By John Keegan and Gregg Wright"The episode has dramatically exceeded our expectations," said series showrunner David Benioff in an interview with Entertainment Weekly recently. Instead of going with their original plan to frame the entire Battle of the Blackwater from the perspective of Cersei and Sansa, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss made the case to HBO that they just HAD to show that battle, and they'd need more money to do it. Surprisingly, HBO agreed to raise the budget significantly. I knew all of this before the episode had aired, and I'd been unable to keep myself from watching the promo, but none of this prepared me for what I was about to experience. This was TV history in the making.