No, I think you need to have seen the previous two at least. You'd probably get what's going on without it but those episodes were well worth watching on their own merits.

Yeah, I'd like to believe the writers were that subtle, but I think that conversation really was what it sounded like on the face of it.

I'd say the show has gotten quite solid, it seems like they started out with trite, formulaic characterization and 'tender moments' to get things up and running, but slowly fleshed out the characters until the triteness has mostly been replaced by genuine relationships.

I didn't know there was a movie, I'll steer clear of that. Really liked that book, probably Koontz's best.

The third one is really really good, I almost like it more than Startide Rising. It doesn't have any of the same characters, though. After that there's a second trilogy with the surviving characters from Startide Rising as well as a bunch of new ones, which is also quite good, but a bit of a departure in style.

I'm holding out hope that whoever's controlling the skitters will turn out to be pretty darn alien. My theory is that some skitters will eventually join the human resistance, so they need to be humanized a bit for us to empathize with them down the road.

They did give her a tiny bit of character development a couple episodes back, but that only added a tiny bit of backstory. Incidentally, her name is Lourdes.

I don't know that they're trying to say that the humans are just as bad. Some humans are pretty bad, and continue to be so even in times when their peers are all banding together against a common enemy, and I think the show is illustrating this reasonably accurately, at least in the case of Clayton's group.

I'm starting to really like this show, and found it at least decently enjoyable even at the beginning, but you're right about the horrible flaws in the aliens' technology. Particularly the bit at the beginning about their infrared tech not being able to sense groups of humans smaller than 300- we have Predator drones…

I'd watch the hell out of that. If the hobo was Clint Eastwood... damn.

The first paragraph of this article is one of the best things I've ever read.

It's in Storm of Swords.

It's happening: [io9.com]

I am mostly enjoying the show, but that point does bug me- where they mention that the aliens' (presumably) infrared scanning can't detect humans in groups smaller than 300 or so. Which, we have better tech than that now. Do these aliens really not have the equivalent of Predator drones?

Yeah, I have to say they look like they belong in a Pixar cartoon, not a live-action CG-augmented film.

Hmm, I'd totally forgotten he was

Since this entire article was chock-full of spoilers (including the biggest one in my comment) I didn't think I needed to worry about it.

To be fair, the Whispering Wood was pretty much 'off-screen' in the books, and the Green Fork was a small affair, and Tyrion getting clubbed was funny enough to make up for its absence. The Blackwater is a complex enough battle that it couldn't be easily described in post-battle dialogue, and Martin's pretty much said…

I'm fine with the first seven, I wish we could have the Blackfish but it looks like it's not gonna happen. I'd be ok with cutting Vargo Hoat, it complicates some storylines but maybe they could give Ramsay Bolton his role? Having Roose cut off Jaime's hand doesn't make a lot of sense.

If we didn't get him for the Greatjon (not that Clive Mantle hasn't been fine, but he's no Brian Blessed), why would they get him for Manderly? He's a minor character, and grossly fat where Brian Blessed is just... large (in every sense of the word). I'd love to see him in here somewhere but I don't see him as…