What's happened to Ghost? Is he at Castle Black?

Yeah, I wish Jon had mentioned the Bolton thing. Roose Bolton personally murdered Jon's brother, and he still asked him for help, which is a direct parallel to what he's asking of Olly.

So, not only is bunches of stuff clearly wrong (Grey Worm is alive; Shireen, Selyse, and Melisandre left the Wall with Stannis; Jon is going to Hardhome to retrieve Wildlings, not taking them there; Sansa encounters Theon in a completely different way), it also fails to predict virtually anything that actually did…

Ah, right, that. Catch phrases are different, though.

Hmm…yes. Random people on the internet have been confidently stating she'll be in a few episodes this season, but Google gives no sign of this.

Olly doesn't even seem alive until he bites, and they roll over white?

That is interesting. I was thinking Sean Bean was, but then I remembered he dies at the end of Episode 9. I see that Dinklage, Fairley, Williams, Clarke, and Turner are also in 9 episodes in Season 1.

Yara's back this season, isn't she? I've no idea what she'll be doing, though.

The North Remembers!

I've rather greatly enjoyed the fact that I don't really know where things are going. Was looking at the westeros forum topic on this episode before the AV Club review went live, and it was basically an unreadable mess of people whining about how everything is ruined.

Eh. Olly has motivations. Satin is just a name, like virtually every Night's Watch person at Castle Black in Dance with Dragons. Jon sends away Grenn and Pyp and Thorne, who are nice two dimensional characters, and Sam, an actual main character. Bowen Marsh, I guess, qualifies as a two dimensional character. Everyone…

I think calling someone a "villain" implies a hero. But I suppose Dany being a villain doesn't require the Great Masters to be heroes.

Well, that is a cool line. It's just that I had absolutely no memory of it.

The first season they were much more loose with backstory, because they still weren't sure what they were going to include or not. They've gotten a lot tighter since then.

My understanding was that the viewers' guide had excised Victarion and Aeron from the Greyjoy family tree but left Euron. But in fact it only shows Balon and his children.

The show seems to have forgotten about Rickon, so that might be it, too.

Euron?

So the Great Masters and the Sons of the Harpy are the heroes? This seems like a substantial misreading of the text.

I can kind of see why guys like Marsh and Thorne and Yarwyck, who weren't on the Great Ranging, wouldn't necessarily have fully invested in the reality of the threat from beyond the Wall. I'm a bit disappointed in Dolorous Edd, though, who knows just how real the Others are.

Since they apparently haven't cast him, I suppose it won't happen, but it'd have been cool if he'd have showed up with Olenna as Tyrell muscle in King's Landing.