Not saying that you're wrong, but Osha was with him for a long time, and that seems like exactly the kind of thing she might teach him?

They definitely were talking about the books, but some prisons do actually have access to HBO. So it's not impossible.

Welcome to The A.V. Club's daily coverage of Orange Is The New Black Season 4. In order to acknowledge the different paces at which people will watch the season, remember the guidelines:

It wouldn't be an impressive TV special effects spectacle if there weren't a few dodgy moments. That's what reminds us it's so impressive!

As the very next sentence notes (people are really copy/pasting this first sentence a lot, so clearly I should have not done a two-part call response on this, that's on me), the EPISODE accomplished lots from a plot perspective. It was the battle itself, and the machinations within, that lacked the type of character…

I'm using "narrative" where I should probably use "characterization"—there are clear plot purposes to the battle, but it's the character dynamics that felt muddled/weak to me.

You can't purposefully be an outlier critic when you write a review before there are any other reviews—that headline was written right after I watched the episode, not after I saw the others and said "OH SHIT, here's my chance to have people jump down my throat for not loving this."

Give me a reason to think that Rickon might have had his own sense of agency/purpose, and I might have thought he wouldn't die. Give me a sense of Jon's specific relationship with Rickon, and maybe I understand his actions outside of them being necessary to serve the battle narrative. The show coasted on "Rickon is in…

All signs—or at least last reports—point to there being two more shortened seasons, resulting in 13 episodes total.

It's interesting to read this, because I didn't really feel it—there are moments in the battle that actively support this, but I think I had trouble separating the "war is hell" reality Jon faces with the way the episode (admittedly shaped by the "hype" around it) was reveling in the effects/scale of the battle, and…

I don't think it's reasonable to say the show successfully sketched in Karstark and Umber as actual characters such that we see them as anything more than pawns of Ramsay's villainy.

Sansa not bringing in the Knights of the Vale before the battle: I totally understand.

If this is true, then why not attack immediately after Ramsay send in his men to surround them? Hundreds more people died in the intervening period, and so the timing makes far more sense for the structure of the episode (spending more time in the battle, more twists and turns and impressive action) than it does for…

But a ballet is a standalone piece of art, without the burdens created by seriality. There is nuance to the way the battle is staged, but the storytelling that led up to it and emerges after at are my points of objection, and are key to understanding this as the penultimate episode of a television season and not…

I'll be honest: amidst all of Jon's brooding, I don't know if I'd say with such conviction what he would or would not do.

We're playing semantics, but petulant for me implies a child-like stubbornness, not a rationalized disappointment, or even a sort of intellectualized nit-picking that I can understand can be frustrating.

Ah, here we go—real dialogue. I think what I'm struggling with is the way you're building this particular straw man. I don't ignore aesthetics in this review, nor do I build some type of elaborate theoretical argument that floats above the text. I may even share some of your frustration with some ways that theoretical…

Apply directly to the forehead.

I suppose there's a perspective from which this is true, but I don't really understand it: I made an argument (which I do not retract in that comment), people disagreed with it (which is not problematic—my goals do not include persuading people that I'm right and they're wrong), and the discussion was veering off in…

We can add this to the list of really interesting readings of Jon's role in this battle that I'm struggling to find evidence for textually—this is very true, but I didn't feel that much associative connection with Jon's past/approach to war/etc. outside of the moment where we literally get his POV. Everything else…