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It took Arrow 3 seasons before I washed my hands of it. The Flash did it in two -- I guess he is the fastest man alive!

I think Davos mentioned in his sales pitch to Lady Mormont. Sansa was there and didn't react so presumably she's heard the tale off-screen. IIRC from the World Book, it was one of Aegon V's sons, who was gay, so he was fine with Olenna saying "no".

LOL. I'm sure what he lacks in staying power he makes up for in fervor and rapid recovery times. Marge did make a joke to her ladies about him wanting to set a frequency record.

I think I'm coming around to the idea that Marge doesn't have much more of a plan than "survive, play along to get more freedom of movement, and work things from there". In a way, she's basically in Sansa's position after Ned's execution: stuck amongst enemies in Kings Landing, behaving how they want her to behave just to survive. The High Sparrow isn't as obviously sadistic as Joffrey, but just as dangerous. Marge, hopefully, will be more adept and less passive than Sansa. Regarding Arya's stomach wound: I initially guessed it was a set-up, that she had armor underneath her clothes and a bag full of fake blood. I thought this would be a payoff to her time with the Mummers, and that she was faking her own death to make her escape easier. When she went into the water and didn't resurface, I was convinced that was the case. Then she lurched out of the canal bleeding, and I thought "oh this is stupid." She shouldn't survive that kind of injury unless she gets some magical intervention.

Definitely, considering their usual M.O. is to kill in a way that can be passed off as natural causes / accidents. Stabbed in the stomach doesn't look too natural.

Could be true, but one of the bad guys was wearing a yellow cloak. I took that to be the show's nod to Lem Lemoncloak. That was a nice call-back to Cercei's scene with the QoT last season with their roles reversed. I'm guessing Olenna isn't going to go quietly. My fear is she's headed to Dorne to get their help which will mean that bad story isn't going away. Lady Crane perhaps.

Gravedigger theory: confirmed. Sort of. Septon pseudo-Meribald's sermon seemed more like an AA meeting. I didn't really care for morphing the Brotherhood without Banners into basically the Brave Companions. I'm glad Marge isn't actually gone fanatic. The drawing she gave the QoT was just a rose, right? Their house symbol. Was that just a way of saying "hey, I'm faking it, still here for real"? I thought there would be more to her hidden note, like a suggestion of a plan or something. Yara being gay seemed like an unnecessary plot, unless she's going to marry Dany. Speaking of whom: no Meereen nor Dothraki Sea scenes adn they weren't missed.

Maybe they can borrow Littlefinger's TARDIS. "Its bigger on the inside!"

That was my impression too. he talked about hunting, asked Sam if they hunted much at the Wall, etc. He wasn't scornful when Sam admitted that they don't hunt much big game ("rabbits mostly. And squirrels"). I got the impression that he was doing the standard upper-class Brit thing of trying to fill an awkward silence with small talk. Papa Tarley's over the top Wildling hatred just seemed like bigotry, or he was searching for another excuse to crap all over Sam. I do, however, think Sam and Gilly should have rehearsed her cover story during the 6 episodes it took them to get there. Something like "I grew up in a small village in the Gift. When I was 14 I was kidnapped by some raiders and taken north of the Wall. Sam rescued me and we fell in love and had a baby".

The thing that bugged me about the 1000 ships lines (both from Euron and Daario) is that having 1000 ships does no good if you don't have the crews for them. Sailing is a skill, not something you can just get a bunch of untrained people to do. Sure, manning the oars on a galley doesn't take a lot of training, but operating sails does. I know it's a silly nit-pick, but those kinds of errors are immersion breaking.

Bran's blink-and-you'll-miss-it vision montage was pretty interesting. I can't wait for the inevitable frame by frame analysis on youtube. I thought the flashes of Arys "burn them all!" and glimpses of wildfire were pretty heavy handed foreshadowing.

Drogon must have hit puberty. Dany better fly ahead to Meereen and let them know that the horde is coming. I kind of wish Gilly had stuck her fork in Randyll Tarley's eye. I guess Sam and them are going to return to the Wall now? Not like he could go to the Citadel after stealing his family sword.

The really sad part is that they actually did give us one of those moments you describe, in this episode: Tormund's nonverbal flirting with Brienne when they were getting ready to ride out, and her skeeved-out reaction to it were hysterical, and completely believable based on their previous characterizations and interactions.

And the religion seems to be a hollow lie. According to Mel and her red friends, there are two gods; R'hllor and the Great Other whose name cannot be spoken, who represents darkness and death and general unpleasentness, etc. We now know that the Others were created by the Children of the Forest; so did they also create R'hllor, or have the red priests mistaken the random results from blood magic as being acts of an imaginary Lord of Light?

I suspect you're right, and it would be nice to bring Benjen back into the story, but I'll still give the show the side-eye. Unless they can adequately explain why Benjen was lurking nearby but never stopped into the tree to say "hey" to his nephew, it'll seem too contrived.

