My girlfriend, watching that scene: “At long last, someone finally found a reason to play ‘I’m in Love With My Car’!”

There was a script, but frequently directors or other actors would improvise on set. The performer who was being subjected to the new activities would frequently feel like they couldn’t object due to social pressure. This is intended to address that.

He wasn’t even the best Democratic senator in his own fucking state. And I live here.

No. It’s not at all that it was once applied secretly. It was once applied so openly that nobody ever thought to discuss it, but that’s an entirely different thing. Do you think that Jim Crow laws were secretly applied due to potential public outrage? Do you think that the pressure to ghettoize and exploit minorities…

And you’ll be fighting whalers! (They’re bored, because there ain’t no whales and they’re out of tales and sang their whaling tunes.)

It’s not just the narration, either. Everything is badly over-dialogued and ludicrously telegraphed, like the nuclear reactor scene where it’s not enough to cut from Adam eating lemon sherberts to showing someone finding a lemon sherbert in the empty reactor—they have to look down a 200-foot pit and say, “That’s odd!…

You say “no longer”, but I’m reading a book about how in 1933, the State Department privately speculated that Hitler’s early crackdowns on Jewish citizens were “the inevitable result” of “Jewish domination of intellectual life” in Germany. They privately instructed employees at State to refuse visas to Jewish…

I’m sure you’re right.

Probably they enforce each other a lot--once your abuser gets inside your head like that, you can become convinced that you’ll get better treatment if you can only tear your fellow captives down. It’s tremendously sad how easily someone with no scruples or ethics can create a system in which the people they hurt wind…

Exactly. We’re not pro-choice because it attracts voters, we’re pro-choice because women have the inalienable right to bodily autonomy and that needs to be respected. I’ve had this same conversation with older Democrats about trans rights, and it’s a very similar story--they feel like they shouldn’t have to defend a…

The whole story is about a bunch of petty morons getting caught up in a meaningless squabble over an empty throne and ignoring a bigger danger even as it becomes more and more and more obvious. I’m not trying to say that it says something about you that you really thought the most important thing about the show was…

But the whole point is that because they don’t know about or don’t believe in the threat, they’re taking actions for their own short-term gain but Westeros’ long-term downfall. Literally everything is intended to be seen through the prism of, “Oh shit, these guys don’t understand that the real war hasn’t even started…

And Dany needed to be a much slower boil than she was. Honestly, that’s where you can see the rush at its worst—she should have swooped in like a savior, blasting the Red Keep to bits even after Cersei surrendered but sparing the city. Then she kills the surrendered soldiers, then she governs like she did in Mereen…

Do the actual wars feature an army of the undead battling giant fire-breathing lizards? Because Wikipedia is really quiet on that score.

Oh, if you want my subversive ending? Well, you should have said.

No. The supernatural threat is literally the very first thing the series ever establishes. The books literally begin with the White Walkers, and the first time we see the Starks is when there is a deserter driven so mad with terror that he would rather die than return to the Watch. The entire series is a slow, gradual…

Well, if I was plotting it out, I would have had the Battle of Winterfell go very very badly. Basically, the armies are forced to retreat to avoid a total, devastating loss that would wipe them out and give the Night King an overwhelming force of his own. They arrive at King’s Landing barely ahead of the Night King’s…

Okay, but imagine that they’d blown up the Death Star with, like, forty minutes left in the movie, and the rest of it was Leia arguing with General Dodonna about who should be in charge of the Rebel Alliance. It would feel weird and anticlimactic, right?

They should have lost Winterfell. It should have been a rout, forcing them to flee rather than lose their armies, and they should have gone to King’s Landing mere days ahead of the Night King’s host. The final battle should have been there, it should have been the final episode, and the armies of the dead should have…

Let me put it this way: I would have been more satisfied with an “everyone dies because they couldn’t put aside their differences and unite against the greater threat” ending than the “...um, guess the Night King and his armies were NBD after all, carry on with the petty bickering over who gets to sit on the big…