The time jump caught me so off-guard that, before the text popped up that said "one year later", my brain's first assumption was that we were suddenly being shown an alternate reality where Gus Grimly got hired at the post office like he was meant to be.

Yeah, it's like RedScarab says. He isn't a guy with a master plan who is out to get something for himself. He's living a life completely driven by his whims and desires. And he is a dude with some pretty dark desires.

I don't think Bill would be that difficult to manipulate. Certainly Molly's chances would've been much better if, instead of straight-up telling Bill that he was wrong, she had instead asked him to be allowed to tie up the case's loose ends without insisting that Bill had arrested the wrong man before she could prove…

If any of Tywin's children are the result of his wife's conjectured infidelity (with Aeris Targaryen), it'd be Jaime and Cersei, not Tyrion. Tyrion is absolutely Tywin's son.

Brienne's plot is guaranteed to be completely different than it was in the show, which if you'd ask me is great. I love the character, but her plot in book four was mind-numbingly irrelevant to everything else that was happening. If they can give the character the same focus but make her storyline more interesting,…

I've honestly been wondering if Tyrion will murder Shae at all in the show. I know plenty of book fans would consider it sacrilege to exclude her murder, but they've changed Shae's motivations so much that it will be almost impossible to keep the audience on Tyrion's side if things play out as they did in the book.

Yeah, I guess that's what I meant. Each season's dramatic climax has always come in the penultimate episode. Most of those events you've listed were important plot developments, but none had the dramatic weight of Ned's execution, the battle on the Blackwater, or the Red Wedding. I think Tyrion's escape and murder…

I know the Mountain got mortally wounded in his duel with Oberyn, but I'd still have to put my money on him. Always bet on the 8-foot-tall freak of nature with armor too thick for a normal man to carry.

I'm pretty sure they do have movies in Westeros, because otherwise I'm not sure where Oberyn got his hands on a copy of The Princess Bride.

I agree that the show's version of events was less plausible, although I actually enjoyed seeing Sansa already starting to learn from Littlefinger and becoming something of a partner in crime to him. Sansa isn't 12 like she was in the books, and so I thought it was cool to see her show a little bit more agency.

That's true. I guess I'll keep my fingers crossed, then.

I'd actually guess that they're going to move Lady Stoneheart to the next season. It seems likely that casting issues would prevent them from featuring her in one single 30-second scene this season.

Considering that every finale so far has been 95% setup for the next season, I'm not sure why you think that would be unlikely. In fact, having Tyrion kill Tywin in the last episode would easily be the most dramatic thing that has happened in a season finale to date.

Oh no, kids might associate a song with the wrong movie. This is a legitimate thing to be angry about.

And Lester called Lorne Malvo at his hotel room minutes before the murder spree. Lorne Malvo whose room contained tokens from the Lucky Penny, the strip club where Hess was murdered. And Hess broke Lester's nose the day he was murdered. And witnesses saw Lester talking to Malvo at the hospital - Malvo, who…

His story is actually really flimsy and only explains one of the pieces of evidence against him (the shotgun pellet in his hand). It doesn't explain the myriad of ways in which he seems to be connected to the murder of Sam Hess. Part of the point is that Bill is a gullible idiot. He's a decent human being, and he's…

As he grew increasingly corrupt, Walter White modified his moral compass to rationalize what he was doing. Even at his worst, he had some concept of right and wrong (even if it was profoundly deranged). Lester, on the other hand, seems to have completely and utterly abandoned the concept of morality. He's fully…

The blizzard's special effects were definitely cheap too, but for some reason that scene didn't bother me nearly as much. In fact, I thought the weird CG fog sort of gave the shootout a surreal quality that actually worked for it. For me, at least.

It's funny that you say that, because I was just rewatching The Life Aquatic today, and I love that silly stuff in the context of a Wes Anderson film. But it felt completely out of place in Fargo, and it didn't work for me.

Am I the only one who was unimpressed by the action scene in this episode? The concept was sort of interesting (even if it also had obvious budgetary motives), but the execution was awful. Somehow, a scrolling shot of a stationary building had the worst special effects I've ever seen in a show of this caliber. The…