For me the most intriguing part concerns the dragons: as the raven-guy hinted, the third dragon is probably on his way north, with bran “warging” it in the future, but with the two others in chains, i’m starting to think that the three dragons are not meant to be with daenerys and that she will never get to King’s landing!
I thought that the whole season was really slow but was mind-blown by this episode, with all the plot lines crossing over: Arya, Tyrion and Varys on their way to Daenerys, Tywin dead, Shae dead, Stanis at the wall, the wildlings defeated. For me the most shocking thing being Shae in Tywin’s bed, which I find more sickening than the lannister kids’ incest.
I’m not so sure The Hound is really dead. Like his brother - for whom Cersei hired this show’s version of Miracle Max - he may only be “mostly dead”. I’ll hope for a fight between the two of them somewhere/sometime.
The skeleton warriors reminded me of the B-17 sequence in Heavy Metal. And the elfen girl brought to mind Aislin from The Secret of Kells, though she didn’t have grenade bombs.
Mance Rayder is a great character. He must live on!
Holy fuckshit, that Brienne/Hound battle was amazing! Gwendolyn Christie acted the hell out of it, too - at the end when she screams/bellows and beats the everloving shit out of him, she very convincingly betrays a mixture of rage and mortal terror. Epic!
Rory McCann, however, came across a bit stone-faced.
Ha! I said as we were watching, “Don’t worry, my *outgoing *boxes are OK - everything’s cool.”
Yes, I thought it must be a tribute - and it was a great one - they were pretty menacing!
I think this is the issue - if she had haltingly recited some testimony that was pretty clearly memorized verbatim, and only given enough evidence to convict him, that would have been one thing. But she seemed to be participating gleefully, and inserted bits of their pillow talk and extremely personal, intimate, and embarrassing details that Tywin & company couldn’t have known or cared much about, so they wouldn’t have forced her to include them. I think that’s what indicates to us and to Tyrion that she was only too happy to fuck him over, either because she was never really in love with him, or (more likely) because she loved him, but she’s an idiot ruled by her passions, and she was so hurt when he dumped her, she had to take revenge.
Either Shae has a cynical relationship with Tyrion the whole time, in which case her actions make some sense or she loved him, in which case she was somewhat demented.
It seems impossible that she couldn’t understand that Tyrion was trying to protect her. Yet, her testimony did not seem forced. She wanted him to be executed and tried to kill him in the bedroom.
We already knew about White Walkers, animated dead men, and giants. Now we’ve got mammoths and the children of the forest. I’m holding out hope that next season brings us spiders the size of dogs, grumpkins, and snarks. And whatever the hell Lord of Bones hat was made out of.
Jojen=Ben Kenobi; tree dude=Yoda. "Run, Bran, run… I mean, save yourself! "
What’s up with the bones laying around the root ball room? Is it also a crypt? At least it looks warm.
Tywin dies like Elvis, the Hound gets stoned like a beetle.
When she rolled over in the bed, but before she saw him, I thought she said “my lion of Lannister” or something to that effect. If I did hear that right, the implication seems to be that her affections are easily transferable.
I agree this is a weird turn. I don’t think they’re going to clean them, but how would you like to be the guy whose job it is to feed them?
Given how much I dislike Dani, I do like the fact that all the real world consequences of her self-righteousness are coming to bear in bits and inglorious pieces.
Perhaps Mance didn’t have more than a few hundred men left in his camp. Perhaps the whole “100000” wildings was a fabrication? He also sent 400 men to climb the wall…where are they?
No matter how you look at it, though, Stannis’ attack north of the wall really seems to me to reveal a bunch of structual flaws in the whole show. Why would Stannis bother, first of all, to use up a bunch of capital to conquer the wildings? They are no danger to his real objective, recovering the throne for the Baratheon line…and how could he manage to get an army, all on horseback, north of the wall without any obvious warning to Mance? If Mance had, say, 25,000 warriors, a few thousand horseback troops in the snow wouldn’t be able to prevail. They’d be worn down and chewed up. Any significant losses, anyway, and what has it gained Stannis overall?
I much preferred Mance’s deal, one I thought Jon was going to propose – the wildings take over the wall, reassimmilate back to Westeros, and protect the 7 kingdoms from the black magic and white walkers of the North.
How does that God character manage to survive among all those Harry Hamlin-Golden Fleece skeletons?
Anyway, Tyrion dies on the toilet, while some character in a cave filled with skeletons and beset by skeletons says he is going to teach Bran to fly? In the same book? Almost as though the author wakes in the midst of the night, every night, with another weirdo idea, no idea too weird.
I have no knowledge of the books. When my son and I were discussing the finale before it happened, he thought it would be cool if Bran could warg his way into a Dragon. Now, there are two dragons locked up, but one still free and Bran was told he would fly. Hmm…
Well, securing the Wall adds some serious legitimacy to his claim to the throne. And having the blessing of the Night’s Watch certainly helps as well. He likely takes the Night’s Watch claims of troubles seriously (obviously, since he just spent a ton of capital on them), and this will hopefully go towards gaining assistance from Northern tribes/clans.
If he is going to be king, then he has to act like one. He gets the area north of the wall secured, Jon Snow is the last known heir to winterfell to live, so you can add the northmen to his eventual march on KL. Melisandre also figures in on this, with the way that she was looking at Jon, as he was lighting the funeral pyres.
This seems so obvious to me that I’m just going to assume it won’t happen, particularly now that Stannis is on the scene. Plus I don’t think anybody has the authority to negotiate that kind of outcome at this point.
I kind of wished they had not burned one of the bodies, so that Stannis could see for himself what was going on.
There was a scene in an earlier episode where Melisandre showed Stannis something (probably the White Walker menace) in the fire that convinced him that he was needed at the Wall.
