He’s basically Darth Maul, stretched out over about the same number of episodes as Gus Fring or Marlo Stanfeld had to make an impression.

Yeah as crazy as that battle was, the way this all played out means that everyone spent eight seasons screaming about “Ice zombies!” and then it turns out the Army of the Dead was completely annihilated in a matter of hours because they have a pretty glaring Independence Day level weakness. The Great War was only one…

They kind of already did that when Littlefinger the White rode in with the Knights of the Vale to bail out Jon after his horrible failure at the Battle of the Bastards.

Also, after a 90-minute Army of Darkness homage, wouldn’t it be anticlimactic if the Night King is killed in one battle, and then we then get three episodes of Team Jon & Dany battling a bunch of anonymous living sellswords to settle the Iron Throne?

Well given that Jon has already accepted the title of King in the North and there are literally two members of the Night’s Watch remaining, I don’t think anyone cares about Jon’s vows making him ineligible for office. A far bigger problem for Jon’s claim is his relative lack of dragons and Unsullied/Dothraki.

It’s also weird that it’s been mentioned Howland is still alive in the present, and Meera was last seen going home to him, but we’ve only ever seen him onscreen in the Tower of Joy flashback. If Howland were to show up at Winterfell to verify Bran and Sam’s story, it would be a new actor. I don’t see them bringing in…

Sansa is too much of a politician to wind up with a man who can’t produce trueborn heirs, so Theon is right out. Although there aren’t a lot of age-appropriate marriage prospects left for her. Her biological first cousin Jon Snow is probably the least icky option left (I mean it’s significantly less gross than…

I thought they laid it on a little thick with all the talk about the crypts. Like, does anyone foresee a scenario in which they *don’t* all fall back into the crypts at the end of the battle and deal with skeleton-wight-Starks bursting out of the walls?

I like this theory as well, but my understanding is that the Night King is an invention of the show and has no counterpart in the books. Which would imply that GRRM did not create the Kingslayer sobriquet in order to foreshadow his ultimate slaying of the Night King.

I’m pretty sure he penetrated Melisandre before she broke out the leeches.

I appreciated the way they spent two full episodes on character work before the Army of Darkness battle. In many ways it redeems last season’s constant teleporting and silly narrative leaps. They took some shortcuts to get the entire cast to Winterfell, but wisely slowed down the pace to start winding down dozens of…

I just loved how Jamie’s choice to go back and save Brienne from the gladiator-bear wound up being so consequential to the overall story. At the time that was frequently cited as an all time worst episode. But if Jamie hadn’t saved her, she wouldn’t have saved Sansa (or indirectly freed Arya), and Brienne wouldn’t…

The thought experiment I like to play is — what if Marvel had tried to make a movie like Civil War after Iron Man 1&2 and The First Avenger, but *before* The Avengers?

Well, to put this all in perspective, $400k is so far away from “fuck you” money that you can actually be reduced to bragging about it on message boards in order to feel rich.

Yeah there are bits and pieces of this in the other movies as you guys are pointing out, I just feel like Tony Stark is let off the hook kind of easily after he gets that many people killed by creating Ultron. Also, the authorities have a quite reasonable reaction to all the devastation created by Ultron — “Hey next…

Yeah, Cersei’s claim to the throne is basically, “I blew up the rest of the King’s Landing elite and I have the Mountain and the Lannister army, so I get to be queen. Anyone have an issue with that?”

The weirdest thing about this movie is that Tony is totally responsible for Ultron, but nobody ever seriously calls him out on that and the movie seems to actually forget this as it goes on. Tony’s guilt over creating Ultron is the subtext of his later character arc, but Ultron isn’t even mentioned by name in later…

But it doesn’t, really. The Unsullied and Dothraki and Yara and the two dragons are loyal to Dany, not to the Iron Throne, so they don’t care who Jon’s parents are. The Northern lords are loyal to the Starks and hate the Targaryens, so they don’t care who Jon’s parents are. And Cersei has zero claim to the throne…

So it’s still weird to me that Jon’s parentage seems important to the show’s plot mostly because he’s committed accidental incest, but every time this plot point comes up it’s in the context of the legal line of succession to the Iron Throne, which the show has repeatedly demonstrated is irrelevant. Jon doesn’t even …

We’re bound to lose a few Starks and Lannisters by episode 6. There’s literally a zero percent chance of a piano dropping on Arya’s head, because that would mean we spent countless hours watching her get hit in the head with a stick learning to be a Faceless Man for no reason (other than to kill the Freys, I guess).…