This is a really savvy point. They all keep emulating the worst MCU movie.

He was! And if there'd never been another MCU movie, he wouldn't have stuck out in the slightest.

Yup. I forgot where IM2 came in.

I *should* but I forgot where IM2 came in.

Yes. There were four stand-alone movies before Avengers! And only the last one did any significant set-up, and even that fit pretty well into the movie's story.

This is the thing right here; everyone wants to dive right in with the whole saga, but the MCU connective tissue in Iron Man 1 was basically just the Sam Jackson cameo.

I dunno…since the soft reboot, I'm not sure I see him as much of a psycho. He's a villain, he's going to do villain stuff, but he doesn't seem to do stuff as pointlessly cruel as Joffrey or Ramsay. Or even Cersei.

That makes sense, too. So, if Bran denies his title, and nobody knows where Arya is, Jon actually is next in line?

Jamie for sure. Whole scene seemed to be setting up a split between him and Cersei.

Yeah, I think Bran's dialogue was meant to establish that he won't be seeking the lordship. Jon basically holds it by right of conquest, with Sansa providing a lot of legitimacy.

It's about 50-50 right now, isn't it? Davies stayed with Tennant and Moffat stayed with Capaldi.

Yeah, looks like they're doing a (not so) soft reboot on the entire Iron Islands, not just Euron. I'm sure Theon and Yara will show up soon, but I bet they pretty well gloss over where Dany's fleet came from.

Many writers before them have described the alchemy of the writer's mind and the character's mind as a lot more complicated than that. Besides, there's the whole "death of the author" thing.

I think that's pretty close to Word of God interpretation, which is what made it very interesting that they were the first two Stark children to reunite.

"Well, at least you are honest enough to admit it."

Imagine missing the point so completely, it *must* be intentional…

Especially since Murdock is pointedly Catholic, which is not usually associated with Born Again status.

"Mom"! There's another one!

I dunno, three examples over three decades doesn't seem like an endless return to well-worn tropes to me. I'm sure we can think of more, and I'm not sure where "the line" is, but I'm pretty suspicious that divorced 40-something women with kids are over-represented on TV.

But a lot of those colonists were killed/hurt by outside forces, at least. There's a sense that the Federation government cares/takes care of it's people in a way that current governments do not. But these folks were on the frontier.