Isn't that kind of what you'd expect of a guy after he has his only child burned alive?

Yeah, no. That is not going to happen.

Yeah, the Jon stabbing genuinely was rushed and didn't really make very much sense as presented. At the very least, if they were going to do it this way, they shouldn't have made such a big deal of the scene of Thorne letting them through the Wall, which already failed to make sense since Jon would have sailed back to…

Yes, if they'd switched the two, it would have made a lot more sense.

You know what else fucking sucks? Macbeth. Lady Macbeth disappears for an act and then reappears all crazy and remorseful for murdering Duncan and then she kills herself offscreen. What kind of hack wrote that one?

They explicitly showed Brienne choosing Stannis over Sansa! That was basically the text of her plot this episode. Sansa literally lights the candle right after Brienne heads off to take out Stannis.

D&D are just following Martin's lead as to having characters constantly barely miss each other in increasingly unrealistic ways.

I still don't really get the idea that Benioff and Weiss hate Stannis and are purposefully trying to make him look worse than he does in the books. Stannis is a giant, humorless dick in the books who uses black magic to murder his brother and likes burning people alive. Stephen Dillane's performance has made me *far*…

I feel like, even without a good conversation, every scene from the time Stannis finds Selyse's body gives us a pretty good idea that Stannis realizes he has made a horrible mistake, and that all that's left is the dying.

Yes. This. I also thought Stannis's plot in the show more or less made perfect sense this season. It's the story of a man selling his soul and ultimately realizing that by doing so, he's condemned himself to exactly the fate he thought selling his soul would prevent. I thought it was quite effective, and that Dillane…

Well, they've got Davos at the Wall now, and he was essentially our viewpoint character for Stannis for four seasons. I suppose he could do that at the Wall, as well, except that it's not at all clear what Davos's role going forward will be.

They're very good at coming up with nice character interactions within the structure of Martin's larger plot. They're not great at plotting on their own. To be fair, though, by books 4 and 5 Martin's gotten to be pretty terrible at plotting himself, though in a different way.

That is not a landslide by any historical measure. 1988: 426-111; 1984: 525-13; 1980: 489-49; 1972: 520-17; 1964: 486-52. Those are electoral college landslides.

Idaho had one Democrat and one Republican.

There's no precedent for a VP serving as a cabinet secretary, but I don't think it's technically impossible. No modern VP would want that, though.

Obama didn't win the EC in a landslide by any historical measure. And the previous Congress was 26 Democratic, 21 Republican, 3 split, with no Obama landslide in the offing.

If we look at Obama's first congress, the Democrats controlled 33 states and Republicans controlled 15 (with Idaho a 1-1 split), so it's not a totally crazy prospect for the Democrats to have a majority, or for it to be split.

Didn't she end up winning Wisconsin? Minnesota is a puzzler, though.

Segundus is not the narrator of the book. The book is narrated in third person omniscient, and I believe Clarke has suggested that the narrator is a woman, living rather later in the nineteenth century.

I don't think they stated it outright, but I thought the implication was that Selina's party (aka the Democrats) will have control of the Senate, but that control of the House is totally unclear. Also, you don't even need a 25-25 split, although that's probably what they'll give us. You just need enough states split…