Structurally, on rewatching, I think it was there to seed doubt that Littlefinger would actually show up at the end, giving those viewers who had predicted his arrival a reason to think there could be another reasonable end to this battle.

I tried rewatching it yesterday and only reinforced my frustration—still impressive, still emptier than I felt it should have been.

DVDs are sitting on my shelf, but it lost my vote for a show to catch up on back in '09 to Buffy/Angel, so it's gone unwatched as I got distracted by grad school.

I like the way you're framing this, although I don't know if I'm really arguing that the two should be conflated. Rather, I think that the formalistic qualities of the episode spoke to the failures of the episode to engage in enough specific character motivations (which need not be ETHICAL in nature, necessarily) to…

Actually, I'm *J-J-jaded,* if we're getting technical. https://www.youtube.com/wat…

Here's the best thing I can tell you here: I'm glad you're optimistic. I do not want you to perceive my cynicism—I mean, *I'd* say criticism, but I understand where you're coming from—as some sort of parasite that I'm hosting, and which I'm hardwired to want to spread to others.

Yes, as others have noted—you've not revealed anything spoilery here, I know, but alluding to it opens up conversations that can go into more spoilery territory (like if someone answers your question).

Shayna, you're discussing parts of the next episode here, so I'm going to delete this—PLEASE be careful about which episode is being discussed when writing comments, per the comment guidelines outlined clearly above.

So, transcendent, then? Thanks!

Yeah, that's definitely not clear, but thanks for clarifying.

Please, for the sake of my sanity, go read my other reviews of this show (particularly those related to key Sansa episodes) and come back to acknowledge that this comment is some bullshit.

But I think the magnification only increases when we're left to wonder, instead of having the POVs from the books. We all have our own impressions of these characters from reading the books and watching the show, but now we're discovering how different those impressions are, and so it's only logical we'd debate over…

Let's continue that paragraph: "Now, to be clear, many things are accomplished in the episode as a
whole, and sound and fury is not a useless end in and of itself.
However, whereas the three previous battles have all felt in some way
transformative or generative as far as storytelling is concerned,
“Battle Of The…

I think that's ultimately my point: they delivered on spectacle, but the narrative flow into the battle gave them a lack of character stakes to explore, and thus it failed to resonate if the battle also reinforced all of our expectations for the conclusion.

With respect, you can't move par like that. You can't say "Well, low point is a B- because that's the lowest grade," unless that review said "This is a terrible episode," instead of "this was a bit below the show's high standards."

I think some of where the underlying assumptions are different—I saw your other comment, I'm happy to have given you a truly new experience—for us is that I've felt like that transition has been happening since the start of the season. This battle got Ramsay out of the way, but the coalition already felt established…

Webseries, please!

As the next sentence notes (I'm going to edit that sentence because people are leaping all over it and not clearly reading it in context of the following paragraphs, which may well be on me), I'm referring to the procedure of the battle itself rather than its outcome.

As is so often the case, I do think that the failures of this battle from my perspective are indeed built around what the show hadn't done to make elements of the battle resonate. We care about the broad strokes, but the procedures of it (Littlefinger's return being a big one) didn't land for this reason.

"A totally unnecessary waste of our time"—not even close to what a "B" represents, or what is said in the review.