All I could think about is who had to sit around carving those House-specific pieces, and how long it must take, and how much redundancy there but be: "Stannis switched to the fiery heart of the Lord of Light. Ok, throw out all the old pieces!"

It seemed a lot more pointed to me than that. Davos knows Melisandre's methods; he saw what she did with Gendry and the leeches, and he saw her give birth to Shadow Stannis, and knows that she needs royal blood to do her business… in times of desperation he knows that Stannis uses Melisandre's magic, and there's…

There was something off about the whole thing. Stannis, who has often been a reluctant believer in the Lord of Light, suddenly willing to do the most unthinkable thing… Selyse, who has been the true believer, abruptly losing her resolve when it's too late… Melisandre seeming less like a potentially misguided zealot…

I feel like the only way Dorne doesn't turn out to be a waste of time is if Trystane turns out to be a spy/assassin or Myrcella ends up a sleeper agent. Besides that all we got was "Jamie did some thinking about Cersei in the desert."

Regardless of their abilities, it's still rather narratively convenient that they were so easily overrun. We've seen them form a pretty decent protective barrier with their shields, a substantial enough number of them could have done just that and made a shell around Daenerys. Impermeable? No. But better than taking…

Yeah, they must have had a really successful recruitment drive. "Hate the Mother of Dragons? Love gold masks? Want to die anonymously? Join the Sons of the Harpy!"

It's Turok-han syndrome: basically they're only as deadly and effective as the narrative needs them to be to suit the story.

Yeah, it's kind of trite and obvious. I never liked Stannis in the books, and maybe this is some shade of what GRRM was planning all along, but it just makes things so manichean: Stannis does an unforgivable thing, so he must be punished. What I've always appreciated about the story is that things haven't always been…

Not that anything Stannis did before this episode made any serious case for him being an effective ruler, but I feel like as of right now we can officially take him off the leaderboard for potential Kings of Westeros. Like, when he murdered his own brother via Shadow Queef it was bad, but seemed kind of par for the…

When I was a kid we had the Clue: The VCR Mystery Game, which was one of those unpopular experiments in combining what was basically a movie with a board game. I don't remember how to play it, mostly because we never did play the actual game, we just watched the movie. Which was amazingly campy and ridiculous and made…

I have binge watched the show on occasion; I watched most of the first season by myself and then went back and when I introduced my boyfriend to it, and then I did a full rewatch of the second season when it came out on DVD… it really does affect your mood. Like, by the time I was done with the second season I was…

It wouldn't be boring, I just feel like it would be so dark and disturbing spending so much concentrated time with Hannibal… I mean, I don't have a good feeling about Bedelia making it through the whole season, and I need a break from the constant feeling of dread.

I don't think I could deal with a first half of the season where it's all just Hannibal and Bedelia in Europe, watching Hannibal slowly erode Bedelia's sanity and resolve. This episode felt like a really successful experiment in focused storytelling, but it would start to seem claustrophobic after a while.

If they had reversed it and had the episode focus on Will, Jack and Alana hanging out and kind of refreshing us, like: "How's your healing going? Fine? Insides back inside?" we definitely would have been wondering what was up with Hannibal, but so would the characters, and it would have felt more natural. Not…

This is the formica table. Green is its color.

I made a 4:28 edit of 'Hey Jude' that contains all the 'Hey Jude' I ever need. It fades out right around the time Paul sings "Jude jude judeee jude judee judee" or whatever. You get enough of the coda, but not so much that you want to smash your head in with a brick.

Yeah, but the Hannibal cinematographers could make Chernobyl look full of gothic grandeur and beauty..

Yeah, the extent of the format changes are still pretty unclear: we know there are two teams, Stage and Street, and they're competing against each other in some way, but what remains of the original format? If the teams are in competition, they probably won't be pairing dancers from team Stage with ones from team…

Season 4, Episode 11, "The Fabulous Bitch Ball", otherwise known as the episode Latrice Royale went home. So it's ignominious for two reasons.

What this show has over almost any other show out there right now is confidence, which, considering how low the ratings are, is kind of astounding. To open the season, and follow a cliffhanger where the majority of the main cast is in jeopardy with a disorienting all-Hannibal-and-Bedelia episode is a huge risk, and…