Apocalypse has the mutant power of contrivance. He can do anything he needs to do to move the story forward.

At least we got to laugh before we cried about Summer and Hodor.

• Hodor. Hodor Hodor Hodor Hodor Hodor. Hodor’s story was heartbreaking. Of all the characters to kill off, why did it have to be him?!

That’s the worse. Bran made him have a seizure. All of Hodor’s life was about saving Bran by holding that door eventually. What a tragedy.

Ghost

And now his watch has ended too. And he held it indeed.

What pisses me off more than anything about last night’s episode is the shit I’ve had to wade through afterward.

When Brienne kneels in front of her, Sansa stops cowering, stands tall, and says the formal language you’re supposed to say (with a little help from Pod.)

I said the exact same thing to one of my friends. “Man, he really went down like a chump, didn’t he?” So much for the badass Areo Hotah.

Davos is really your only other option for a hero besides Brienne though he doesn’t have nearly the same combat skills as her.

Sansa didn’t knight Brienne, just took her to her service. There are traditionally no knights in the North, since knighting is a tradition of the Andals and closely related to the Faith of the Seven. There are a few converted exceptions, like Ser Jorah, but mostly the men sworn to the Kings of the North don’t have a…

The dialogue in this scene, in which she is in the tub without the choker, implies that Selyse is seeing her true old form but the viewer is still seeing her in her young form; the dialogue revolves around deception and potions and ultimately Melisandre telling Selyse she did not use a potion to have sex with Stannis…

I also thought she was contemplating suicide. That’s why the nap thing blindsided me—I could tell it was the culmination of something but not what or how.

That’s a good point. I also kinda figured that’s just the way she goes to bed. I don’t think her aging has anything to do with her crisis of faith. In the trailers, we clearly see her as her younger self after this point, as she talks to Davos about what she saw in the flames was a lie.

Except that we’ve seen her without the choker before.

He's described as being really fucked up with gout. Not paralyzed, just very feeble.

Man i used to love to know where this show was going
But i totally lost my marbles on this 1st episode.

I think it tells us something important, though. Melisandre has been doing what she does for a very, very, very long time. So for her to face a crisis of faith now, after all that time presumably having it continue unshaken, is that much more significant.

It's TV-MA. You knew the risks