Take your enjoyment where you can get it, I guess. Me, I was thinking "Aww, don't tell me we're gonna waste the last few minutes of the episode on a pointless action scene! Can't we just cut to the outcome?"

Yeah, this doesn't bother me. The power struggles have always been what makes the show interesting. They have a human element, and offer thematic allegories to real life. By way of contrast, a battle against an army of interchangeable personality-free undead monsters sounds pretty boring, and frankly tangential to…

Except the way the fight was edited, at first I thought it was Euron she'd stabbed. Needlessly confusing.

He needs to have something up his sleeve, because a character like him is never without a plan. But what is it at this point? What are his motivations for just hanging around, randomly pissing off Sansa and Jon?

Yep, de gustibus non est disputandum. There are (and have been) lots of attractive women on this show, but I have never at any point considered Sansa one of them.

Okay, that's a semi-plausible interpretation, although it still wasn't clear in the episode. Remaining open questions, then:

Unfortunately, there are even fewer *good* ways. An awful lot of shows and movies have great first and second acts, but then fail to stick the landing. I really, *really* don't want to see that happen with GoT.

Seems to me the manipulation of the lords' fears of foreign barbarians was all coming from Cersei (and yes, it definitely evoked Trump)… Jaime didn't play that card with Tarly so much as try to appeal to his sense of self-interest.

They said *that*? Great. Yet again (I'm reminded of Arya's plot last year, among other things), the showrunners go for the most obvious surface-level meaning of what they're putting on screen, rather than thinking about the layers of strategic subtext that countless viewers seem to have no problem imagining…

Tyrion's plan makes strategic sense in a lot of ways, as presented: use native Westerosi armies to besiege King's Landing, thus belying Cersei's claims about foreign barbarians and undermining the loyalties of her remaining obedient lords, while using the Dothraki and Unsullied to attack King's Landing, where they're…

Ev'body loves Colonel Angus!…

In the category of unexplained things, this one doesn't bother me so much. Varys's mission to Dorne presumably involved getting relevant intel on Ellaria and her daughters *before* agreeing to an alliance with them, after all, and he's certainly had time and opportunity to share that with Tyrion and Dany.

More than likely, even. It would give her ongoing leverage over Euron, who after all she has no reason to trust.

In the category of "things they didn't bother to explain despite all the other exposition," though, what exactly was Jorah *doing* there in the first place? He was apparently residing in a cell… but if he had any access to research materials on greyscale, or any other maester was looking after him, we don't know about…

Not unlike a lot of contemporary American universities, then, right?

Well, Sam also mentioned a medicinal ointment afterward, so there's that. Presumably only the Maesters have the recipe. (And since taking off the grayscale involves touching it, which involves the fairly serious risk of catching it oneself, it's not like there are lots of Maesters waiting in line to conduct clinical…

What the heck were those fireballs, anyway? There's no such thing as gunpowder or cannon in this show…

For all the time the show is spending on exposition lately, it's amazing how much relevant information we *don't* know sometimes. Who was sailing with Yara? (Apparently not any of the leaders except Ellaria, which is awfully convenient — no risk to Dany, or Tyrion, or Varys, or Olenna.) How many ships did she have…

Castle Black is really undersupplied these days. They're all out of ravens…

It really does baffle me how stupid both Sansa and Jon are being toward Baelish. He's the guy who saved both their asses in a critical battle just three episodes ago, for heaven's sake — certainly not something he was obliged to do — yet they're both treating him with disdain.