The Boltons are all about ruling by fear; I get the feeling that once a real Stark (or Jon Stone) shows up to retake Winterfell, all of Ramsay's northern alliance will crumble.

Rent doesn't hold up because it isn't actually what everybody thinks it is, or wants it to be. For all its feints at counter-culturalism it ends up making its most radical character the prototypical gay martyr, who is funny, wise, and a literal Angel, who guides the straight woman back from the brink of death just in…

Well, Ramsey's just not very smart. Someone no doubt saw him lead Lady Walda and her baby into the kennel, and surely someone heard her screaming. I mean, the kennel's right there. If someone shows up with enough of a force to take Winterfell back, it's unlikely too many people are going to band around Ramsey for his…

I don't know. One of GRRM's big themes is that people can be brilliant strategists but be undone by their emotions and/or one random unfortunate coincidence at any time. I mean, Robb was a great military strategist, but he didn't realize that his personal actions would anger people enough that he'd be assassinated.

No you are not. It's the most ancillary of all the subplots. Reading about newly introduced Greyjoy sibling quarreling over the least-interesting piece of real estate in Westeros was eminently skippable. That said, maybe now that the show is moving more independently from the books they'll come up with a way to make…

Well, a third power could have sensed Mel's magic at work and then jumped in to intercept. But yeah, I feel like the occum's razor solution is probably true: Melisandre was trying to resurrect Jon, it just took a little extra time.

Yeah, never accept a hug from a psychopathic sadist.

Jon as a variation on Coldhands would work, except we never got much of a sense of what Coldhands' deal was, other than that he wasn't alive and didn't speak. And if they were going to make Jon a Super-Wight, I feel like they would have just given him the blue eyes right at the moment of resurrection. That's how it's…

I do kind of love that Melisandre's magic could only have a hope of working if she got to give Jon's toned body a delicate sponging.

It is a shame that the scene's verisimilitude was broken by a modesty toilette. This would have been an excellent, non-exploitative moment to even the score and throw some peen out there.

So, now that Jon's back, we can start debating the manner of his return. Was it Melisandre's magic, just slightly delayed? Did it have something to do with Ghost, who lifted his head just before Jon opened his eyes? Or was Ghost just sensing the magic in the room? Or was it a third, unknown thing, and that's what…

Yeah, seeing the younger generation be really into it made me feel simultaneously really happy and really old.

I'll second Molly on Mad Max: Fury Road. I saw it late in its run so I had already absorbed all the unlikely accolades and was ready to be impressed. By the time the first big chase scene took a detour through a writhing nuclear cloud, I was aware that my actual mouth was actually hanging open, like when people say…

Sometimes I feel like what GRRM is writing (and HBO is adapting) is a story where every character becomes compromised by the darkness either within or without. We've still got two whole books left, and the only characters that I can think of who remain generally "good" are Bran and maybe Brienne and Podrick. That's…

Kim will find a way to fall even from a prone position. She'll end up flipped over on her front. I love her to death, but she lacks the coordination of a baby giraffe on a tilt-a-whirl.

Kim couldn't even do Chi Chi's choreography in Converse All-Stars. She better hope for one of those "stand and sell it" songs.

I don't have a lot of hope for Kim's relationship with her mom, considering her mom obviously didn't sign the waiver to show her face unblurred in the shot of her and Wee Kim (Little Kim?!) together.

If the end result might be that "good' wins, but the winning side has to resort to such dark measures to prevail, I can live with that. Dark decisions for the right reasons; that's pretty much the world we live in now.

I don't think that "nothing ever changes, and everything is futile" is a bad theme for a story; I just think it's a bad theme for this story. I've said in the past that GRRM didn't create a Manichean world, and I have to revise that statement. GRRM created a world where people act like people—they're neither all good…

Well, I hope not. That's not really a story that I'm interested in. If the theme of ASOIAF is that nothing ever changes, and everything is futile, what was the point of the story in the first place?