DigitalCount

I actually felt we saw a very human Ramsey in the most recent episode. If it was a scene involving good guys, it would have been an uplifting moment when Roose tells Ramsey that they rule the North, and it fits Ramsey's desperate need for acceptance from his father. In a way, Ramsey is kind of a dark Jon, but Ned's dead and Roose is very much alive and well, obviously. Essentially, Ramsey has everything Jon wanted, and he got it by being utterly despicable, turning on his comrades and having a father dishonorable enough to do the same. How very GoT.

Isn't it already? I thought that was what we were watching.

Well, that happened. I personally don't think Tywin was poisoned; it seems a bit too pat. Plus, it seems like a way to: a) Make Oberyn out to be even more awesome, because everyone loves him b) Weasel Tyrion out of the kinslayer curse And at the very least, on the show it doesn't seem like Oberyn could have poisoned him. When would he have had the chance? Too many variables that make Oberyn out to be a ninja or something.

Can Manderly really be cut though? It feels like he's way too popular, and we need a good guy to be the face of the North as it was under the Starks. Sorry to be that dude who's always pushing this theory, but I personally think Tyrion is the red herring for Cersei, while Jaime is the red herring for the audience. The valonqar is exactly who Maggy said it would be: the younger brother of her three children who she's just finished crying over, and whose eyes will be--by that point--a lovely shade of glowing blue. Yes, Cersei is always wrong, but I think she's even more deeply wrong here in terms of the way she frames the prophecy in her mind. And how good would it be to have the woman whose only redeeming quality is her love for her children undone by one of them?

Well, when they reintroduced 3gor Clegane, he was skewering someone in a mustard-colored cloak, wasn't he? I thought that was a bit of foreshadowing, but it doesn't seem as if it's come up in the Unsullied threads. But man, I can't imagine what people are going to be saying about Tyrion's fate after Oberyn's death.

Because he didn't use witch magic, he used pure magic.*shoots Markos*

Wait, I didn't think Amara or Silas were capital-D Doppelgangers in the sense that they were super-blood-bags who people fall in love with. The "shadow selves" were created as a result of their immortality, so Amara likely did not have the associated supernatural properties. Silas got in because he's a witch, but he and Amara are only doppelgangers in the dictionary sense of the word, aren't they? They couldn't really be original doppelgangers because they weren't the product of someone else's use of the special elixir Q made. EDIT: Stealth-Salvatore'd by Fangirl. That's pretty much my take on it too.

Wait, which doppels have we seen who didn't go to the other side? Kat, Elena, Stefan, presumably Tom...I don't think Silas and Amara counted as doppels since they were the templates. My question regarding doppels is why they're RUINED FOREVER as supe jet fuel when they get vamped, but the Travelers can still use their blood for spells. Maybe it's because they cast using pure magic. (Screw you, Travelers, for not only having your own convoluted mythology, but actually going back in time and screwing up previously-established stuff. And for not having a different term for your spells--even some nonsensical made-up word would be better--but that's the hidden aspie in me wanting to categorize everything, probably. Hopefully they'll retcon it like they retconned Silas being offended at being considered a vampire.) Fangirl: I think it works, actually. Emily was able to possess Bonnie since jump street, so maybe some witches or travelers can just...do that. How Nadia knew he was capable of doing something he'd have to die in order to accomplish is another matter entirely, but maybe doing a passenger spell once leaves some tether in the person you were in so even if you die, you can come back through them. Kat showed that you have some control over your own spirit after death, but that could have just been Kat being a boss.

Talk about hard to watch, though. I feel like this break is going to make it even more difficult.

Yeah, I'm not sure if there was supposed to be some magical element to Tyler's triggering; as I remember, he was forced to kill Sarah(?) when she was compelled to attack him at that masquerade ball. So he should still be a wolf, but for whatever reason they're treating him as untapped. As for Gregor, maybe he was just...particularly talented at doing the passenger spell? Yeah, got nothing. That one specifically should have been caught, since it's the same season. Speaking of travelers, I wish they had some other term for the supernatural acts they did, because it's really annoying to hear them harping on and on about witches when they're freaking witches. I mean, what's the difference between "spirit magic" and "pure" traveler magic? The only things we've seen them do are spells that witches either have done or can do just as easily.

I figured that we should have a thread where we discuss how the world of TVD itself works, based on a discussion about Jeremy (what he is, how he's alive, etc) in particular, as well as some things that were set up for Tyler in the S5 finale. If anyone has a better idea for the title, we can go ahead and have it changed; I just thought that it was perhaps fitting.

