Right. Who needs a lengthy conversation when we have Stephen Dillane's face to tell us what's going on?

Oh, not to say there weren't great parts of it. It's just that Democratic presidential candidates don't compete with each other to hold nuanced positions about illegalizing second trimester abortions in order to please all sides of the abortion debate. That's not how it works. Each party has a clear, fairly absolutist…

Subject to an extensive set of unwritten rules.

I suppose it doesn't make too much sense to hold things up if you're the Republicans and the choice is between the Democratic presidential candidate and the Democratic vice presidential candidate (or vice versa).

I mean, sure. They only have so much time, though. I guess I'm more willing to accept the dialogue shorthand and roll with it, because I'm more interested in seeing the psychological struggles than I am in some scenes of random extras being hungry.

I'll just note that, legally, a child's father is considered to be his mother's husband unless proven otherwise. Stannis has not proven to anyone's satisfaction that Cersei's children are not Robert's, so Joffrey and Tommen should legally rule until that proof can be provided and adjudicated, likely by a Great…

Shireen was curedish, though.

She found Arya, and then immediately lost her. And then she found Sansa, who wanted nothing to do with her. She did deliver Jaime to King's Landing, but only thanks to Roose Bolton's treachery.

With Sansa's rules and methods, how was she supposed to avoid getting raped by Ramsay (aside from by not going to Winterfell in the first place)?

But Stannis is desperate. He's trapped in the snow with no food.

Doesn't keep the VP from doing tons of executive branch stuff in the Office of the President. It'd never actually happen, but I don't think it's outright illegal.

Hmm…maybe 33-16-1? Too lazy to count again right now.

No, it's just not. It's a "solid electoral college victory."

It is just absolutely not true that every change in the show is designed to make Stannis look worse. They did a lot more to build up a loving relationship between him and Shireen, for instance. And Dillane's performance, for me at least, injected a lot of humanity into a character that I found it very hard to…

The pacing was rushed, but that's inevitable. I'm more concerned with the characters making decisions that make emotional sense for the character than I am with the situations presented being completely plausible and prepared for, which is basically impossible in a television show. I thought his failures in this…

But the House could just totally fail to pick someone permanently.

Wisconsin and Minnesota both have ten electoral votes, so switching them would not have changed the outcome.

The first two books end very strongly, especially AGOT. I'd generally say each book has had a worse ending than the one that preceded it.

I will just note that us book readers are in a really terrible position to judge whether plot elements that have been somewhat changed from the books still make sense. I remember so many book readers claiming that Tyrion's decision to murder Tywin made no sense in the show because they dropped Tysha. I don't believe…

Right. Stannis is actually a bigger asshole in the books. So far as I can tell, prior to the Shireen thing, the entire case for the showrunners hating Stannis and making him less sympathetic rested on 1) bald assertion; and 2) his somewhat greater willingness to human sacrifice complete stranger Gendry than book…