The English touring rep company is fun - Richard E Grant hamming it up like only he can. Reminiscent of The Dresser and numerous other of that backstage theatrical genre.
I’m bored with dragons returning, atonement, incest, Bran, Gilly making Sam man up, etc, etc, etc.
Richard E. Grant is a god.
Getting a real Feel the Bern vibe from High Sparrow …
Thanks!
I actually liked that a great deal too. People are complaining about how predictable the episode was, but I’ll bet no one at all saw that coming. That was a major fake-out.
The next opportunity for a resolution will be Cersei’s trial-by-combat. I like to think that Zombie Mountain, after taking out the Sparrow’s champion (and I wonder who that will be?), will pivot and slice the High Sparrow in half. 
Thank you for the correction. My memory was Sam left before Jon left for Hardhome but I wasn’t sure.
As Jaqen says, it’s all the same to the Many-faced God.
See, I half expect that something’s going to happen where she won’t be allowed trial by combat. If only because it’s been mentioned SO many times so far. Can’t let her have an easy out lol
You’re right of course, but it would be way cool if the actor/character went into serious training off-screen and returned next season as a bad-ass warrior.
Depends on what you mean by an experienced fighter. Someone who plays by Chivalric rules going up against someone who has been trained for combat at the wall.
Its like Bronn says, he fought with honor.
Declan
Sam may have been trained in swordplay, but he’s never been any good at it. His two kills came by stabbing a White Walker in the back with a magical knife and hitting a Thenn at point blank range with a crossbow after struggling to get it loaded.
Happy to see some development in Arya’s storyline; I agree it would have been disappointing for her to go full Faceless Girl. Arya has things to clear up she only can do as Arya, not as no one. (Also, I did call the death match against the Waif—OK, so that was obvious, but with my track record of predictions on this show, it’s still something!)
Also, I feel all but confirmed in my belief that the High Sparrow isn’t just all humility and meekness; you don’t just luck yourself into basically controlling the king. He’s as much a power player as anybody in this game.
Let’s remember, thought, that “the king” is an impressionable youth. Very impressionable.
Plus he got the everloving shit beaten out of him by those two other Nights watch brothers last season. He has come a long way from the whimpering coward of the first season, but he is going to have no chance in one on one combat with Randyll, unless he has a pistol.
Even before this episode it was obvious Tommen aligned himself to however spoke to him last. So gullible and manipulable, if that’s a word. Out of all the people molding Tommen, I think Marg is the best person for this job. We need to see who holds more sway, the High Sparrow or The Queen.
I don’t believe that Margaery has turned pious. The last we saw her was with Loras and she was defiant. Now, you might argue that seeing Loras like that broke her resolve, but that seems flimsy to me. If she hasn’t turned, then how did that rest of her conversation with Tommen go? She must have been manipulating him. Is Tommen’s conversion a ruse orchestrated by Margaery?
Margaery has certain techniques of persuasion with Tommen not available to the High Sparrow. 
I agree that Margaery’s conversion of Tommen was just a stratagem on her part to get out of the Sparrow’s clutches (although Tommen probably actually is converted). Whether she’ll seek to use the Sparrows for her own benefit or try to get revenge on them remains to be seen.
Tommen is now dedicated to the high sparrow because A) the high sparrow is treating him like a son, being kind and gentle and telling him what a wise king he will be, and B) his gorgeous wife is now a disciple and he wants nothing more than to be with her. Personally, I think he’s being played by both of them. There was a moment on the steps when Margaery gave away the charade with a look on her face when she saw the soldiers show up, I thought.
Love the Arya plot line. Of course we all knew she was going back to being Arya Stark - hiding Needle was the ultimate Chekov’s gun, for one thing. For another, her plotline would have been completely irrelevant had she just become another faceless man. So there had to be a transition back to being Arya at some point - the question was whether it would be done in an interesting way. I think it was.
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if the Mountain stood for Cersei, and Arya walked out of the crowd and demanded to be the challenger? He is on her list, after all. It would be interesting to see what she’s capable of with her full-on faceless man training coupled with her swordplay capability. And she would be small and fast - a tough target for a lumbering brute like the Mountain. And she knows how to use poison and all the other ways of killing that the faceless men use.
Here’s an interesting idea for a fakeout. Arya confronts the Waif. We don’t see the actual fight. But later on, we see the waif leaving. Eventually, we discover that it’s Arya using the Waif’s face as a mask. She uses it to get through to King’s landing without being recognized. They are close to the same size, so she could pull it off. So then the waif steps forward to challenge the Mountain, and then dramatically Arya pulls off the face to reveal herself to everyone - and starts killing people.
I don’t think Sam is going to the Citadel. Now that he has a wife and child, he can’t go there. He explicitly said that he won’t allow them to be separated again. Besides, if Sam had entered the Citadel his plot thread would have to end with him, as it takes years to graduate and we don’t have that kind of time.
Looking at a map of Westeros, Sam is very close to Highgarden, the Tyrell seat of power. He might look for sanctuary there. He’s also not that far from Riverrun, and it sure looks like a lot of plot threads are converging there. Brienne is on her way there, and so is Jaime Lannister. And Walder Frey’s army. It would be interesting if Sam tried to go through there overland on the way back to the wall just as all that crap hits the fan.
What would be really cool is if Brienne winds up on opposite sides of a war from Jaime, then Sam brings them together by clearly explaining the threat of the White Walkers, and the threat of the Boltons up north, and Jaime defects with his army and leads them, along with Brienne and the Blackfish into battle in the North against the Boltons. Sam rides along and rejoins Jon for the final battle against the Knight’s king and his army of undead.
Helping the Starks retake Winterfell would be the ultimate act of moral absolution for Jaime - especially if Bran Stark tells him he is not only forgiven, but that pushing him out that window was pre-ordained and helped him along the path to becoming the new three-eyed raven.
He has been given some training. I would be surprised if at this point if he is “trained” at all in the sense of being actually skilled at combat in any way, whether chivalric or not.
Every battle he has been in he has bumbled around and benefited from the surrounding chaos and had some success through luck rather than skill.
If he actually had to stand in front of someone and fight face-to-face, especially a battle-hardened soldier like his own father, I dare say he should be cut down within seconds.
Margaery is absolutely playing the game. I think there was a moment when she and Olenna exchange a look of mutual acknowledgment. Margaery did what she had to do, and Olenna understands that, even if it ruined the rescue.
I think the High Sparrow also gave away that he is playing the game, and isn’t simply a ‘true believer.’ He may well be a believer, but the look he gave Jaime and the Tyrells when he paraded his new convert out was more “I beat you–suck it, losers” than “God is great”.