CletusMusashi

I wish Arya found Nymeria again. She does. But The Hound is asleep at the time, and when he wakes up Arya herself has gone back to sleep, so all he knows is that dire wolf tastes like chicken. R.I.P. Crispynymeria... Next wish is obvious, I think. I wish Oberyn had finished off The Mountain.

I watched it again today. The fight scene is easier to deal with if you know how much of an over-the-top ending is coming. Then you just end up watching it as comedy. My brain no longer acknowledges Mountie's actual last words, because my brain is stuck hearing him as Dr. Kelso from "Scrubs." Not quite as random as it sounds, if you know your Kelso jokes. "You raped my sister, you murdered-" "Hey, what has two thumbs and doesn't CARE about your damned sister? THIS GUY!" (squish!)

Is her hair stylist a Lannister? By the way, now that Sansa's got that supervillain costume, what's her new name going to be? Ravenatrix?

OK, I've had a night to think it over, and the ending of that fight still sucks. Oberyn dies? Fine. Potentially valid narrative choice, let's see where it leads. Oberyn gets his head crushed, by hand? Exploding zanily all over the place? That's a little bit ridiculous. At least when they killed Ned, they tried to make it like a real character death. Oberyn's was more like "Dude! Wouldn't it be awesome if his head exploded?" Troma called. They want their schtick back.

Where are all the Hill tribes? In Season 1, you couldn't walk through the Vale area for five minutes without running into them. Then they got all that military equipment from Tywin, supposedly to go back there and cause trouble, and there has been no sign of their existence since then.

The fight didn't occupy as much as the episode ad I expected it to, but that's okay, because ultimately we got what we've really all been waiting two week to see: an unbelievably long speech about beetles that actually manages to do the impossible and make Peter Dinklage boring. Maybe his backup plan is he'll tell that same story again, put everybody to sleep, and escape. I guess maybe it was some kind of foreshadowing. Oberynn died because he wouldn't stop asking a violent moron that same beetle question. But, did we really need that much extrapolation to clarify for us that The Mountain was a crazy violent thug? The Mountain and The Viper were barely even in this episode. They should have called it "The Beetles and The Stones." By the way, are there now three songs in Westeros? During that belching contest at the beginning, Castamere and the Bear song were both represented, but what was that other song someone guessed? Why, yes, I did find whores belching to be more interesting than the beetle speech.

One thing that never ceases to impress me when I rewatch the old show is that The Joker, unique among the show's villains, is absolutely never funny. Everybody else gets to say some good jokes, even if they're just angrily muttered at a henchman, but they made absolutely certain that every line ever uttered by The Joker was a complete and utter dud. Now don't get me wrong. I quite enjoyed Heath Ledger and I loved Mark Hamilll, but on a show where all of the villains are funny anyway, what do you do with the official self-designated "funny guy." Answer: You make him suck! Apparently the psychosis of Cesar Romero's version stems almost entirely from the fact that he wants to be laughed at but is just completely unbelievable incapable of inspiring it.

This was the ep that originally sucked me in. I was channel flipping around and came to the "Redrum!" scene where Xander was playing around with Sid. I didn't even know what I was watching. Hell, I didn't even know if it was a TV show or a movie or what, but I did know that any time you see a ventiloquist's dummy being picked on like that people are about to start getting sliced up, so of course I stayed on that channel, and I loved it. By the time anyone even clued me in by saying "Buffy" or "slayer," I already knew I was hooked on... whatever it was.

... Shae: Camilla the Chicken Podrick: Scooter Shagga, son of Dolf: Sweetums Tywin: Sam the Eagle

I wish Catelyn Stark hadn't believed Baelish about Tyrion being the owner of the dagger the assassin used to try and kill Bran. She doesn't. Being Catelyn, she tells him so, flat out. Being Littlefinger, he immediately pulls the string that activates some kind of a Rube Goldberg device that drops a tiny anvil on her head and knocks her out. Littlefinger ties Catelyn up and carries her away to the Eyrie. Lysa immdiately flips out and makes Catelyn fly. Littelfinger makes Lysa fly, but it's too late. Cat go splat. The Cat is flat. Ned Stark drops everything and devotes the rest of his short life to a suicidal attack on the Eyrie. Meanwhile, King Joffrey Baratheon continues to rule unopposed. I wish that, instead of confronting his enemies openly and in broad daylight, Ned Stark had tried spending his nights as a caped, masked vigilante.

