Slight, but important correction: the maesters don’t give Viserys the choice between his wife or child’s life. The choice they give him is between his child and neither — there’s no option where Aemma lives any more.

I think about the pre-Kinja days all the time.  GOT and TWD would have HUNDREDS of comments within 2 hours of posting.  It would take me hours to get through reviewing them.  Then...lucky to see a 50 spot on a talkback these days

It’s not even really an accurate recap...I’m absolutely sure that the Maesters present the choice to Viserys as saving the child at the expense of the mother...or losing BOTH mother and child. Not, as the recap states, saving the child OR the mother.

Agree. Especially Bran’s storyline. That was so fucking dull and, in the end, pointless. Maybe if they had made Bran appear more important and helpful, more people would’ve been ok with him on the throne.

I guess 200 years isn’t a massive amount of time anyway, and I feel King’s Landing looks far more advanced in this show, it’s in its glory years.

I thought it could have been interesting for Dany to literally “break the wheel” and establish a proto-democracy (an idea Sam is laughed at for suggesting in the series finale we got), only for Jon to rebel against her because he believes feudal monarchy is right and just.

Not to “um actually” your notes at the end too much, but “a song of ice and fire” is a thing within the fiction of the books that several characters talk about—it’s not just a nudge-nudge-wink-wink meta reference!

Yeah in season 6 you could see the train started going off the rails . Season 7 when characters were teleporting all over the show , a bird went mach 10 and characters all became thin caricatures saying “mah queen” or being a drunken idiot the train was busy derailing . The last season was the inevitable trainwreck

It’s been awhile since I saw Season One, but I thought that the whole “Baratheon black hair” thing was just the dominant genetic trait: Baratheon kids always have black hair and so Robert‘s blonde haired kids can’t actually be his offspring...not that black hair is “superior”.

(And weren’t most Targaryens born of incest…

Yet, for the next 3,000 years after they were built, almost nothing changed in Egypt except for the “huge pyramids are too expensive, so let’s not build them anymore” thinking.

Although I don’t disagree with the rest as a slight correction they *did* specifically say that all attempts to turn the baby had failed. So, while we didn’t see them try, it’s not that they just jumped straight to surgery. 

Agree her being a woman had nothing to do with it. Disagree that it was setup well. That people determined to defend it have to make examples from random little bits throughout the series only proves that the writers poorly set the table for that plot “twist”.

I think it’s interesting because I know what you described was the impression we were supposed to be left with, but the writing down the stretch was so piss-poor that they did a horrible job communicating Dany’s development in that direction. The writers really seemed to approach the show like their goal was just to…

Yeah, the objection should be to how rushed and badly written it was, not that it happened altogether. It was obvious where we were going; it was just poorly executed.

I audibly wondered why they would do this??!

You know, I had a similar thought about how virtually little has changed in society in the two hundred years between the two shows and wondered whether that stretched credulity.

I think Matt Smith and Milly Alcock (Rhaenyra) is great casting. Smith is a charming tyrant and and Rhaenyra already comes with an edge to her, I just hope they don’t make it creepy between them. We can have some complicated affection without it being incest.

A perfectly acceptable, if not at times, galvanizing prologue. As Jenna mentioned in this recap, the cross-cutting between the jousting and the Targaryen Cesarian was brutal and effective elevating the pathos at hand.

Hightower:

Two points: