Is Loras really that promiscuous? Maybe I'm forgetting. There was Renly… and there was Littlefinger's spy. Anyone else..?

Of course they weren't beholden to film exactly 30 episodes for the remainder of the series… they could have arranged to film a few additional episodes, or spread it over an extra year to increase it to 35 or 40.

I had the same thought as I typed. Guy's not even a B-lister!

Plus the whole homophobic persecution thing.

Isn't he pretty much an entirely different character though..? Right from the start he's been more of a composite of the Highgarden dynasty; he's the sole heir and was never in the Kingsguard. I attributed any changes to that fact, not his homosexuality. The character changes didn't strike me as "stereotypically gay"……

That's a bit over the top… I don't think he's a joke or stereotype. He's a gay character who is vaguely sketched, but that's only because he's a minor character with only a tangential influence on the plot, and his homosexuality is one of the only important narrative facts about him.

I didn't mind that. Couldn't Cersei give instructions to the Goldcloaks? In fact I think that was implied in one scene.

Er no, just the interesting details. Please read my comment I guess.

The show makes a profit, it doesn't cost money. They could do three more seasons instead of two. There is no financial motivation behind the limit — in fact HBO wants to do more seasons — it's purely a creative decision by the show runners.

There's no way we won't be at or past the Battle for Winterfell by the end of this season, the writers are already emphasising it.

That's their own arbitrary limit which they pulled out of the air and imposed upon themselves.

It's probably the thing I miss most. It was an awesome story line… the way the Freys seemed to have pacified the gullible Manderlys with a pack of outrageous lies about the Red Wedding, and Davos's feigned execution, only for the tables to completely turn; "The North Remembers". I really don't understand why they'd…

Same reason ebola exists mainly in Africa..? It's not unusual for an infectious disease to be localised to a particular region and climate. In fact the phenomenon has a name; "epidemic".

The show is definitely improving on the source material in a number of ways. Killing Selmy is a good way of raising the stakes in Mereen; GRRM has pretty much lost his balls by this point in the books and doesn't even kill B-listers — one of the reasons Mereen is so boring. The Tommen change is also really…

Mind thoroughly unblown. Your seed is strong argument doesn't make sense for a bunch of reasons, not least because Lyanna had dark hair. The fact that Arya liked one of Robert's bastards is super weak evidence. Is Jaqen Robert's bastard too..?

I don't have an issue with those things, they are crucial to most of fiction. My issue is that they are done poorly, and as a crutch for a lack of real substance.

Lovely.

Really… you didn't find this episode pretentious? Did you think it was intended as a straight-forward story? You didn't think it was trying to present itself as an obscure metaphor for some kind of deep insight into personal relationships, to be uncovered by literature students? The title card with the bear crying…

I think rubbish, pretentious episodes making it through production suspiciously coincide with Pen Ward leaving as show runner.

Who cares what it was a metaphor for? It didn't give any insight on the topic and it wasn't entertaining.