Someone somewhere confirmed that the Night King (President for Unlife of the White Walkers) is different from the Night's King in the books. Bran remembered the legend of the Knight's King when they were camping out at the Nightfort. He was the 13th Lord Comander of the Night's Watch, married a blue-eyed bride and enslaved the NW until the Starks of Winterfell and Jorumun King Beyond the Wall united to overthrow him. Old Nan told the story to Bran many times, and said the Night's King was a Stark. As Maester Lewyn said, her stories shouldn't be swallowed whole. It sounds an awful lot like a legend passed down and distorted with each retelling. The chronology of prehistory is pretty muddled, but this bit about the Children making the White Walkers puts an interesting spin on it. From the World Book: Dawn Age: 1. CoF, Giants living in Westeros peacefully, lovey-dovey hippies. 2. First Men cross the Arm of Dorne and war breaks out with the CoF 3. CoF break the arm of Dorne, flood the Neck. 4. After a long war, the CoF and the First Men form the Pact on the Isle of Faces, ushering in the -- Age of Heroes: 5. Heroes do heroic acts of heroism 6. Long Night hits, CoF and First Men band together to fight it off, build the Wall, start the Night's Watch. So if that;s the order of the events, and the Children created the White Walkers, it makes them out to be pretty treacherous. They formed a peace with the First Men but eventually launched a biological weapon against them.

The Children of the Forest missed a golden opportunity. When the army of the dead attacked, they were temporarily kept out of the tree cellar by a ring of fire. The four White Walker leaders came in on their own and sent the zombies scrambling for a different entrance. How about having everyone armed with dragonglass and waiting around the entrance and get all stabby? They could have decapitated the leadership of the army of the dead and ended the threat. I'm annoyed with the cliffhanger with Meera and Bran. How are we supposed to believe they escape? Any rescue force (Benjen, wildlings, more CoF) will seem contrived. I guess Bran could become an uber-warg and summon an army of ferrets or something.

Varys had an excellent scene back in season 3 where he gave Tyrion the details of how he was castrated. Basically a sorcerer burned his privates in front of him, and he heard a voice coming from the flames. He told Tyrion that the voice was the part of that experience that haunted him the most, and it's why he hates magic and everyone who uses it.

Dammit, I thought we were going to get Tower of Joy, The Sequel, tonight. I guess Bran will have to have that on his own while sledding across country? I did think that the Three Eyed Raven should probably have warned Bran not to go looking for the Night King because it would end in disaster. Withholding vital information in order to further the plot, I guess. Arya, still don't care about her story. I am embarassed to take this long to realize that the Waif was Anne Neville in The White Queen. I didn't like the red priestess either. Is she borrowing Littefinger's teleporter device, to get from Volantis to Meereen in the time it takes to make a scene change?

When Esther turned Alaric into a Klaus-killing machine back on TVD, she at least had the brains to tie his life to Elena's so that he wouldn't be immortal. You'd think the ancestors would do the same thing. Or otherwise incorporate some sort of off-switch. LOL, I did exactly the same thing! That's still one of the best line-readings on this show. I'm kind of glad they're leaving Hope's abilities (if she has any) as nebulous as they are. So far, I think the only thing we've seen has been her stopping the car when Cami was driving back to the soon-to-be-exploded safe-house that one time. I really wouldn't want to see problems solved with deus ex infans.

I wasn't suggesting that AoS's universe is a parallel to ours. I meant that maybe, in-show, they were going to do a two-worlds story like they did on Fringe -- most everyone has a doppleganger, but their lives have been slightly different so they're different people who behave differently. People from the original world cross over to theirs eventually and have to pretend to be their counterparts and it goes horribly, etc. On Fringe, one of the first indicators that we were viewing events on the Other Side was that they misspelled "Manahatan". A lot of people assumed it was a production error when it was actually deliberate. The truth is AoS probably just had a production error. I sincerely hope they aren't doing a two-worlds story because those inevitably go off the rails.

Oooh, maybe we're in an alternate universe, like on Fringe when they intentionally misspelled "Manhatan". Which, now that I think about it, I hope not. Shows rarely if ever deal with the alternate reality / Earth 2 / mirror universe well.

That was pretty jarring in the Littlefinger scene in the Vale. The place didn't even look autumnal yet. I've been trying to come up with another motivation for Jaime leaving that doesn't involve Cercei's long-ago infidelity and I'm stuggling. Maybe if, as speculated earlier in this thread, she's got secret agents in the attack on the Faith Militant who are assigned to kill Marge and Loras, and Jaime finds out about it and is repulsed? That doesn't really sound right either, considering his "F everyone who isn't us" speech in the first episode. I'm about ready to conclude that he doesn't break with her, and his adventures in the Riverlands are just an assignment he goes on willingly.

I liked Talbott this episode for the first time ever. He actively helped the situation with the missile disarming code, and threatening Dr. Radcliffe with turning him into a zombie was pretty chilling. It actually sounded menacing rather than his usual all-bark-no-bite tone. I also liked that Dr. Radcliffe defied the omnidisciplinarian scientist trope -- "Fix it!" "I'm not a rocket scientist or computer programmer, I have no IDEA how to fix it." Daisy said that she wanted to introduce them to a guy who worked nearby who also liked animals -- I'm assuming that's Crazy Cal. Nice call back. They have an opportunity to do some Daisy-lite or even Daisy-free episodes during the six month time gap. Daisy can take a sabbatical, off-screen, then a few episodes later pop up on their radar with her first bank robbery.

Yeah, her going back for a fix nailed it pretty well I thought. And Lincoln seeing that it's exactly why she went after Hive was nice. Shotgun-axe is reality! I'm happy about that. The rest of the story was kind of bland and predictable. I enjoyed Dr. What's-his-name, and it looks like he's going to be in the next season. I'm really curious about what it was he had in his cabinet there in the tag -- comic book aficionados, any clue?