Comments like this are inevitable. People keep wanting to see a message of "Have no scruples, just kill everyone if you want to succeed" in ASOIAF no matter how much Martin shows the short-sightedness and unexpected vulnerability of even the most ruthless characters. You may like the idea of Dany going wild with…

OK, people who have literally never seen the show before, or who saw maybe one episode, might not remember who Catelyn is when they see her return. But… so what? There's no way the show could possibly provide an equally meaningful emotional impact for totally ignorant viewers as for people who have been paying at…

Or perhaps the producers and writers don't agree with you 100% about what is or isn't absolutely ESSENTIAL to the story?

Also, @avclub-84a9f64106792dd9b7e5ba4d631ac12e:disqus, I don't know if you've read past book 3 but…

It's out of left field anyway. The vast majority of ASOIAF readers have not read the Dunk and Egg stories. I still haven't read the one that mentions Bloodraven.

Strong Belwas lets every show cut him— once.

But the scene where Arya saw that was right after the massacre— like literally a minute later. They wouldn't have had time to do any serious upholstery yet. I just figured it's the kind of thing where people improve on an idea as they go: first of course you're going to chop off Robb's head anyway, then why not chop…

@avclub-f2b489efd726db529335e31c83509c73:disqus Totally agree. And I think that might work even better because of the way they chose to show Catelyn at the very end of the Red Wedding: frozen, unable to even scream any more or pay any attention to the person she killed, just a horrible face with the life drained out…

It's not a mysterious letter. I mean, he doesn't say what's in it at that moment in the book, but it's already been established in a previous scene that Davos luckily picked up the Night's Watch horror memo. The only mystery is what Stannis will do about it.

Because clearly this is the kind of show where if you're on a winning streak, other people will totally go along with your plans and you are destined for a long life full of puppies and rainbows.

I don't think they took away what makes him interesting, I think they just dropped one particular moment, mostly in the interest of time. Stannis is dependent on Melisandre now because his quest is fucked and there really isn't anything he can do about it except for something that's obviously uncool. He doesn't know…

I don't think we're meant to take Dany's grandiose sentiment totally at face value. Of course these people don't have a choice in the sense she means. They barely have any idea what's going on, they just know that someone extremely strange, who has mythical creatures with her, has just shown up and destroyed the…

I get the feeling that I'm in the minority on this, but I LOVE Sibel Kekilli in this role and I find every moment of her performance totally convincing. Sure, I kind of want her to cut Tyrion some more slack, but that's just because I like Tyrion and Dinklage is such a charmer; I don't seriously think her character…

I think it'd be emotionally brutal even if you didn't have any sense of what their narrative role was. I mean, a son is murdered in front of his mother, and he gets neither a big heroic moment nor a quick surprise death— he's just stunned and confused and in agony— and her last act is to murder someone she knows is…

I don't understand this complaint. Whatever Melisandre is really up to in general, as portrayed in this scene she's not an evil advisor at all. She is correct about the letter and she's right to argue for Davos's life. The worst you can say about her here is that she really shouldn't be continuing to encourage Stannis…

But the show has made it pretty clear that he has the best claim, and that Stannis is mostly driven by his sense of what's right, even though it's colored by resentment. He even had a line this week about how his rivals' worst offense was "making [his] kingdom bleed"— which is a not-unreasonable complaint about Robb,…

Well, that's how most people lived in Europe for a couple thousand years. You'd just say Fred the baker, or Fred from over the hill, or Big Crazy Fred, or Fred the son of Fred. And some of those qualifiers eventually evolved into family names, once family names became less exclusively a ruling-class thing.

Yeah, they didn't explain this on the show but Davos did in fact make up his own last name when Stannis made him a lord. He also had to choose a sigil: a ship and an onion.

Besides all the correct things everyone else said, I'll just point out that "I couldn't ever be in that situation, I would hate myself" isn't really a helpful way to be thinking. I mean, you really don't know what it's like to be in that situation or what it means to either of them emotionally— not just because you…

OK, I'm going to have to give you one of those condescending "if you say sos." Not about yourself, but about "every person [you] have known." You don't know that, any more than you know whether they're all straight. I don't mean to belabor that analogy— it's not a great analogy, especially since the chance that you…