If you like Guy Kay's stuff, you may also like R.A. MacAvoy's historical fantasies. Damiano and Daniano's Lute.  She's also got a lovely stand-alone book called Book of Kells, which is a personal favorite.

That was Loras, not Renly.  Renly was dead before he could sit on the Throne of Sharp Pointy Phallic Objects, much to his dismay.

I'm not entirely certain Mormont won't have a death's bed speech after the mutiny dies down….they were pretty careful to show him being stabbed and spitting up blood, that's being lunged, which can take a long time to die from.  (Not that anyone in a film/tv adaptation dies at any other speed than the speed of plot.)

Actually, he thinks Jaime is a proper heir.

Yeah.  I could totally see Tywin saying "I'm selling the three of you to Tyroshi slavers, and putting this girl on the Iron Throne. She's got more balls than Jamie and that lecherous stump combined, and I'm not sure where, given who her parents are, those brains came from."

I grumble a bit at the presentation that England was some "unknown foreign land" in 783.  The Norse knew about England - they'd been trading down the coast for decades before Lindisfarne.

I had been hoping that this was going to be a mid-season reversal, and have the two of them desperately trying to avoid letting the KGB know they'd been turned, doing work for the KGB, and having to carefully balance what they let slip to the FBI, trying to feed bad intel to the Americans.

I think it's pretty clear that Ellen May is Drew Thompson.  She's the only character nobody would expect…

I dunno.  It's a cop show.  We know that any cop that's about to retire gets killed in a dramatic way to give the survivors stiffer resolve…

Wynn Duffy without a 'stache looks like a grown up Barney from HIMYM.

In the last paragraph, the scene in the bar is between Randall and Raylan.  Liked this one a fair bit.

I'm mildly invested. I would be more deeply invested if I saw the episodes more frequently, but they've got Karen's relationship end down pat. Mal is basically Boyfriend Object of Appropriate Skin Color at this point, but it is nice to see a black character getting a love life.

I'm also not sold on Constable Bob. He seems too much of a self-deluded doofus to actually survive in a setting with Boyd Crowder and Limekiller and the like.