I agree. He's the most awesome of the bad guys. Cersei tends toward as much pettiness as planning. Roose tries, and does pretty well with the cards he's dealt, but still feels like a poor man's Tywin. Littlefinger spends all day lecturing Sansa about how clever it was of him to hide in the bushes and talk Joffrey into attacking the butcher boy. Balon's infrastructure makes no fucking sense. ("We consider farming and trade to be unmanly, but we'll happily risk our lives pirating in order to pay taxes to keep some bitter old prune in a humungous castle.") And from there it's all downhill. Ramsay, Thorne, Slynt, Hound of the Week, Melisandre, Bald Cannibal Chief... put every single third-banana villain together and maybe the entire lot of them could make the scene half as interesting as Tywin being mildly sarcastic to someone. It's not just that he's well written. It's not just that he's well acted. it's that the good acting so often focuses on restraint, charisma, and/or a degree of pragmatism that often makes him the one who appears to be playing "good cop." So then, when he turns around and shows that, no, he has not suddenly turned into Mr. Nice Guy, I may not be surprised intellectually, but on an emotional level... yeah, kinda. Every time the thought crosses anyone's mind that maybe, just maybe, if there was some kind of do-over, maybe Tywin would not have Tyrion's wife gang-raped by Lannister soldiers... it's like Charlie Brown trying to kick that stupid football. You want proof of how brilliantly evil Tywin is? He named his most interesting kid Tyrion. So that, just in case someday there was some kind of story about the Lannisters, we would all constantly be typing things like "I think Tywin was a very cruel father to Tywin-" and then having to go back and correct it, over and over and over. I mean, that kind of torture takes way more thought than just killing a pet or chopping a dick off. The man's a fucking artist.

Hey, I was sweeping up my apartment, and all of a sudden out of the blue it hit me. The reason why he sometimes uses that Batman voice? He's getting ready to fight crime with Robin.

Person A makes a wish. Person B, defined as the first other person to answer, grants the wish, in a terrible way. Then they make their own wish. Then, anyone else (you cannot "grant" your own wish,) continues the cycle by corrupting that wish and making a new one. Once in a while, you get such an oddball wish that simply writing anything about it qualifies. Those tend to be the funniest ones, actually. But, at least to start out, the core template of the game is corrupt and wish, corrupt and wish, corrupt and wish, ad infinitum. Example. Let's say I open with: "I wish Shae had never gone to King's Landing." You might see something like this: "I wish Shae had never gone to King's Landing. Wish granted! But without her, Tyrion gets so horny that he ends up impregnating a drunken Cersei, who gives birth to octo-Joffries! I wish Jaime had gotten a cool pirate hook instead of a golden hand." "I wish Jaime had gotten a cool pirate hook instead of a golden hand. Wish granted! Jaime is given a hook for a hand, sent back to Casterly Rock, and appointed Master of Guestcoats. I wish..." well, I've got to save some for the actual game, right? Okay, here we go for real: I wish that Ser Davos' financial plan had been something more exciting than a loan application.

Either that, or seducing someone (either sex,) in the casting department, in order to get them to replace the Mountain's actor with a smaller one. Perhaps Gilbert Gottfried.

At this point, I'm pretty much assuming that Littlefinger was the one behind the hunting accident. He just hasn't confessed it to Sansa yet, but give him another week and I'm sure he will. He also killed Tywin's wife, gave Hodor aphasia, inserted the stick into Stannis' butt, and made Hot Pie fat.

Historically, two weapon combos weren't really a successful thing. Rapier fighters would often keep a dagger in their left hand in case the fight clenched up, and Miyamoto was able to show off with his two sword style simply because he was a six foot tall monster fighting little four foot eleven guys in 16th century Japan, but usually holding a weapon in two hands makes it faster, harder hitting, more secure, and allows you use one with better reach. The only thing that really proved a competitive use of the other hand was a shield. Maybe a really quick spear and shield style like Grey Worm uses? The Mountain's no stranger to spears, though. If he wasn't good at using his sword against them, he'd be dead. Granted, we've seen weapon combos used successfully on the show. Ramsay took on a whole room with hand axe and dagger, but it was a crowded room where the other guys might not have had room to use their swords properly. And Karl McRapypants held off Jon Snow's sword by using two daggers. But Karl wasn't just very experienced with daggers. He was also, much as I hate to say anything remotely flattering about him, a big, strong guy, and while Jon Snow is certainly no weakling, he doesn't seem to be known for having an abnormal amount of brute thug-power. Using a couple of one-handed weapons to block Jon Snow simply isn't the same as using them to block The Mountain. Ideally, if I were Oberyn, I would bring a mare in heat with me, just in case Gregor decided to ride. I would find out what all of Gregor's favorite toys were, buy replicas of them, and duct-tape them all over said mare. I would wear a suit of armor with twenty-foot spikes on it to keep him from reaching me. And as my primary weapon I would use a catapult. With poison. Whatever object he uses to fight with, I expect a lot of psychological warfare. Using Musashi as a historical example again, he was fond of things like showing up as late as possible for duels and being as over-the-top insulting as possible right before the fight, because he considered an enraged enemy preferable to a disciplined one. I expect similar shenanigans from Oberyn, although, let's face it, we've seen an enraged Mountain before and he still came pretty close to killing Ser Loras. Maybe just give him a whole bunch of kittens and puppies the night before? And hope that he eats so many of them that he can't move properly?

