Looked that way to me, too. But with the low lighting and quick cuts in those combat scenes, it was far from easy to tell what exactly was happening to whom.

I didn't read it that way at all. Arya's major epiphany in the episode was when she learned Jon had retaken Winterfell, and outside the inn, seeing the men in the cart set off south for King's Landing, she reconsidered her own plans and turned her horse in the other direction, heading north.

Jon Snow knows nothing, remember? ;-) He should be dead six times over by now. He just keeps failing upwards.

I worry that you're right not because it's inherently necessary from the plot dynamics, but rather because the showrunners know that audiences want a big dramatic battle-laden showdown, and long sieges don't really make for that.

It's supposed to be, yeah. He claims to have a thousand ships. Which is something I try not to think about too much, because it requires one to wonder how a island-based kingdom with no natural resources and no allies managed to build a thousand ships in a matter of months.

I could trip over Ed Sheeran on the sidewalk and not have the slightest idea who he is, so the scene didn't bother me.

Not as stark a contrast (no pun intended) as one might imagine, I think. Jon was saying that people shouldn't be punished for guilt by association — do not visit the sins of the father upon the son, for instance. Arya, on the other hand, was talking to a room full of people who were at the Red Wedding and *actually…

Temper tantrum? Melisandre is a murderous religious fanatic who got everyone Davos ever cared about brutally killed. She has no redeeming qualities. Her one and only purpose was as a plot device to resurrect Jon, and that's done now. The only annoying thing in that scene was that Jon let her leave.

It’s not that important a distinction, really. Last I checked we were still a free society that doesn’t punish people for thoughtcrimes, so being “radicalized” isn’t an offense. As for being a “suspect,” that means you haven’t been found guilty of doing anything wrong, so it’s certainly not grounds for being hunted…

It does feel like something got edited out at that point. Suddenly Audrey's AWOL, Laura's arm is off again, and she's apparently in whatever city she needs to be in…

Yeah, that last sentence seems crucial here. Otherwise, the whole pickup scene would come across as wildly implausible (and it kinda did at first, b/c we didn't know Laura well enough at that point in the episode)… what woman would even stop to talk to a much larger guy who approaches her alone after dark in an empty…

The contrast between this, and this season's last arc of Agents of SHIELD, has made Tuesday nights really bizarre. A few episodes in an alternate reality produced more genuine emotion on that show than Flash has come close to with all its forced mopiness, because the writers and actors knew how to hit every note for…

"We can't get into ARGUS because they have a shield that disables Barry's speed. On an unrelated note, where can we hide Iris that Savitar can't get to her?"

Hush up! Xander wasn't the "comic relief" character on Buffy — he was the Everyman. The one with no powers, no magic, no dark secrets, who nevertheless held the rest of the team together and kept morale up. The show would never have worked without him.

Here's the thing, though: when you're a vigilante, working outside the law pretty much comes with the territory, so those compromises are baked in from the start. When you're a government agency, on the other hand, with all the power of the state behind you, the law is the only thing that legitimizes your existence,…

Wow, a classic case of YMMV here. I thought the Quentin/Rene stuff was a pointless diversion from the interesting parts of the episode. OTOH, I loved seeing Felicity confront Oliver for not trusting her, and even more loved seeing Diggle confront Lyla for running a government operation in blatant violation of due…

Personal rankings aside, isn't it friggin' amazing that we can casually list 15 serious comic-to-TV adaptations on the air in a single year? Good times…

Then they have been trained wrong. That’s the whole goddamn point of the piece.

Actually, under the law, they absolutely *could* have offered more generous incentives, among various other options.

Voters like you describe — genuinely undecided swing voters — are rare as hens’ teeth, whether they’re “moderate” or not. Despite how trendy it is for people answering surveys to claim to be “independent,” more probing questions reveal that the vast majority of them have clear ideological preferences, and vote…