I swear to god that there was a Cersei chapter in Feast that mentioned that she promised Shae that she would marry a knight… I haven't reread Feast in a while so I could be wrong but I always had the impression that Shae was being paid off by her and/or Varys. But anyway, great episode as usual.

It was indeed revealed in the first Cersei chapter in Feast.

"They had last spoken the night before the dwarf's trial by combat, after that smiling Dornish snake offered to champion him. Shae had been asking about some jewels Tyrion had given her, and certain promises Cersei might have made, a manse in the city and a knight to marry her. The queen made it plain that the whore would have nothing of her until she told them where Sansa Stark had gone. 'You were her maid. Do you expect me to believe that you knew nothing of her plans?' she had said. Shae left in tears."

What game was that, that you two were playing in the post show?

Was it this episode that had a concern over Ramsay describing himself as '...Snow, natural born son...' when he hasn't yet been legitimised?

If so, I don't think it's a contradiction. The word natural can mean bastard. For example, in Jane Austen's Emma, there's someone of illegitimate birth who's referred to as "the natural daughter of somebody" and "the natural daughter of nobody knows whom".

My impression was that Kyle thought that natural born meant legitimate, not baseborn, therefore the confusion. Might be wrong on that though.

Nice guest appearance by Mrkorb.

Is the podcast sponsored by Hearthstone?

I get the feeling ShowTyrion is willing to commit suicide by trial if he can't get a champion, just to spite everybody.

To cause further semantic confusion, baseborn and bastard-born aren't necessarily synonymous.

Bastard = born outside marriage
Natural son or daughter = a polite way of saying bastard
Base-born = low-born within the class system of this world, ie not from a noble family. You can be base-born without being a bastard, and a bastard without being base-born (see whichever Dunk and Egg story it is where Dunk schools Egg that Bloodraven is "bastard-born, not base-born" since his mother is from a noble house

Now we know Tywin asked Cersei to bring Shae to his Tower of the Hand (does that sound dirty?) and we get an indication that Tywin had planned to send Tyrion to the Wall anyway before Jaime suggested his bargain and so it could well be that once Shae was brought to him he says "you, whore, testify" and she says "yes, m'lord but only if Tyrion lives by the end of it" and Tywin says "It shall be so". I could see Tywin agreeing to that in exchange for a few "favours" from her and he gets out of having to order the death of one of his family members and becoming a kinslayer by proxy.

It's not just that. He actually thinks of himself as a worthy successor to Roose Bolton, mainly because he practices what he thinks are the old Bolton traditions and customs" and so he uses that phrasing to make himself look more important and hence make himself feel better because he hates his baseborn status but he cannot say Ramsay Bolton in a letter because that would betray one of his weaknesses to someone else so he has to pretend that calling himself "Snow" is no big deal, whilst still aching to be seen as the true heir to the Dreadfort.

I feel like we can't really know the motivations of TV Shae going by book Shae since she's a very different character. Hopefully it would be something like thinking he would live if she testified - but then I'm biased because I'm all for making Shae more sympathetic and Tyrion less so in the moment when he kills her. We shall see I guess.

I'm looking forward to seeing how viewers respond to Tyrion when that happens.

Yeah, this is an old euphemism from our world that I'd never heard of before reading the series. Confused the hell out of me before I realized what it meant. It's used pretty consistently, even in the appendices ("Walder Frey's Natural Children: Walder Rivers, Other Walder Rivers, Various Rivers, Et Cetera Rivers.").

Kyle, don't be swayed. The trial was very well acted... like Amin said, of course Tyrion's being melodramatic. And like someone else pointed out, the whole thing had a very Shakespearean feel to it.

Great podcast episode, as always. Sat in the hospital parking lot after my commute listening to the end of it. Patients can wait. The podcast waits for no one.