charis

That makes so much sense as to why D&D might have made that choice, doram -- and I'm sure there's a lot of people who think it's an utterly boneheaded choice (hi!), but it's at least a little more explicable to think of what was going through their heads like that ... I always thought the tragedy of book!Robb was that, in the most bitterly ironic of ways, he proves himself his father's son (honour before reason) -- a fact his adversaries were counting on. Show!Robb's tragedy is, as you said, being a teenaged brat. It makes me want to smack him upside the head, which detracts from the grief otherwise there at how he dies.

Grief does terrible things to people, especially when they're no doubt already deep in self-castigation. Cat had told Bran time and time again not to climb, and it seems exceedingly likely she's wracked with guilt for what she sees as her part in his injury as well as grieving the potential loss of her child. It doesn't excuse her words, but it does explain where they're probably coming from. I never understood people who say "how could she say that?!", because to me it seems entirely plausible in that kind of situation.

From what I heard, they bumped it for some sport -- not sure which.

Looks like it aired as planned (replanned? close enough!) in the UK last night.

There's a lot about those memories that goes towards unreliable narrator and some seriously rose-tinted lenses; I suspect in reality Athos had more cares than he wants to remember, at least if he had any of the sense of duty we see in him later. If he's trying to recapture an idyll that probably never existed as he recalls it, then that seems like a mission doomed to failure, even without discussing the practical realities of the situation. Your memory is sound, Happy Harpy; at the end of The Return, Athos basically goes hands-off and effectively renounces his title and gives the lands to the people of Pinon. (I qualify with 'effectively' because I don't think he actually could do anything like that historically and my recollection of how the show handled it is fuzzy, but it's basically that when distilled down.) And if you take it as him giving up the title and the claim to the lands and never going back to Pinon, it begs the question of what he actually has left to his name ... (You said in an earlier post that it seems like a sentence to being bored to death for him -- and in the long term I agree; he might want that now, and it might help him in the immediate, but I can't see him being happy with that kind of quiet life years (or even months) down the road and I'm not sure he ever would have been, even before the Musketeers.)

Oh, I agree completely -- the problem is what the show tells us (tacitly) is a Proper Happy Ending, based on how the Musketeers (and their respective endgame ladies) finish out the show. (Which is just one more part of a long rant about the show's handling of female characters throughout all of the seasons that I probably shouldn't get into here.) And you're right, we weren't told much; what we were told, and what we're given, to me reads as if they're telling us that "LOL no she's evil and she was always evil and she went right back to being evil so clearly she was unworthy". Someone on Tumblr described it as a vicious loop of "does she kill because she's unhappy or is she unhappy because she kills", and while S2 pointed to the latter with her desire to change, I find the handwavy reversal in S3 forced at best (and a total waste of a character and kind of illogical besides, but that's another soapbox). That is the problem I have in a nutshell, especially when his actions towards her are (and always have been) without consequence. ... wait, I said I wasn't going to go climbing on soapboxes, didn't I? Anyway. I'm in the minority on here in that I have a lot of can't regarding S3; I like some of the high-level ideas but I find the execution to fall flat both broadly and specifically (with a few exceptions) and to include some very serious problems. I'm glad people liked it, and I'm glad there can be civil discussion about its merits and flaws, but I'm definitely not in that happy group. (I'll just stay in my own little world where there are only two seasons instead. XD )

The showrunners have been trotting out Mamie McCoy's pregnancy as an excuse for her storyline, but TBH I don't see any way in which that adds up; even if they'd had the limited time for her that her airtime suggests, there are multiple story paths and scenarios that would've leveraged that to an ending that made more sense after where Season 2 left her. It felt as if what time she had was explicitly being used to paint her as unequivocally villainous, thereby freeing up and whitewashing Athos' character. (I might be a little bitter about this; Milady is and always has been my favourite character in the source material and adaptations, and I especially enjoyed her on this show. And I do ship it (especially in this adaptation), but while it makes me angry as a shipper it makes me even more angry as a fan of Milady.) (I wanted to like Milady's ending, but I have so many problems with it because of how it was presented, as opposed to the strictly factual situation -- she's still being used as a narrative tool to warn Anne, as well as shown as ending up there because she's lost all chance at the spouse-and-kids scenario we're being sold as the defined Happy Ending. If the choice was one born of her agency it would change things, but it's not -- her agency is stripped away pretty much wholesale this season -- and that wrecks it for me.)

