The Bolton line is either extinct or is about to be. The rest of the Northern Houses (whatever is left of them after this) will fall in line and renew their vows of fealty to Sansa and House Stark. Aside from the Boltons, I suspect she'll be gracious enough to accept their pledges of loyalty. . . although in the case…

I think Sansa would make a good villain. . . and there's at least a bit of foreshadowing of that in the books. She had a dream in which she was fighting a giant in a castle made of snow. The giant is commonly thought to be Tyrion, and the castle of snow could well be Winterfell.

It would have been cooler if Rickon the teenager showed his Stark side and kept glancing back at Ramsay. . . easily dodging his arrows and even taunting him. One archer can't possibly hit a person at any distance if the target is watching the arrow and knows that it's coming.

You could have also made the scene more believable by having Rickon do what everyone is suggesting and run a jagged path, until Ramsay was forced to roll his eyes for comic effect and gesture to the 500 or archers standing next to him to launch an entire volley of arrows at Rickon's fleeing back.

Magic in Game of Thrones is often quite subtle. It's possible that Jon was protected, but the forces protecting him were satisfied to simply make sure that the arrows all missed.

My guess is that Yara and Theon won't be in a hurry to search for any loopholes in that deal, given what Danaerys is capable of exacting from her enemies and betrayers in terms of revenge.

Well, no. . . but Dany's not offering them a democracy.

True. Helping Ramsay win a battle that he was already winning would have earned him no gratitude from Ramsay. . . and it's not as if Ramsay was known for being grateful.

Well. . . something bad did happen to Sansa unexpectedly.

Magic in Game of Thrones is often subtler. The fact that a thousand trained archers somehow managed to miss him, again and again, was probably the work of R'hillor (who's made it clear, via resurrection, that he has ongoing plans for Jon Snow).

I think he means that he's permanently scarred her mind, to the point where she won't be able to forget him. He's probably optimistic, there. . . Sansa's smile as she walked away from his dying screams could have come with a thought bubble saying "Closure!"

I know, right? Has he learned nothing at all? It would have been a lot more realistic if Rickon was clever and ran a random path that kept causing Ramsay to miss. We'd have had a moment of hope, until Ramsay ordered all of his archers to fire at Rickon simultaneously.

#WUNNING

Exactly. It's also a stupid plan, in retrospect, because the Soviet Union's time horizon is down to its last Summer Olympics, let alone a future generation. The party commissars are so obsessed with playing the "long game" that they can't see how much trouble they're already in right now.

I'm thinking they have the budget to do maybe one of those battles in style- I'm guessing Mereen, since they seem to have put some real money into generating the CGI assets for it (those shipboard trebuchets look great).

I barely trust this team to figure out the contents of the episodes they're currently working on, let alone what needs to go into in each of the next 17.

I loved the way Lady Crane took Arya's advice about how to eulogize "her noble son" Joffrey: a long tirade against the evil Wolves, culminating in a pledge to take vengeance against "Sansa the Whore."

Tyrion was a good political operator; he just had a weak hand to play with the Masters, because Mereen had no real defenses to speak of.

The show is still HBO's biggest ratings draw. As long as that's the case, the writers will get as many episodes to finish the story as they want.

Well, technically she will; but since the student loans were made out to "No One", it could be a while before the banks collect.