I was thinking exactly this. I was actually also a little bit miffed that the memories were random new scenes that we'd never seen before, but a clip show for the finale...it took me about 45 seconds to think, "huh, guess they made the right call." EDIT: At the end of Myka & Pete vs. SuburbaNinjas, the voice said "Flawless victory" which is just beautiful.

I thought that the problem was the sire-bond re: Elena's ability to drink animal blood. I think that, fundamentally, Stefan was right on the money with regard to Elena's worries, it's just that her turning period was a strange, special case. Also, re: Alaric - I'm pretty sure that in the s4 finale Alaric still had at least his speed and strength when he prevented Connor from blowing up the grill.

Obviously, if we take nothing else away from this finale, there is one thing we will always have, and that is MYKA MYKA BERING MYKA MYKA BERING

Maybe Death did the legwork initially, and then when angels entered the fray he contracted some of them out?

I never expected Dean to say yes to Michael and didn't feel as if Dean was "slighted" for not getting to be a vessel. I always thought it would have to go differently. Someone had to be there who was rebelling against the Apocalypse Prizefight, or else the finale would have been Michael vs. Lucifer with no Winchesters anywhere. Adam being a pinch-hitter made sense to me as a last resort, given that he wasn't The One, and that the angels couldn't be certain of the outcome in that instance. They were absolutely certain that Michael-in-Dean would win, but Michael-in-Adam is better than Michael-in-Random or Michael-in-No-One. The only thing that would have made Swan Song better for me is if a) it was the end of the series, and b) Sam was able to take control but not able to jump or physically move, and then Dean would need to tackle him into the hole so all three Winchester brothers would end up downstairs. It's really the only ending that would make sense to me at this point. I can't see them leaving the life if they're still breathing, and I don't see them growing old. Season 1 and 2 were nice, but a bit heavy on the As You Know style of exposition. I found it clunky enough to consider quitting at the time. With the mytharc I actually felt the story was, well, a story rather than a cobbled-together collection of updated legends that could have used a bit of elbow grease here and there. (I tend to be hopelessly bored when there isn't an overarching plot in something I'm reading/watching, though.)

I'm going to assume that Bonnie having brought back Jeremy works in the same way as the rings. Even though he was brought back by magic, magic is not currently sustaining his life in the same way that magic is actively sustaining the lives of vampires or pushing the Travelers away from each other. It's kind of like the nonsensical way they treated the vampire switch where they said it was turning off "emotions" when it was clearly turning off humanity, or morality, or something else that actually related to what was on the screen. When they say "this spell will wipe out all spirit magic" what they mean is "this spell will negate all spirit magic currently acting on anything." So if, for example, a witch used magic to light a candle and hold a feather in midair, upon the Traveler spell reaching them the feather would fall and the candle would remain burning.

That cold rage, that crazy-eyed rage. Dinklage and Dance are unstoppable. Hizdahr seems younger than I read him to be. Also, I thought the look on Margaery's face was poorly-veiled guilt. She may not be a Tyrion cheerleader, but she knew him to be innocent, and she knew Sansa to be innocent. I think she was fighting against her better nature to say something, because she knows she can't explain why she knows that they're innocent. Ugh, the Oberyn scenes were too good and painful at the same time. I was so weary of backing the wrong horse by this point, and then Oberyn rode in like some sort of magical hero character and I was like FINALLY! and then, well. Looks like Shae is going to be adhering to the books, and they substituted "lion" for "giant," which I figured they would do. I did like how, while a bunch of people testified against him, she was the only one to outright lie on the stand and humiliate him, which may play into her eventual fate. The other testimonies implicated him (with his own words, no less) but Shae made up stuff to get him executed and made him look like a laughingstock in what could have been his final days in the land of the living. I can buy him seeing red when he realizes the depth of the sham.

I don't think the ring maintains their lives, it just restarts them. So rather than being a continuous effect that the rings cast, it's more like a trigger effect that activates whenever they die because of a supernatural cause. So if the rings fail, they would just be in danger of being killed again, not auto-killed. Vampirism, on the other hand, keeps the vampires alive continuously, hence their need to provide maintenance (drinking blood etc) in order to continue living.

W13 has always had mood whiplash. The S3 opener was so whimsical I actually commented that they should have put in a laugh track, and then S3 ended with...Emily Lake and Stand. Yeah.