Word on the street, as it were, is that Season 3 only was greenlit thanks to international viewership -- and I don't mean American; there's probably a reason it aired in Turkey well before it showed up on BBC. They dropped the ball with promotion in the second season and only seem to have gotten worse in the third, and it sounds like there was significant viewer dropoff. With all that, I'm not entirely surprised it went to streaming rather than cable in America, especially if Hulu was willing to pay and BBC saw that as a way to recoup some of their losses. (There were some announcements about it going on Hulu, writersblock51 -- I remember seeing them linked on Tumblr -- but I can't recall specifics, and while I've long since dropped my Hulu subscription and have no interest in reviving it, I also don't recall seeing any promotional material related to this.)

Towards the end of 2x10, if I recall correctly -- they had little scenes for both the wedding and the morning after, but IIRC both were relatively low-key.

Sorry for not replying, ABay -- I get most of my information secondhand (people reposting news links or official show Twitter comments or the like) off Tumblr, and since I check that on my phone and this site on my desktop at work, it's hard to join the two up. And I'm with Athena -- I think there's a lot wasted potential in the show that could've been mitigated even after Capaldi left, especially with the solid cast they had, but that never seems to have manifested. I haven't heard specifics as to why they decied to cancel (though IIRC UK shows typically have a 3-season contract for the cast, so that may have been a factor), but I know they were having issues with the ratings. The marketing for this season really feels as if they'd already phoned it in -- migratory release dates, the show releasing abroad before it did in the UK, Hulu rather than cable in the US. (The whole thing is apparently already out on Latin American Netflix too, just for extra chaos. It's ... kind of fascinating to watch as a lesson in what not to do?)

Apparently the US isn't getting it on BBC America -- sounds like the series will be going up on Hulu for American watchers.

I can't pull citations here at work, but there have been other tweets and comments indicating this is the last season.

She not only jumps around in accent, she just plain doesn't sound Hungarian. One side of my family are expat Hungarian Jews, and nowhere in accent soup did she sound anything like them. Hungary's Jews were fairly well-assimilated at the time, from what I recall, and Hungarian is a language isolate, having her sound (for example) Russian or "vague Hollywood Eastern European" makes no sense at all. (Even a German accent would've been more plausible, between the vestiges of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and possible Yiddish influences (if she were from a less-assimilated family.) NGL, it bothered the heck out of me. (I found Anna kind of grating as a character, but the accent kind of capped it all.) I think my favourite surprise with the new season was Rose coming across the country, because she was just delightful. I am 100% here for the ongoing Peggy vs. Dottie show, and the Peggy uncovering mysteries show, and the Peggy smacking people with whatever weapon of opportunity is at hand show. I am much less here for the Peggy romance show, so I hope they don't spend too much time there. Still, very much looking forward to the new season!

Agreed, Zuleikha -- I looked at a photo of Verbeek, and comparing it to my mother's (Hungarian Jewish) family, she doesn't look it. It would be nice if Hollywood let Jewish actors play Jewish characters when it's not for villainy or comic relief, but I suspect this has an element of name recognition involved. :\ Still, looking forward to seeing what the new season brings.

The actual song seems to be "Is You Is Or Is You Ain't (My Baby)", which was a 1944-vintage jazz standard. The utter matter-of-factness of Angie's delivery makes that line for me.

The show's definitely taken liberties there -- I vaguely remember it even being explicitly stated that they had. Not saying it means things would be different for all Targaryens, but there isn't the same "absolutely not" groundwork that there is in the books.

Fair distinction -- I meant more the non-readers who do follow some news for a show, not the full-blinders-on Unsullied. (Also, I can use English, I swear. But apparently I need more coffee first.)

The problem, I think, with turning Jon's death into a cliffhanger is that you lose the suspense once the actor is confirmed for the next season. I think they could have a lot of fun with making the Unsullied wait and speculate and squirm, but logistically it's not easy. OTOH, they can possibly bring Jon back in such a way that leaves ambiguity and questions about whether he's still truly Jon or whether something went awry, or something of the sort. That still invites speculation and squirming and "OMG WAT" sorts of moments without forcing them to hide the fact that Kit Harrington is going to still be around the next season.

I kind of loved the radio play. It's horrible, it's hokey, and it's dead wrong as far as the truth, but at the same time it rings true to what I remember of the medium. (One of the local stations used to run old radio plays at midnight, so I'd hear them on my way home from theatre.) There's also something about the incongruity of the radio play actors to the people they're playing that I appreciate. Not sure how it would work as a standalone and/or without the visuals, but I'd give it a try if they did some shorts. If nothing else, handled well it could be a good laugh -- and best case, it gives an insight as to what the Average Joe On the Street thinks when it comes to Captain America and the like, which is pretty neat IMO.