Tyrion's axe is terrible. Even for Tyrion. It has no reach, no leverage, and at the range that it actually is semi-useful, whichever edge you're not using is dangerously close to your face and neck. I always thought that if Tyrion were going to use a short double-blade weapon, it should be a short spear, with a blade at each end. With his stubby little arms, he could pull off spins with it on a crowded battlefield that specifically gave a (partial) advantage to his size. And anyway, Podrick has it. But, best weapon for Oberyn to use... It's going to be a "coming at each other from a distance" scenerio, so it needs enough reach to be competitive against a six foot long greatsword. I'm ruling out weapons that you have to swing with real muscle power, like greataxes, because a trained warrior guy the size of Mountain of the Week is always going to have better control of a long heavy weapon than a much smaller guy. I also don't think a spear is the answer. Even though there were some great spears designed for fighting guys who had armor and big fucking swords, ultimately the big fucking swords only faded because they were so much more expensive than the spears. During the era that the ahlspiess, for example, was a popular spear for killing knights in plate armor, the two-handed sword continued to be used, largely because it was a far more versatile weapon than one tends to assume. So I don't think you're really going to surprise Gregor by poking a sharp stick at him. Especially in one on one combat. Spears are most effective when you have a dozen of them stabbing at one guy on a crowded battlefield where there's no room to dodge. Swords are most effective when there's room to circle around and change which direction the fight is happening from. Modern fencing (the current rules of which are more Victorian-and-later than Renaissance,) has forgotten that. The Mountain is not a modern fencer. If Oberyn can talk The Mountain into fighting with no armor,a lot of options open up. Defeating him with a whip, for example, would be both awesome and hilarious. But that's not gonna happen. For one thing, they're very rapidly running out of seven foot tall actors, so Greg's probably going to need full visored plate armor to cover up the fact that he's suddenly a black guy or a nineteen year old ginger or the midgets from Joffrey's wedding standing on top of each other. So my vote is Oberyn uses a staff. Quick, long, with more surprising angles of attack than a sword or axe or whatever, so you can smack and jab and trip and hook and block from all over the place extremely quickly... and if multiple weapons are allowed you can always finish Mount Gregor off with a dagger. Either that,or he just goes retro, and catches him with the old "Candy-gram for Mongo!" schtick.

