You still watching, Chris? I thought 5 was one of the best of the season. No pointless sex scenes, which actually helped the story move. I was a little disappointed by the casting of Qhorin Halfhand, he was just so unimpressive. Maybe I was influenced by rumours that Pon Perlman wanted in on this and he would have made a great Halfhand, then again Qhorin is probably one of my favourite peripheral characters so I was always going to be hard to please. It looks like the Reeds are gone for good with Bran having one of Jojen's dreams. People keep wondering what they'll do if they cut the Reeds. I don't see why. You just send Bran north with Osha and Hodor and have some other family retainer take off with Rickon. Once they get to season 6 or 7 they're going to have to move further and further away from the books, because George simply won't be able to keep pace with the show at the rate he currently writes (he doesn't even seem to have started Winds and we're coming up to the one year anniversary of when Dance was published). The line of the night for me was when Littlefinger asked Margaery if she still wanted to be a queen and she replied with A queen? I want to be THE queen.

Optimistic aren't ya . Yeah I'm still watching and yeah it was one of this years better episodes. Bran and Arya were my fav characters in the book along with Jaime, so any episode that has lots of them will be good for me. Dragon Princess girl's plot improved a bit. It went from lame and cringe worthy to just slightly lame .


I see Spartacus has started on Showcase. Have you seen that? GoT's got nothiing on that show.

They keep talking about having actors signed for years ahead. S3 has been greenlit and that finishes midway through Book 3, so I'd say S4's a go, too. It then depends on how they and audiences react to the 4th & 5th book. I personally think you could compress them into 1 season, or maybe extend the season to 12 episodes, which would take them into S6 and working without a net.

Bran's chapters in the book tended to cure me of insomnia for the most part, the TV version is a great improvement and I like horny Sam on TV better than whiny Sam from the books.

I thought Spartacus was fun, it was a little like Rome lite. Put in a few more sex and violence scenes and hope that no one noticed that the acting was a little off and that the dialog was horrible. It will be interesting to see how they handle the new series with a new actor in the main role.

So if season four ends book three in 2014 and they combine four and five in 2015, George has still got three years to get the sixth book out, but from then on the show is in uncharted waters. Given that and assuming they don't won't the show to come to a grinding holt without an ending, then me thinks they should start diverging big time from the books in the combined(books 4 & 5) season five and wrap up the show in season six. That or just end the show at the end of book three and end on a high.

Anyways, it looks like this season is finally picking up. Six was the best episode this year so far for me. I actually enjoyed all the PoV's for once.

I actually preferred 5, but we did get to see Tonks naked in 6, and that was a definite highlight . 3 years? You honestly think that having got 200 pages in TWoW, which were actually bits of ADwD that they moved, and having written virtually nothing since ADwD that George can really do the other 800 odd pages in 3 years? I like the guy, but I doubt he can do that. People thought the show would make him write a little quicker to keep ahead of it, but it's just another time sink, which seems to eat up more and more of the time that he may have used pre show to actually write the books.
They're already deviating significantly from the books. It's actually a point of interest to me to watch and wonder how they'll change things from episode to episode.
Damn that Charles Dance can act, he summed up Tywin's back story and why he acts the way he does in about 5 minutes worth of dialog and it was so damn powerful! I'm still upset that they killed Irri, too.

I wonder how many actress's missed out in parts in GoT because they didn't want to do nude/sex scenes?

Bit of another snorefest this week, but the promo for next week was great. Hopefully that isn't the extent of the battle scenes....

I just found out that Oona Chaplin (not-Jeyne, Talisa?) is Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter. Episode 9 looks fantastic, but I wonder how they're going to tie up all the other story lines in the final episode.

Chris, I assume you've seen the end of S2 Game of Thrones. Any thoughts?

Weak ending.

It's a tv show, it's meant to end on a cliffhanger! They should have ended it after the dwarf got knocked out.

The last episode wasn't bad it just wasn't as exciting as the one before and therefore was a weak end to the season imo.

They didn't explain the burning of Winterfell much did they? Is my memory correct in that it was the northmen who were sent to lift the siege that did it?

I think by concentrating on Kings Landing exclusively in Ep 9 they gave themselves a few too many threads to wrap up in the final episode. The way they did the burning of Winterfell was rather disappointing and kind of senseless. Roose Bolton's bastard son lifted the siege and in the process burned the whole place to the ground. They may have been better off shunting that into the first episode of S3. My biggest disappointment was Qhorin Halfhand, I've spoken to people who haven't read the books who simply don't get the impact of Jon killing him or why. Admittedly The Battle of the Blackwater was hard to top, so consequently Ep 10 couldn't. The House of the Undying made next to no sense as well, no heads of the dragon, no 3 betrayal prophecy.