I don't know about anyone else ... But very few things that I table flip over do I do completely seriously

I didn't care about the Mountain, it was weird to me that people kept talking like he was this amazing character in the books, it's enough that he's big and scary.

Not to pick on you, but I think this is a false assumption. Nothing needs to be dumbed-down. People are generally pretty smart and will figure things out on their own if you give them the necessary information. Look at the books, GRRM didn't simplify things to reach a wider audience, he created a story with foreshadowing, hidden motivations, grey characters, and intellectual storytelling. The fact that he didn't dumb-down his books is probably the primary reason that they became so popular. He didn't need to spoon feed all the plot points to people, and people appreciate that. People appreciate the assumption they are intelligent and that they can figure things out on their own, they like the intellectual challenges.

TV generally assumes the opposite, but it doesn't need to be that way. Breaking Bad is probably my favorite show in terms of smart writing. Vince Gilligan and his team really did a great job of looking at all the angles and coming up with reasonable explanations for telling the story the way they did. Maybe they have more to take into account for Game of Thrones, but there is no reason they can't scrutinize all of the angles of their story in such detail. There is no reason they can't think, "If Tyrion doesn't just learn about Tysha then what is his motivation for going up to see Tywin? He has to have some motivation, right?" Could you tell me what his motivation is? Just simply revenge? He decides he's going to risk his freedom to go kill his Father? Doesn't make sense to me. If it doesn't make sense to me than I'm sure there was one writer on the staff that it probably didn't make sense to either. It would be a much greater show if they scrutinized those details and made sure they weren't dumbing down for their stupid incapable audience who won't ever wonder why something happened the way it happened.

All of the talk and discussion about the show is reason alone to think that people care about smart story telling and not just another Transformers movie.

I tend to agree. I don't think the show works quite as well on the rewatch and picking up new details as the books do, but that could be my book reader bias speaking of course,

I thought the theory was that Gregor's head may very well have stayed attached to his body and they sent the head of that dwarf that was though to Cersei? I could see it it going either way in the book which is why I think the show may avoid it altogether.







I'm in the camp that thinks he would have sent him to the Wall. That Tywin puts Lannister above all and his progeny above all other Lannisters. I mean, Tywin has supposedly wanted Tyrion dead his whole life but he starts a war when Cat takes Tyrion prisoner. He wants to Lannister to look as good as possible to the public. Part of why know one has any hints of Tywin's whoring. Tyrion at the Wall looks better than a public beheading. He doesn't have to even love Tyrion to want him to get off easy. I think if he had a legit suspect for Joff's murder that wasn't named Lannister he would have pounced on it.

Sorry to jump in late on this one, just finished the episode.

As to the reason Tyrion chose to go back to Tywin we're supposed to just accept that it was his "impulsive nature" as D.B. Weiss said in the inside the episode. Which I think is pretty lame.

I'm not so angry that we didn't get Tysha, using Shae hit most of the same points as TV show Shea is more like Tysha than book Shae.

Anyway I'm kind of surprised all the hosts were so down on this episode. I was so happy to get what we did that I can't harp too much on what wasn't there.

If I can calm down and be reasonable about no Lady Stoneheart I can accept almost anything.

I've accepted most of it really except the Shae death scene which still pisses me off. I think it was good but give how much they were hyping it it wasn't as amazing as I thought it would be.

Still the Hound/ Arya scene was amazing and made me cry. So kudos on that.

Wasn't a huge fan of the episode but the nonstop book focus of reviews is asinine at this point. The show is not the book, get over it. There is rarely any discussion of the episode as an episode of television. Was it well written, how was the acting, was the scene good, etc. None of that seems to matter and instead the focus is on "hey that wasn't like the book, booo."

Also the thing about Stannis not being in episode 9...it made sense for them to avoid ending the battle exactly how the Blackwater battle was ended in S2 - a new army coming to save the day at hte end.

So, I'm not quite caught up on the podcast episodes yet, but this seems like an appropriate place to ask - have the hosts talked further about they'll be doing next season? Some of the storylines, like Sansa and Bran, are pretty clearly about to overtake their book counterparts, so are any of the hosts going to be swearing off the show at this point? Personally, while I'm not worried about spoilers - while I'd certainly love to get the book version first, I'm not about to cut myself off from the internet for the next decade or so to avoid any talk about the show until the book series is done, but I'm curious about whether the hosts have talked about the issue further.

They've talked about it a couple of times, I think it breaks down like this:
Mimi - definitely out
Kyle - definitely in
Amin - probably in unless a Winds release is imminent
Ashley - my memory fails me, not sure

I thought it was episode 151 where they talked about it? Maybe it was 152?

Well, if Shae was planted there by Varys to murder Tywin then she'd have to have a knife and Tyrion coming in would have fucked up the whole plan and they were already on bad terms at this point so it's actually not as much of a change as we'd think maybe....

My thoughts exactly. I'd have hated a Blackwater 2.0 because then it's truly a derivative episode but thankfully they recognized that and preferred to stick to the book version of events.