Recently Hawk and I started watching Season 2 of The Wheel of Time. It's streaming on Amazon Prime. As I write this we've watched the first two episodes already. I'm not going to write about them, though, but the series in general up to the start of S2 ( Read more... )

During my first watch-through of the HBO miniseries Chernobyl I found the actors' accents jarring. It's not that they're speaking English with Russian accents that are hard to understand; it's that they're not speaking with Russian accents. They're speaking with British and Irish accents. It's like watching Star Wars Game of Thrones! Plus, the ( Read more... )

S8E6 of Game of Thrones is the series finale. Recent episodes had shown Daenerys Targaryen spiraling quickly into madness. She became the same kind of intemperate, cruel tyrant that her father had been. It's especially a tragedy for her (and the whole freakin' world, btw) because for so many seasons she professed wanting to be a different kind of ( Read more... )

Game of Thrones S8E5 is officially titled "The Bells" but it really should be called "Kill Them All"- the infamous last words of King Aerys. Twenty or so years later his order is carried out. 😨

This episode is about the final battle for control of King's Landing and hence all of Westeros. Remarks after the cut (spoilers).

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In Game of Thrones S8E3, "The Long Night", we see the battle for the world. The surviving members of most of the northern houses, allied with Queen Daenerys and her Dothraki horde and Unsullied troops, assemble at Winterfell to meet the onslaught of the Night King's army of the dead, possibly 1,00,000 strong.


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Something that's bugged me across the arc of Game of Thrones season 7 on TV is the series's reliance on unearned plot points. The writers have written a number of results into the season's plot that are unsupported by... well... the previous 60+ episodesThis happens a number of times in season 7. Armies loyal to the queen score major victories ( Read more... )

Petyr Baelish has been one of the important minor characters throughout Game of Thrones. Rarely a viewpoint character (at least in the TV series) he nonetheless has served as a powerful and scheming advisor to several kings, queens, lords, and ladies. Across the series increases his personal rank from being head to a very minor house to being lord ( Read more... )

Game of Thrones S7E6, "Beyond the Wall" involves a climactic battle: "The Battle of the Frozen Lake", as people call it. While the battle is narratively powerful, the writers took a lazy shortcut the writers took broke my suspension of disbelief. A heroic rescue that's shown arriving in 12-16 hours really should have taken more than two weeks to ( Read more... )

In the season 7 opener of Game of Thrones Arya Stark shows us that not only is revenge a dish best served cold, but when you refrigerate it it can keep for a few weeks and you can whip up a batch that serves 24. 😨😈😵


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Sansa Stark has interesting character development across seasons 5 and 6 of Game of Thrones. She grows from being a person who's always being pushed around by others' decisions into someone who understands how the Game of Thrones, aka politics in Westeros, is played and starts to assert her own agency. But does she really gain agency over her own ( Read more... )