He's tried white noise machines, but the only thing that can get him to sleep at night is the soothing sound of murder.

All good points. I'm just bracing myself for the potential disappointment.

Was he drinking the ale that Ray had mentioned earlier? You know how drunkenness can often mask the sounds of mass murder.

I still remember when Lena Headey trolled us all by posting a heart made of goddamn stones on her Instagram. We all had a good laugh, that day.

SANDOR: I'm just going to sublimate all my murderous urges into chopping this wood!

I mean, isn't this just going to be Jaime? At this point I feel like they could call the final episode "Heart of Stone" and it still wouldn't be LSH.

McShane made it work fairly well, because he's a great actor. I hope something else comes of his character's death besides, just, proving to Sandor that there's no escaping the cycle of violence.

Yeah, even Theon's been given human, understandable reasons for doing all the terrible things he did. Cersei's motivations seem to just be incest and greed.

This idea just exhausts me, because it doesn't really make sense. The implication would be that Jaqen's been grooming Arya to be an assassin since before her father was killed, which was the catalyst for her quest for revenge, which is what drew her to becoming an assassin in the first place.

True; I was thinking more like, "Arya" gets killed at the end of Episode 9, and then comes back at the beginning of Episode 10. Nothing super drawn out.

Storywise, you're totally right. Stannis served his purpose, failed at his big objective, and totally deserved to die. And Brienne, of all people, had plenty of reason to kill him. There's really no reason I can think of for him to still be alive. Unless his being alive could somehow help Jon retake Winterfell, which…

That's true. Hadn't thought of that.

It really feels like everything in King's Landing is there to act as a counterpoint to the fact that the really important stuff is happening elsewhere, and that all the petty wheeling and dealing about who controls the Iron Throne is all a huge non-starter in the face of the true annihilation that's on its way.

It was a little weird though. On one hand, yeah, he wants Margaery to tow the line, and is probably already suspicious as to whether or not she's really accepted the Faith, so he's testing her. But also, if he really wanted to punish and "purify" Olenna, he would just send Lancel and Co. to snatch her up with no…

Yeah, everybody in King's Landing is unlikable in one way or another. It's hard to root for someone when the choices are, you know, the Lannisters and their incest dynasty, or the uber-fundamentalist, forehead scarring "cult."

I don't know what the point would be of having Stannis alive, but I totally agree with you that he isn't dead. The characters are practically falling all over themselves to talk about how dead he is: "Remember Stannis? The guy who's totally dead? Decapitated, even? Well, he's still dead! Just a reminder!"

I doubt it. If they were pulling a stunt like that, I feel like they would have shown "Arya" actually dead as a big cliffhanger, and then revealed that real Arya was alive at a later date.

As soon as we know that Sandor is alive, we know that he's not going to spend the rest of his time on the show building churches, and that it's only a matter of time before something forces his hand back to violence. So everything that happened with Ray and his flock felt kind of perfunctory, just there to be the…

Oh, cool. It just feels like they have a lot of ground to cover if the Starks are going to mount an attack on the Boltons before the end of the season. There's alliances to repair, oaths to cash in on…

Christoph Waltz is too impish to play Saruman. It would have to be someone with more menace and gravitas. This is just off the top of my head, but Mads Mikkelsen might be a decent choice. That said, if they ever do remake the films, they should probably just use whatever superior technology they have at that time to…