Did anyone else notice the seventh season of Game of Thrones proved to be perhaps the least gruesome in the show's history?
Besides barbecuing two thirds of the remaining Tarly men, hanging the same proportion of Sand Snakes from their own weapons at the front of a Greyjoy ship and having Thoros of Myr's chest savaged by an undead bear, there wasn't much gore to behold.
Far removed from the beheading and eye-gouging days of earlier seasons (ahh, memories), perhaps it was the cost of crafting three fully grown CGI dragons and getting one of them to burn down The Wall that didn't leave much room in the budget for graphic blood and guts.
Whatever the reason, perhaps the most disgusting scene this year (Citadel poo segment aside) was Samwell Tarly removing Jorah Mormont's Greyscale infection with nothing more than his bare hands and a rusty old knife – which, in fairness, is pretty bloody grim.
And here's how they did it:
"The operation on Jorah was one of the major challenges for me in episodes two and three," said director Mark Mylod.
"99 per cent of the credit goes to Barry and his incredible prosthetics team."
"It's something we hadn't necessarily done before," added prosthetics designer Barry Gower.
"We had to devise a way of removing this top skin of this disease and having a layer underneath which would bleed and have pus and various gooey things.
"We had a team of four applying this body make-up."
But how long did it all take?
"It was five or six hours to get the full body prosthetic done," added Iain Glen, who plays Jorah Mormont.
Ouch. And we thought the Greyscale looked painful.
Game of Thrones airs on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK.
