can you explain what it means? I think he meant that the castle's layout was too simplistic so he felt no drama in Pyp and Sam escaping from Tormund

Wildlings don't know about battle engineers

"Robb's strategy was he didn't really have one beyond bringing the fight to Tywin. That, in itself, doesn't win wars."

because they need to continue south, unopposed and pass through the wall quickly, they can only do that from Castle Black's gate

my take is that Varys did it, nobody else seems to give a damn about the dragons for some reason. I don't think Tywin even knows Jorah exists.

If Jon dies, the story up North dies, no amount of subversion could make that work.

but the story can continue without him and of course, it did. It's different with Jon, where if he dies, the story up North is over, there aren't any other characters right now that can pick up after him. Sure that can change overnight if/when Stannis shows up at the wall, but for this particular episode, he was…

Harrington is a manlet

they were going for a different feel altogether. The book has a hard fought battle, the show had the guy lose over his overconfidence, that was to emphasize how hubris dooms everyone and blah blah blah

slow development, yes. Deliberate, hmm not so much, the show just focused on King's Landing (shorthand for Tyrion of course) all season

the wildlings would never go for that, they consider the north to be their land by right

most of the ranger's battle duties would be spent in patrols, and they would probably use mostly swords for that

it looked badass as hell! like "I got your back brah, no prob" type of thing

both Grenn and Pyp died.

the episode was too expensive to not take notice

Hannibal got stabbed in the back by the Carthaginian senate, with proper reinforcements by sea and a not so underachiever brother he could have won, the strategy wasn't bad, but for some reason Hannibal never tried to cut off or wasn't successful at cutting off Rome from a major port city

Martin said he regretted not showing more of Robb's exploits in order to give the reader a better understanding of how huge he was while he commanded the north's troops.

true, but it's kind of his job to know this stuff too

but stopping the White Walkers is the ultimate plot of the show/books

let's see: for point one, I think that makes sense but the timeline from the moment Thormund's crew goes over the wall, to the attack on Castle Black is difficult to tell, and they would have needed too much time to raid the castle's supply lines for that plan to be effective. You can take for granted that the…