So far as I am concerned this kind of thing is totally consistent with how mediaeval lords behaved. In fact, I like that they did that, intentional or not. It shows a combination of excessive self-regard and lack of interest in the childrens’ self-regard.
I caught up on this season over the long weekend and now I can’t sleep. The undead dragon bringing down the Wall is one hell of a cliffhanger. I have to get these thoughts out of my head so I can get back to work.
So are Jon and Dany actually siblings? If so, they’re the new Cersei and Jamie.
Haven’t the Lannisters run out of money yet? Turns out the Iron Bank had the equivalent of a safety deposit box stuffed with gold bars which Cersei used to buy 20K mercenaries. Yes, I remember the earlier conversation Cersei had with the IB’s maester, but it just strikes me as a little Deus Ex Machina-ish nonetheless.
OK, so Euron was actually planning on making a grand show of leaving the Dragon Pit Summit all along to secretly retrieve the mercs. However, he knew nothing about the Night King’s undead until he saw Gregor’s sample at the summit. Supposedly. He seemed to place more importance on humbling Theon and making himself the center of attention. The undead’s appearance just happened to be a convenient out for him. I can’t buy that he already knew what to expect.
No. Jon’s father was Dany’s older brother. She is his aunt. Which is par for the course among the Targaryens, who routinely practiced brother-sister incest (including between Jon’s grandparents/Dany’s parents).
No. The gold was looted from Highgarden after the Lannister army took it. The gold had been sent on ahead and made it into King’s Landing before Dany, Drogon, and the Dothraki destroyed the army.
ETA: Ninja’d
They’re using the gold plundered from Highgarden.
Not hard to imagine that in all his years sailing around the world he tried improv class for a while. Oh, we’re doing zombies, no problem I can run with this…
Which explains him being a dick to Theon and Tyrion - he was setting himself up for Cersei to ‘banish’ him. Then the wight showed up and gave him an even better excuse for leaving.
Thanks. That does make for some interesting heat assuming everybody survives and puzzles out who gets the Iron Throne.
Oh right right.
This is why I’m not losing any sleep over the question. 
RIP Littlefinger. whattaguy. It was clumsy getting there but I was satisfied. I guess I’m on team Varys now haha.
I thought it would have been perfect if Theon just got beaten to death on a beach by some nameless asshole, and nobody ever heard of Yara again. I felt the same when Jon greeted him on the beach at KL.
I thought everyone on the wall died, and it seemed like it fit.
Re: the chains: would have been cool if they raised it similar to the zombie pile-on like WWZ (link)
I expect Euron to betray Cersei. Surely she does too? She’s like, yeah this dude I only sneer at is gonna come back with tens of thousands of troops, at which point he will need me for … ? waitaminute.
I expect Arya to kill Cersei. We have not had a Stark spill Lannister blood yet. (Not counting peons in battle.) Ned should be avenged, and not third-hand. I hope Jamie watches and gives her the finger. Then Arya should knife him too for Bran.
Without a guess at who sits the throne at the end, I have an idea for the final scene: Sam sitting down to write at the top of a blank scroll: “A Song of Ice and Fire”. Sam is GRRM self-inserted in the story. Fat nerdy kid, nose in the books, bravely(?) saves the damsel and baby, learns to true truth to save the world … tells the tale.
Jamie will be absolved for crippling Bran by Bran himself. If Jamie goes to Winterfell, expect him to approach Bran and offer himself up to whatever punishment Bran would like him to face. And Bran will be all, “What? Oh, THAT. Water under the bridge, dude. I am the three eyed freaking raven now. I can fly. So thanks for that. We’re cool. You might have to murder your sister, though.”
I wonder if Cersei would be so stupid as to send Euron with the gold to pay the Golden Company instead of say paying them thru the Iron Bank.
She already sent the gold to the Iron Bank. She’s buying the Golden Company with a new line of credit.
Not bad. I like it!
Tormund is 100% still alive, I promise you. He and Beric ran west along the top of the wall, and only the easternmost section was shown to have been knocked down. The rest was quite intact. Combine that with their never being shown to be on a part that was even shaking, and there’s no way their characters are dead unless something bad (death, scandal, contract holdout) happens to the actors.
There were a lot of unrealistic aspects of this season (unrealistic, that is, within the rules of the universe previously established) that many people have described at length. But after reflecting for a while, the one I don’t see getting any attention to speak of (and someone please set me straight if there was an earlier post about it) is the fact that Littlefinger heard Bran say–what, two episodes ago?–the “chaos is a ladder” line, and didn’t immediately:
(1) Chuckle nervously (okay, he did do this part)
(2) Excuse himself from the room on whatever pretext came to mind
(3) Immediately peace out of Winterfell and hightail it with some bags of gold and bodyguards to the farthest reaches of Essos or a distant island.
Bran could of course still locate him anywhere he went, but if he went far enough away and, I dunno, started a soup kitchen or something, maybe the interested parties in Westeros would leave him alone.
Another plan would have been to seek to kill Bran immediately (not too much planning time), and then go into hiding without any Three-Eyed Raven to track him. No orphanage or other charitable cover needed then.
But for him to only execute the “chuckle nervously” bit, and then go right back to plotting his plots, right in the middle of Bran-occupied Winterfell? C’mon. The guy is smarter than that. He knows very well that his sort of Machiavellian scheming can only work when the people he’s scheming against don’t have an omniscient seer in their ranks!
Not exactly.
Ding ding!
Oh I agree completely.
But sadly you’re asking for consistency and logic from a writing team that has spent the last two seasons showing us that neither quality is something they’re particularly good at.
I’m late to the party because I had to wait for the disks.
I think Littlefinger got off easy with the cleanest death Ari has handed out in ages.
[ul]
[li]Poliver got pinked in the throat to drown in his own blood instead of a severed spine.[/li][li]Rorge got run through the gut.[/li][li]Meryn is blinded and taunted before getting his throat cut.[/li][li]Waif’s demise is not shown but I’d be surprised if she were anything more than a pile of bloody ribbons.[/li][li]Walder is fed his two sons, informed of that fact, then has his throat cut.[/li][li]An uncounted number of male Freys are offed by a painful poison; at least she spared Walder’s [del]wife[/del] widow.[/li][/ul]Compare those with her walking up to Littlefinger, slicing both carotids like this year’s shoat, then walking away without a word.
Still an awesome scene - and a tour de force for Aidan Gillen.
Cleanest physically maybe, but I think his death might have been the most painful and messiest psychologically of all of them, since he went out knowing he — the master manipulator — got outplayed by a couple of little girls.
So much for that ladder.
Well, a couple of little girls and a guy who can see the past.
Yeah, but Littlefinger never really fully understood that, right? Even after Bran told him “chaos is a ladder,” he still went along business as usual.
Granted, that whole Stark Kids vs Littlefinger storyline is pretty muddy.