That certainly seems like a better fit, IMO -- especially when one thinks of poor Jarvis' face when Peggy drags him door to door through Howard's exes. He just seems so squirmingly uncomfortable with some of what he has to do on Howard's behalf. Poor put-upon man. XD

I'm not sure I read Jarvis as much 'contemptuous' as 'realistic about Howard's flaws and resigned to the fact they'll never change', if the distinction makes sense. IMO he still respects Howard (unsurprising, given Howard's part in Anna's survival), but isn't blind to his employer's shortcomings. (Which might well have been what you're trying to say -- contemptuous just doesn't fit for me.) I wonder if Howard even bothered to find neutralisation methods for all of his inventions. That doesn't seem to me his style -- more 'shove it in a corner and ignore it because ooh, shiny new challenge!'. Howard is ... not very grounded in reality, and seems the type to think that locking something up obviously means no one will go after it (despite having seen evidence to the contrary in the past). He's not very good at thinking things through, is he?

I may be the only one thinking this, but the little awkward look Thompson gave Sousa and, especially, Peggy when the senator was lauding him makes me think maybe the character hasn't gone back to being a complete tool. It'd be nice to see that the series did give him some evolution; I can think of plenty of plausible reasons for him to keep his mouth shut, and some even stem from not entirely selfish motives. (Partially, yes, but not entirely.) I watched the episode before work this morning when I woke up to texts from several friends full of capslocky glee, and I'm glad beyond reason I did. This show manages to strike a balance between seriousness, hilarity, and punching-you-in-the-feels that is really well-executed; that I could go from laughing over Howard failing to remember whatever name Dottie had given him and how indignant she was to tears over Peggy and Howard on the radio (not to mention the bridge, and Jarvis' declaration as he handed over the blood before) to squealing aloud at the end when Zola was revealed ... Agent Carter's handled things deftly throughout, and while I think the short season may have helped I don't think it's the only reason -- the writing here is head and shoulders above Agents of Shield (and a lot of other TV shows). Loved the Odysseus gambit Sousa pulled -- it seemed so very true to character, whether the origin of his idea was common sense or classical literature. Loved Jarvis' reaction to Howard hugging him. Loved Howard being Howard, that jerk with an essential humanity that he just can't shake. Loved Thompson and Sousa as buddy cops. Loved Dottie's ability to switch between wide-eyed innocence and kicking your arse. Loved the Angie cameo and how excited she was over the apartment. And loved everything Peggy. Hayley Atwell is a treasure, and I agree 100% with whoever said they want an Atwell/D'Arcy Thin Man reboot -- I am there. I had little problems here and there with the episode, and I'm sure if I sat down and rewatched critically that I would find more, but overall I'm just riding an excited high (despite this being the season end), and I'm too busy being delighted to focus on those. They didn't detract from my enjoyment, and that IMO is plenty. This show. This cast. All my incoherent feels and delight. There had better be another season (at least)!

So a 63-72% dark ending? (On second thought, maybe I shouldn't say I like my stories like I like my chocolate ... that might end up too dark!) Martin never struck me as nihilistic, either in Game of Thrones or in any of his Wild Cards work. He writes storylines with some pretty severe shit going down and some decidedly dark notes, but if the Wild Cards stuff is any sort of gauge, his endings never seemed to me as crapsack as the buildup. (Of course, a lot of Wild Cards was shared 'verse so make of that what you will, but I think that if he'd wanted Rocks Fall Everyone Dies that could've happened all the same.) Although Rocks Fall Everyone Dies is a lazy ending, so maybe if he gets bored enough and just wants to finish that's what'll end up happening. Right. Happy thoughts. Chocolate!

If it hasn't come up yet, I wouldn't put it past the producers to use "little brother", let the implication of Tyrion build up, and then drop the information that Jaime is younger than Cersei ... Cue dramatic chords.

While I do think the two shows are inherently different and that it makes it harder to compare, I think Agent Carter definitely has the better writing (both in plot and in dialogue) and the better cast, all around. The initial popularity of AoS predicated, IMO, on two things: Coulson, and the Whedon name. I was tentatively interested at first, but got bored with it pretty quickly, especially when it wanted me to be invested in characters that it felt like it had given me no reason to care about (and who, unfortunately, also weren't the kinds of characters I cared about to begin with). I lost interest wholesale in the middle of season 1, and when I tried to pick it back up at the beginning of season 2, I couldn't even muster up the energy to watch the May-heavy episodes. And May is the one character I'm actually invested in at this point. (I want May-Romanoff-Hill SHIELD agent shenanigans instead. Please?) Obviously Agents of SHIELD is doing it for some people. I'm not sure if you can judge one as objectively better than the other, but overall I've found Agent Carter a much more engaging and interesting show, and I have no interest in giving Agents of SHIELD another go when it takes over the timeslot. It would've been interesting to see how both shows worked in a short-run season -- ten episodes like BBC tends to do, or something like that. One of AoS' admitted problems was the amount of filler ...