King Tommen

You win the internet my friend. Re-read that chapter.

So you don't think that Cersei doing a complete 180 on all of things that she had established she loathed prior to this episode to the three people who are going to "happen" to be judges in Tyrion's trial is just a huge coincidence? She obviously has no intention of marrying Loras, she can't stand Margaery and more or less offered up Tommen to her on a platter and played on Oberyn's sympathy for family even though he antagonized her and called her a useless, old has-been the last time they talked. Happy to see book readers can be manipulated just as easily as non-book readers.

Jon is taking a small group of NW to Craster's to take out the mutineers. E4 is him gathering the recruits to go and arguing with Thorne about it, E5 will be the actual attack with him fighting Karl himself. E6 he'll probably sit out while he heads back to CB offscreen and E7 and E8 will be about him convincing the NW at Castle Black how big the Wildling threat actually is as well as preparing the people there for the battle. During this time, they'll get word of Tormund/Ygritte's attack on Mole's Town (which takes place in E7 or E8) because we've seen a scene with he and Sam discussing Ygritte and whether she was someone who Jon could convince to turn on the Wildlings with Jon telling Sam that the ship has sailed on that possibility. At some point this season, Locke will show up at the Wall to interact with Jon but we don't really know in what capacity and if he's there for the final battle. E9 will have the entire episode dedicated to the simultaneous attacks and will climax with Stannis' arrival to save the day. In terms of the logic of the simultaneous attacks, the show has set up this strategy from the start with Mance telling Tormund to wait until Mance had his army in position and that the signal would be him lighting the biggest fire the North has ever seen. Logistically, it makes more sense for the Wildlings to hit them with their full force at the same time in order to provide the maximum amount of chaos. It was revealed in the last episode that the Wildlings in the south have orders to just generally wreak havoc in the nearby villages in order to try and draw out the NW from Castle Black and spread them thinner (something the NW aren't falling for). They're stalling until Mance gets his army into place. From the trailers, it looks like the Mole's Town raid is pretty brutal and we know that Gilly is there now too so she'll probably be put in danger during that attack.

I think having an entire episode fully focused on a massive attack on Castle Black which comes from both sides simultaneously where a huge SFX and practical effects budget has been allocated which will include multiple one-on-one faceoffs (Jon/Styr, Thorne/Tormund, Giant/somebody, Ygritte/most likely little boy who's father she killed, Sam saving Gilly etc) is more than what any fan of that storyline could ask for. They're delaying things in order for the attack to be on a much larger scale and provide a sustained focus whereby we get to see all the characters interact and have a dramatic climax (the arrival of Stannis) all in the same episode. If you get over the "it didn't happen this way in the books" aspect, then you should really be looking forward to how this will play out. You're getting a "Blackwater" dedicated solely to Jon.

D&D actually directed the episode together, as they did for one episode last season. The director's guild only allows you to list one director so they alternated. Last season Benioff was listed and Weiss got his name on this one.

Just announced 6.6M viewers for last night which crushes the old record. Biggest audience for an HBO episode since the 2007 finale of the Sopranos. For perspective, S3 premiered to 4.4M viewers and the most they had in any episode for S3 was 5.5M. This show can write it's own ticket now. Even if viewership drops off in subsequent seasons, it's a bonafide megahit now and will surpass The Sopranos easily this year has HBO's most-watched show. And we're not even mentioning the HBOGo watchers who fucking crashed the server last night.