Bronn gets much better dialogue than the dragons, though.

My worry is that the showrunners are basically just keeping LF around Winterfell in order to be killed in some suitably dramatic way, and haven't actually given any serious thought to either his schemes involving Sansa or her schemes involving him, since they're never going to play out… not unlike the way they first…

You're not wrong, but… it's not like bankers in the real world aren't prone to prioritizing the short-term bottom line over long-term economic stability. Hell, it's arguably their primary weakness.

Everything Arya has done, she did because (she thought) her family was dead and she had no home to return to. Now she's discovered that wasn't true, and she's back in Winterfell, so it makes sense for her to be somewhat more comfortable being who she is. Granted who she is has *changed*, but that cuts both ways……

They have no chemistry on screen, and a romance would interfere with the story rather than advance it. IMHO, of course.

Irrelevant. Supernatural story elements in a fictional world don't mean that all bets are off and the laws of physics (or armed combat, or whatever) don't apply any more. Internal consistency is still important. A battle scene either works according to its own logic, or it doesn't.

That hints at the tricky question of how you survive at all, actually, in a world where winters can last years, during which there are presumably no growing seasons and hence no new harvests. Logically, every population center in Westeros should be surrounded by grain silos!…

*North* of the bay? I doubt it — that would mean the Dothraki would've had to circle King's Landing itself, and then cross the Blackwater Rush as well, before they got to the armies approaching from the south.

Yeah, they are (in ways that are more of less blatant depending on the details). But filling in the blanks is always an interesting exercise. ;-)

Euron claims to have a fleet of a thousand ships. Even if he's exaggerating by an order of magnitude, that's still a massive navy by the standards of the day. (Remember a few seasons ago when Stannis was stuck on Dragonstone, and hiring a sellsail fleet of just 30 ships was enough to put him back in the war?…)

The terrain in general was odd; we've never seen rock formations like that anywhere else in Westeros. It doesn't actually contradict anything that I know of, but it was unusual enough to capture my attention.

Dany's HQ is an island. (Yes, the original decision to go to Dragonstone remains an obvious artifact of "writerly convenience" and is otherwise unexplained and strategically stupid, but it is what it is.) She presumably used only as many ships as necessary to ferry some Dothraki and their mounts to the mainland. Those…

Yeah, the historical parallels have always been part of what makes this show great (well, the source material anyway; all credit to GRRM). For anyone who ever imagined what things might have been like if the Mongol hordes had continued into western Europe, here you go!…

Indeed. This was one of the instances where the writers actually *didn't* ignore the implications of the geography. The line from Tarly about the army needing to cross the Blackwater Rush gave us a sense of where the battle took place, and the advantage was clearly to Dany.

One of the top five? Okay, out of 64 episodes so far, that only means it's at or above the 92nd percentile. Sounds like an A- to me! ;-)

That was great! But what did Jon say in reply? I couldn't quite make it out; it sounded like he asked "More?", which didn't make any sense.

Nuclear weapons might be too strong a comparison. They're more like jet fighters. Think of, say, the Third Crusade being fought with the crusaders having the advantage of air support.

Skirmishes? This was just one battle, yes, but it was a strategically pivotal one. Losing its food supply (and a good chunk of the Lannister and Tarly infantry) will dramatically change the prospects for King's Landing.

Except there was no moment when he tried to flee. He stuck by Jaime's side (even trying to tell *him* to flee) until he was given the order to man the Scorpion, then he went and did that (albeit with a reluctant look). It might not have been altruistic, but he did at least seem to be operating from a sense of duty.

But science is a lot harder to develop when you don't have reliable natural cycles… there is no pattern to the seasons in this world, and related to that (presumably) no pattern to various astronomical phenomena. We don't even know if the planet has consistent magnetic poles. Scholars in Westeros might have *tried* to…