I went through that exact line of characters (Ygritte, Mel) before settling on Cat myself, particularly because she's been both sides of that coin. But now that I think of it, "eyes of fire" describes Mel better than any other onscreen character. After this episode and the way Jaime and Cersei speak with one another, I'm mostly okay with just mentally filing The Scene last episode as not rape, but Jaime should still not have put Cersei in that position and they shouldn't have written out Cersei's "yes." Despite my disgust, based on something someone said I watched part of it again, and you can see Cersei pull Jaime's face closer; by the time they're on the floor, her boots are around at Jaime's back, meaning she did indeed wrap her legs around him. What I take issue with is the irresponsibility of portraying a person having sex saying no while taking actions that imply a yes. I mean, in that position, with a hold on him like that, it'd be incredibly difficult for Jaime to actually comply with Cersei's request to stop, so even if he had wanted to it would have been hard. I understand this. But the writers control every aspect of what happens on the screen, and just like the Smallville writers didn't need to have Superman burning a pair of identical towers in the middle of the biggest city in DC-USA until they collapsed, these guys did not need to set up a scene where LH was directed to wrap her legs around NCW while saying "no, it's not right." This doesn't even really touch the issue of Jaime essentially "working a yes out," which kind of falls under rape anyway. Poor planning, poor writing, or poor directing; pick two.

Cross-posted from TWoP, but: I don't think it's like Julian where it was on a timer. They had to take some action to activate the switch. The system for activating that switch is now destroyed, so Bathory (Hugh?) can't use it to kill them. Russell, Russell, Russell. I think the first time when I started to realize that he was a total moron was back when they were trying to read Jed's mind and he was literally incapable of not touching anything in Jed's house. To his credit he actually looks like a shell of a man when they're waltzing down the sidewalk, like the puppet of Lady Natabeth that he is. She pulled him in to kiss him, put his arm around her shoulder, practically dragged him down the street. He actually looks far from happy with himself when they're initially walking, it's the other turncoats cheering and laughing in the background. To be honest, I think they (the writers) let the metaphor run away from them, which is why it came across so jarringly. In the context of the show we've been watching, it seems ridiculous that these guys would be so impatient and lacking in self-reflection, but if Roger--as well as Stephen--is a Christ-archetype (they even crucified him!) then you can see what they're trying to do. Hillary didn't commit suicide because she was remorseful or because she was a woman or any reason other than the fact that her "role" is that of Judas. They didn't really think it through beyond "hey, cool allegory" and it shows. This doesn't exactly fill me with lots of confidence about Luca's future position, mind. If Stephen is the new Roger, wouldn't that make Luca the new Jed? Speaking of the crucifixion, that montage was well filmed and rather sweet. They didn't do absolutely everything wrong. And John/Astrid is somehow more bearable than Cara/Stephen. Maybe it's because they're both moving on from nonsensical nonsense and actually work well opposite each other, while Stephen is easily at his best as far away from Cara as possible. EDIT: Although, watching it over, I remember being intensely irritated about everyone's reactions to things that happened. John and Astrid were rather resigned to their deaths, and Marla, the woman who can stop a billion bullets from hitting anyone like her name is freaking Neo, was stopped from dissecting Natalie...how? She has two hands, right? Also, I found it funny how even without his powers the fight looked like it could have gone in Roger's direction if there had been maybe one or two fewer people attacking him. Way to suck, TPs. EDIT 2: About Irene figuring out what Jed hadn't after he'd dedicated his life to it, I think it was the new information they got from the tracker in Jody's brain. The tracker automatically (presumably accidentally) bonded to the specific information he needed to do the rest. I assume that the information he got from the tracker was the last thing he didn't know and that he already had something set up. And lastly (maybe), this episode had a later-in-series feel to it, if that makes sense. The destruction of the ULTRA office set, the re-capture of the father/mentor figure, giving powers to a SAP (hopefully paving the way for John to regain his powers)...these are all things that I've seen in later seasons of similar shows. Maybe it's a sign that they aren't kidding themselves as to this show's staying power.

I think my favorite part was probably when Snow was on the ground, pleading with Regina to split her heart between herself and Charming, with Regina telling her it was too dangerous. It was almost the loving mother-daughter relationship they didn't get to have.

MachuPichu, rather than just saying WORD to everything, I think I'll focus in on this: YES. I mean, what on Earth? ExBonnie could have made a handbag out of Liv's pancreas without the latter even noticing it was gone. Liv may have had a headstart, but Bonnie was practically a new Qetsiyah. Wasn't she going to use the headstone to make Katherine into an Originator? We've seen exactly 1 other witch do that, so is Liv more powerful than Esther too?This was LAST YEAR. The whole reason Bonnie is a zombie is because of that, so what gives? Maybe she's trying to be sly since she doesn't trust Liv.

Specifically, it was when Cersei was crowing about having found Ros via the Lannister pendant/brooch/some bit of jewelry, and thought that she, rather than Shae, was Tyrion's paramour.