Futurama! Phillip J. Fry is Tyrion Lannister. Hardly a traditional hero, but tends to get pitted against very bad people and come out ahead, at least with the help of a few friends. He loves to drink, rarely fits in with those around him, tends to be despised by authority types, and has a criminal as a best friend. This means that Bender could be Bron. Although The Hound is actually an even better fit. Which one would you expect to hear saying "Bite my shiny metal ass, meatbag?" Leela is Brienne of Tarth. She's a tough, capable woman who's a bit insecure about not being a size zero. Which of course means that Jaime Lannister is Zap Brannigan. And, yes, that does mean you could substitute Podrick as Fry if you are so inclined. Amy is rich, pretty, popular, and very much aware of it. Yet she's never actually let it turn her into a bad person. Amy is Margaery (insert last name of current husband here. Are they still even trying Baratheon?) Hermes is ridiculously anal retentive, but more physically capable than one would expect. Could he be anyone other than Stannis? Professor Farnsworth is an old, petty, easily distracted bumbling fool, but he is also an absolute genius, with a lifetime of experience at what he does, who can crush you if sufficiently motivated. He has elements of Pycelle, Aemon, and Walder Frey, but ultimately he is Fry's elderly relative slash abusive boss. The Professor is Tywin. Which means that Mom, the sweet old lady who the public never suspects is so brilliantly plotting so many things, is Olenna Tyrell. Yes, I do kind of ship her and Tywin. And so I guess professor Wernstrom is Roose Bolton. Lrrr, Ruler of Omicron Persei 8, is Shagga. The part about him trying to get vengeance on King's landing for eating baby Hill People did not actually make it into the TV series, but I'm sure it's in the books somewhere. The Robot Devil is Littlefinger. "Ah, my ridiculously circuitous plan is one quarter complete!" Depending on who you chose as Bender, Nibbler is either Ser Pounce or The Hound. Ser Pounce is littler and cuter, but The Hound eats more chickens. Probably. Scruffy is a janitor, whose dialogue consists mostly of such information as "I'm Scruffy. A janitor." He seems to get all his work done, but he does like to sit down and take porn breaks when he can. Scruffy is Hodor. Earth President Richard M. Nixon is a card-carrying supervillain who makes absolutely no secret of being a horrible dick who despises everybody. Yet he continues to remain in power. Nixon is Balon Greyjoy. Kif is Varys. Both are bald, squishy, highly intelligent, constantly derided by others, and, instead of bones, are supported by a system of fluid-filled bladders. I'm sure that last part about Varys is in the books somewhere. And, no, I have not forgotten about Zoidberg. Dr. Zoidberg is obviously Mace Tyrell.

Well, the Maestro is the closest thing to a father figure that Darla's had. I think that when he's around, her behavior changes a little bit, kind of like with Faith and the Mayor. Except probably less miniature golf.

I loved that crazy-ass killer preacher vamp who we thought was the Annointed one. He was comedy gold. I wish he'd survived a bit longer.

Oh, I agree, she's a horrible person. But she's a nuanced horrible person. She's well-written, well acted, and therefore a lot more fun to hate than Littlefinger or Ramsay or Disposable Bad Slave Master of The Week. As a villain, I like Cersei, just as I like Tywin and Roose. As a surviving character... yeah, if she dies I probably won't hold it against whoever kills her, because there is an enormous number of excellent reasons for people to do so, but until then I like having her around. For one thing, she's prettier than Tywin. But as far as having her around in real life- hell no. Jaime can have her.

Poor Ned. just when I think I've heard every single damning argument against him, there's still more. I guess my take on it that he was okay, in theory, with people shipping their kids around, but he personally was too determined to be a perfect hands-on parent for that option to ever seriously cross his mind for long. Doesn't make his choice right or wrong, just understandable. Back on episode topic: Was anybody else kind of hoping that Hot Pie would join up with Brienne and Podrick to form a perfect comedy trio? Seven gods! You could fill a whole episode with just the three of them bickering about how to cook a rabbit.

What about Ramsay?

I actually thought it was fun. Oh, if it came out in 2014, it would be horrible, but back in the 90s even its low-points were pretty much "yeah, that's what I'd expect from a weekly monster show." Most episodes from the early seasons were so great that they make us forget what actually passed for "pretty good" back then. Plus, it was Season 1. They had to do some throw-away MoW eps. I liked that Buffy was already so used to reasonably-bad-ass-vampires-with-intimidating-publicity that she was headlocking them and using them to find more important monsters. And, they had to show that the next monster could be anything. Season 1 had to be a little bit gratuitously zany a few times, because if it's all vampires and witches then viewers can quickly start acting like know-it-alls. Which we did anyway, so... all right. Not a one hundred per cent successful episode. I can't help thinking that if we'd seen more of "Natalie," though, she'd have grown on us. She's more fun than a lot of longer lasting Bads they've had, and I'm not even talking about the shit seasons. I'm saying that the only thing that made, for example, Angelus, more fun to me than Natalie was Spike sitting in a wheelchair arguing with him. Natalie came in, served as a plot device, and went on her way. Holy crap, do I miss the days when a villain and/or conflict we didn't all love was just background to the character arcs, instead of vice versa. Sure, the nonsense about bats, flying around in the sky, being the natural enemy of praying mantises, sitting around sonar-shielded in bushes, was pretty silly. But I accepted it as the kick in the ass that I apparently needed, for expecting scientific accuracy in a show about magical monsters. At least they got it out of their systems early. Otherwise we'd eventually have had to see a gigantic fake mongoose on steroids wrestling around with Glory's zoo snake.

I'm a little confused. Ned screwed up a lot of things, but how was he responsible for Jon Arryn's death?