you extend their quest until practical and then kill them off.

Similarly, you don't want to prolong a quest (unless you have to) if the viewers *know* that the dungeoneer is doomed. It's just boring to watch.

If a team is making good TV, you might allow the occasional small lapse or mistake - after all, the end product is supposed to be entertainment and you may allow the occasional hiccough in gameplay in order to allow that.

And I think that's all there is to it. Trying to look for some kind of specific "status" of the team at any point just seems too fixed and too artificial to me.
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Re: Re:Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by pjmlfc05 »

Mystara wrote:As far as I am aware, this whole "losing status" thing is nothing more than an abstract description of a whole bunch of questions and concerns that the production team continually asked.

Unfortunately, with hindsight, we seem to occasionally interpret it as a production rule. In practice, I don't think it's anything more complicated than "Are the current team making good TV *right now*? If not, force them to make good TV or die".
If that is the case, did Julian's team deserve to win? I don't think they did. They didn't make better tv compared to most teams. They were prompted a lot and for entertainment purposes, didn't find it good tv.

At the time we were youngsters so we wouldn't be bothered thinking are teams making good tv or not. Watching it now, it does become more obvious. But at the same time, I don't agree with it.
TimeMaster wrote:I'm starting to think that I have been very naïve :-[ I genuinely thought that the outcome of adventures was mostly based on the skills of the team and that each adventure was more or less mapped out beforehand (subject obviously to the team taking the right objects, answering the riddles correctly etc).

Do we know to what extent the production team made decisions to kill off teams that didn't make good TV?
At the time I was lead to believe that. Yes it should be entertaining but at the same time, if it ends up with a team winning due to their entertainment factor and not down to their skill and wits, it becomes farcical and not a fair contest.
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Re: Re:Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by Mystara »

pjmlfc05 wrote:If that is the case, did Julian's team deserve to win? I don't think they did.
In my opinion, a team doesn't deserve to win merely because they are entertaining.
That would be bad TV.
pjmlfc05 wrote: They didn't make better tv compared to most teams. They were prompted a lot and for entertainment purposes, didn't find it good tv.
Again, I think you're looking for a hardcore absolute rule where none exists.

First of all, let's keep in mind this is all subjective. Furthermore, you're viewing an edited version of what actually happened, which is not the same as what the production team saw. There are serious disadvantages to both views and either your view or the production team's view might be distorted.

Secondly, I don't think that the team is so bad that it can't be said that good TV isn't being made. After all, you as an adult, with a far more discerning taste than a child, was obviously not so repulsed by the episode that you switched it off halfway through. One way or the other, the episode did something right to keep you watching. Good does not equate to perfection and nor, necessarily, should only perfect teams be allowed to win.
pjmlfc05 wrote: At the time we were youngsters so we wouldn't be bothered thinking are teams making good tv or not. Watching it now, it does become more obvious. But at the same time, I don't agree with it.
I completely disagree.
While it's true to say that children are more likely to watch TV regardless of what's on, I don't think you can say that the entirety or even the majority of Knightmare's viewers would have viewed the show had it been boring (i.e. bad TV).
pjmlfc05 wrote: [snip] Yes it should be entertaining but at the same time, if it ends up with a team winning due to their entertainment factor and not down to their skill and wits, it becomes farcical and not a fair contest.
I suspect you may have misread something I said. At no point have I suggested that a team would be allowed to win based on nothing but their entertainment factor.
"Good TV" includes having a fair contest.
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Re: Re:Series 2 - Episode 13

Post by pjmlfc05 »

I didn't misread what you have mentioned, the last statement was just my own opinion.

I'm not saying I'm right but at the same time I'm just giving my honest views. I'm not saying the production team were bad, they did an amazing job, but for Julian's quest, they did give the team an easy ride in my opinion. And when you compare their quest to other teams, for example Jamie's team, they didn't face much challenge.

For me good tv should be a team who can make good decisions without taking too much time, good interaction with other characters and to be challenged. Julian's team were not challenged enough and for me, it didn't make good tv. It left me a bit disappointed that they won, plus their reaction annoyed me.

Again just my opinion! Still it hasn't stopped me from enjoying Knightmare today and to talk about it!
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