@avclub-d72f705337e5adcf7e33ec0381c5f5b2:disqus I liked Watson a lot. Fiennes was pretty good throughout, but he was perfect whenever he was with her. Glad they kept the tiger scene.

@samatict:disqus You're thinking of tonic clonic seizures (grand mal), which are not the only kind. This looked like an absence seizure, which I've seen— remaining upright but just being totally out of it and maybe twitching a bit— although normally the person would come back to awareness a bit sooner than that.

I loved Spacey's Luthor. He really seemed like what the Hackman Luthor might have become after spending a fairly long time in jail; both of them would kill you with a smile, but Spacey had a real bitterness underneath.

I didn't realize for a long long time that what Lois is doing there is speaking song lyrics as dialogue— "Can you read my mind" etc. follows the tune of that section of the theme music. I mention this only because maybe someone else is as slow as me and will appreciate the scene more now. It's still really corny but…

@avclub-0ae7484a9f3bbd2a21df420050c032ae:disqus I don't know if I'm people, but I liked it a lot.

"Um Tywin and "The Rains of Castamere?" Martin is realistic enough to show that sometime a carthagian peace "works.""

Maybe this will fall under "being wrong only makes me more infuriated and committed" too, but "Your Grace" is not an affectation; it was a real historical usage until Henry VIII decided he liked "Your Majesty" better.

I'm glad I went back to read this after starting to watch the show, because I'm happy to be able to increase the number of likes on your awesome comment by 50%. Thank you for making me imagine a world where every single one of history's worst tyrants and every one of their propagandists was really an undercover agent…

I'm surprised no one mentioned that the flashback starts out with them talking about the death of Stalin. They're looking at his picture on the wall with hard-to-read but intense reactions much as, in the "present" storyline, Americans are looking at pictures of Reagan on TV and bracing themselves for his possible…

I'm not sure why we're still talking about this (I mean, besides that it's the Internet), since GRRM has said that they are casting Oberyn for next season.

Oh, I wasn't really complaining about Robb's motives— I just meant that from Stannis's point of view, it doesn't really matter that Robb wasn't after the Iron Throne, or that he was defending against military aggression in the Riverlands for that matter, because Stannis sees all disorder as a deliberate offense…

The novel The Years of Rice and Salt contains a detailed description of one historical method of producing smooth-crotched eunuchs, albeit without a 100% survival rate. It's… pretty tough to read.

@avclub-d35d0af0d2a70c049bbedcb88e25ef28:disqus And the Turkish didn't generally use last names until the 1930s, when the Atatürk regime made them mandatory.

You're both right. Cersei (as usual) takes everything less seriously than Tyrion does, but Tyrion has made a point of being an educated modern person who doesn't believe in magic and monsters; most recently in the scene where Varys reveals his own bad experience with a magician.

@avclub-782066c88e9c574d6085f3ddfc7032e4:disqus Just because slavery is technically illegal in Westeros doesn't mean that they've "evolved past it." There are plenty of people in forced servitude there— the non-volunteer majority of the Night's Watch for instance— and the smallfolk have basically no rights if an…

@avclub-6eee520b390220bbb4ac1911caf8f4d5:disqus Bolton wouldn't have had to make up his mind so early; holding onto Theon was a good bet either way. If Bolton had stayed loyal(ish) to Robb and Robb won the war, he'd presumably want to execute Theon and wouldn't mind if he was a bit damaged (though Roose's comment…

@avclub-81c603201624a8dad9d7ca5ebc98329e:disqus It was a bit cryptic, but the gist of it was that they were concerned that the wolf and the lion (Stark & Lannister) were getting ready to go to war, and that this would be a problem if it happened "too soon." You could take that to mean that they were hoping for an…

@avclub-d980b15d49101608dc407770f35b1d75:disqus Especially when the random anthologies are out of print. I agree, the new collection will probably make a big difference. It might even attract some new readers who don't feel like reading a 100,000,000-page series of novels but would dig some shorter new-to-them ASOIAF…

@avclub-d980b15d49101608dc407770f35b1d75:disqus Even though the sack of King's Landing wasn't described until later, I'm pretty sure Ned had some dialogue in season 1 that made it clear he was concerned for the children's lives. And Robert's attitude toward Dany and her potential children was obvious. So I think you…

The Tickler— the guy at Gregor's death camp who was in charge of torturing people to death while asking them "is there gold in the village, where is the Brotherhood," etc. In the book, Arya becomes particularly obsessed with him and his repetitive questions, and she puts him on her list, but she doesn't use one of…