I don’t begrudge the man his money, or his wanting to make more. There were a ton of years he was writing up a storm and almost certainly not getting paid nearly enough for his efforts. If I had a way where I could get paid for work I’ve already done and other people—who HBO pays, not me!—were the ones who had to do…

I typically don’t find it necessary to issue the disclaimer that I don’t know GRRM and have no means of reading his mind. I was being a tiny bit arch. Thought that was obvious, but I guess not obvious enough.

Is anyone still under the impression that Martin says stuff like this because he really cares about the story being told properly, rather than because he thinks about what an extra 10-20 episodes of HBO money will do for his bank account?

That first episode of D’Arcy’s run starts with Rhaenyra delivering a child, and with a wig that’s intentionally not very styled. It works in that Rhaenyra looks like she’s been put through the ringer, but all of it reads like she’s older. I’ve seen it from time to time since then, where the camera will catch her at an…

You know, they give you Dark Sister, and it’s so terribly sharp and fun to swing...

I think the idea that Alicent has few allies is a bit of protesting too much. When she said that to Larys, she’d been deprived of her most powerful ally, Otto, but she was still sitting in small council meetings and basically running them. You don’t do that without allies. There was also an interesting moment in the…

I get that they’re going with an alcoholic state of puffiness for Aegon, and that 19-year-old Aemond is supposed to already be a formidable warrior, so they wanted to cast someone who looked like he could plausibly fight Daemon. But say what you will about the wind, and the sun, and the eyepatch, Ewan Mitchell looks…

I don’t know that it’s the trigger. People have been pretty credulous about how much one slightly-less-unfriendly family meal was going to heal the deep divisions between the two families. One cheerful dinner and a few decent toasts weren’t going to put Otto off his ambitions or make Aemond forget that someone at the…

It particularly doesn’t look right given the babyfaced guy they cast as Aegon, who looks at least 10 years younger than his younger brother.

My understanding of the arbitration that awarded the House of Cards production company all that money was that Spacey wasn’t just paying them for them firing him as an actor, he was paying because he was also an executive producer on the show, and his breach of contract in both jobs was egregious enough—he was found…

I guess I’d have to go back and watch the scene but I’m pretty sure he tells Sam at some point early in the series that the reason he hasn’t been with a woman is because he has no idea who his mother is, so there’s always some potential he could end up in an incestuous situation.

I’ve heard that a lot of the conflict with Russell isn’t as much about him being mean to the stars so much as being really, brutally mean to the crew. That was supposedly what got him into the fistfight with Clooney on Three Kings. Which is why it’s natural for Christian “You and me, we’re fucking done,…

On the show, you’re right, but in the books it’s not that, it’s that Ned (and John Arryn before him) realizes that whenever a Baratheon and a Lannister have kids, those kids never inherit the Lannister blonde hair. Which is not that far-fetched an understanding of genetics, given the state of Westerosi tech and…

Those may be the only circumstances under which he gets sucked off.

...so, what you’re saying is that it’s not women and minorities getting opportunities that you hate, but rather you’re standing up for ethics in game journalism. Got it.

an out-to-there sex scene

They evidently came to the conclusion that Baldwin called (and got no end of shit around here for saying) months ago: that their best chance at a decent settlement was for the movie to proceed and be profitable. One reason there are all those production company credits (sometimes including obnoxious logos and…

Jordan didn’t need a wealthy spouse--he had Nike subsidizing the Bulls’ championships.

Do we really think that Cole balked at blinding Lucaeris out of any sense of morality? Or was it just that he was unwilling to disobey a direct order from the king, right to Viserys’s face?

Rhaenyra outright says to Daemon that Laenor’s been a good parent and has tried to be a good partner to her. Yeah, he was absent when things got tough between the kids, but so was Rhaenyra. He just wasn’t up for the fight with Alicent, and couldn’t give Rhaenyra legitimate heirs—as gross as it seems, her uncle’s a…