SeanC

In the novel, the joke was merely that they're nerds and so used a LOTR reference to name the project.

Why would Littlefinger give a damn about Catelyn's children with Ned Stark? And, for that matter, Catelyn herself was no longer an object of interest to him; she rejected him and had a happy marriage. Sansa is the teen Catelyn of his childhood fantasies. Um, no. Show Sansa replaced Jeyne Poole. Sansa in the books is unlikely to ever end up anywhere near Ramsay. George R. R. Martin has quite openly talked about Littlefinger's infatuation with Sansa. It's legitimate. It really doesn't make sense for it to be a ploy, because anybody looking at the situation rationally would see that his creeping on her is actually extremely counterproductive. Sansa was/is desperately lonely and was actually kind of open to having Baelish as a friend/uncle figure; his impulsive kissing her and all his subsequent sexual advances upset her. Hence, that's why she assigns those to the "Littlefinger" persona that she doesn't like.

Beyond which, Littlefinger has a personal fixation on Sansa that goes beyond her political value.

Both of those references are from the book, so they're cases of the casting amplifying existing jokes.

Blunt being the lead is not a creation of the marketing. She is clearly introduced as the main character and the audience POV. She just fades out toward the end, where del Toro takes over.

Emily Blunt is an actress I've admired for a while, so it's nice to see her get a lead part, albeit a lead role that is very intentionally marginalized as the story goes on. Benicio del Toro gradually feels like he takes over the movie; I could see this getting him another Oscar nomination (evidently he can only be nominated for movies about the drug war). The camera-work in this is amazing -- a number of sequences that are basically us following groups of vehicles driving around feel both tense and propulsive, and quite visually stylish.

Guillermo del Toro tweeted about having lunch with Maisie the other day. He remarked that if he ever gets to make Pacific Rim 2, he wants her to be in it. That's been delayed indefinitely, of course, but that's a good director to have interested in your career.

She agreed to marry Ned too. She didn't think he was hot, unlike Brandon, but duty was why she was fine with Brandon too. Sansa didn't marry Tyrion out of duty, she did it because the people who had killed her father and taken her hostage forced her to. Not remotely the same.

The idea that you can compare Ned and Catelyn's marriage and Sansa's is really off-base. The former is a standard arranged marriage where two parties formed an alliance and the bride was perfectly fine with it -- it's not that such arrangements can't go awry (see, e.g., Robert and Cersei), but they aren't intrinsically problematic. Sansa was kidnapped by her family's enemies and is being threatened at sword point, when she quite clearly refuses.

I thought it was quite good, and a very effective adaptation of the book. Obviously the book had way more incident (I was surprised they pretty much skipped over the journey to the Ares IV launch vehicle entirely), but what they chose to depict worked really well. The change to the climax to amp it up a bit more, in terms of giving the biggest actors more to do, I thought also worked, and that's often a place where movie adaptations can slip up. The only thing that could have improved the movie: in the final montage with the Ares V, when we cut to Sean Bean on the golf course, he is struck on the back of the head by an errant golf ball, and dies.

I'm sure there's plenty to do in terms of running the Stark family cause that it can accommodate multiple characters (the writers clearly think so, since they've been trying to consolidate storylines).

Hey, the Mayor! It feels like a while since she had a notable part in an episode. I think there was a glimpse of the back of Dr. Mephisto at the end of the episode, too.

Not that Lea Michele isn't gorgeous, but I rather liked the "neckbrace" look, so I hope that's not gone for good; the character is less distinctive without it. Though her performance as Hester reminds me how much I enjoyed the comic energy she had in the first season of Glee, before all the life was sucked out of Rachel.

She doesn't immediately go to "trust nobody"; to the extent that she gets there, it's because she keeps getting burned. Joffrey and Cersei's betrayal (and her earlier attempts to apologize for Jaime, etc.) lead to her refusing to trust any Lannister -- which is smart, since their interests are not the same. But in ACOK and ASOS she's far from unwilling to trust people, she just tries to evaluate how trustworthy they are. She trusts Dontos, and she trusts Margaery and co., and she wants to trust Baelish and Lysa. She gets burned on all those occasions, and isolated up in the Eyrie she miserably concludes that she really has no alternative but to stay with Baelish, who she doesn't trust at first; gradually she becomes more admiring of him over the course of AFFC, as he continue to wear her down.

It will turn out that one of the twins is the terrorist.

They might also want to look into who they should be suing over that car accident, which was clearly caused by the negligence of one of those truck drivers. Don Johnson still has charisma, I'll give him that. The climactic cliffhanger, them wrestling in a pit of actual oil that's about to catch fire, is hilariously literal. I'm not sure this is the sort of show I'd watch on a regular basis, but I can see this having an audience.

I thought the same thing. I was glad to get Hader's character out of the way. That character was so intentionally one-note that he clearly wasn't going to last.

So the FBI thinks that Alex dropped herself into the middle of the blast zone to make herself look like a victim (despite making no attempt to make herself look like she had been in the middle of a blast), but left a living witness and an apartment full of incriminating evidence?

That's not Carice. She was in LA less than 16 hours before that photo was taken.

All they did was compare their schedules for the next two months, at which point Ria noted that she wasn't in Belfast in that period. Sophie herself didn't say anything about the show. Hence, Ria wondered about what the show's filming schedule was like, and was told that they still film in December. It's the second of the Ghost of High Heart's prophecies, about the maid (the same one in the vision of the Purple Wedding) slaying a savage giant in a castle made of snow. It's open to debate whether that just referred to Robert Arryn's doll or not, but either way I agree that Sansa will be the downfall of Littlefinger.

Yes, I know that they film out of order. The point is that if Sansa were to die in episode 9, either way they would be filming a full season's worth of material for her, so that would not explain a supposedly lesser filming schedule. If she were dying, they would have to tie up her whole story.

Maggie seemed perfectly able to stand up for herself, so absent some indication otherwise, I assume it was her idea. Scott getting sent to jail would have turned her entire life upside down, so I hardly think it's unreasonable.

I don't know what you mean by "realign", but unless Littlefinger is defeated this season, that's a major part of Sansa's plotline that is unresolved (she also hasn't met Arya again, which I'm absolutely sure is going to happen; GRRM has as close as admitted that). And as for "nothing for Sansa to do for the rest of the series", I'd call that dubious; we don't know what hardly any of the characters will do as the series becomes more White Walker-focused. She's meant to have been learning skills that will be useful in the coming struggles; even with the Boltons gone, and even with Littlefinger gone, the politics of Westeros are far from settled. Also, the Reddit rumour that Sansa dies was that she dies in episode 9, so that would not explain if she was filming less (that would only be the case if the character was killed early).

Maggie, while a bit more sympathetic to Scott, didn't want him around either (and it's her call). Paxton was reflecting his partner's wishes in that.

For those who needed visual confirmation of Jon Snow's return.