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The Killer Snark

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Everything posted by The Killer Snark

  1. I voted it a 9. I really couldn't go any higher, because of a desperately slow and padded middle third that almost derailed things, but I thought it was terrific apart from that. Nice to see the Battle of the King and the Two Queens set up now. Goodye, Tommen, Walder, the High Sparrow and his fanatics, and good riddance. Unfortunately, farewell to Margaery. We will miss your pretty little smirks. PS - Before anyone gets it in first here, does anyone else think the Sand clan should have told Lady Olenna at their conference she 'needed the bad pussy'? I actually would have clapped at that. It would have been hilarious.
  2. I gave it an unreserved 10. Voted 8 for last week's. I was hoping last week's fairish, but somewhat stopgappish episode, was just that - a stopgap. Thankfully, I was proved right. This was one of the best episodes so far of the entire series. It was absolutely majestic. It had everything in it. I'm not even going to quibble about the whiff of pandering in the show's reinvisioning of Yara. I actually quite like the show version anyway. Everything else was more or less very probably the way it goes down in the next book. Wonderful, wonderful. I actually checked the time a few times during the battle to make sure there was a very real probability of seeing Ramsay cop it at the end.
  3. I rated it a 9. Nothing much I'd really fault it on. An improvement over the episode before, but I'm reserving a higher grade for when things really gel together unless next to every scene's a doozy. Loved the King's Landing and Arya scenes, though.
  4. I voted 8. Well late, because I only just saw the episode after a week in Blackpool and watching the Euro. Solid, but a bit underwhelming after the multiple build-ups of the last episode. Seemed a bit like a stopgap. No dull moments, but on the other hand nothing particularly stood out.
  5. I gave it a 10. I thought it was flawless. I won't bother critiquing it, though, in depth, because I'm late to the thread.
  6. I gave it a 10 after watching it last night, even though I was watching a download that had poor sound, so I had to struggle to catch the dialogue. I thought it was terrific, everything from the burlesque that Arya watches at the start, and its lovely nudity, to the finale with "hold the door." The only nit I really have is with the consistently bad dialogue they keep giving Theon. The Kingsmoot was well enough realised, except for some truly awful speech-giving, but I'm not letting that affect my overall score.
  7. Was thinking about an 8 during the more leisurely parts, but the last twenty minutes sealed a 9. I'm responding late, though, so I won't bother reviewing the episode, but nice to see Jon about to confront Ramsay at last, and our mother of burnt off clothing getting her mojo back again.
  8. I gave it a 9. I would probably have scored it higher were it not for the anticlimactic treatment of the expected Jon resurrection and the sense that future episodes will be better as soon as the story strands develop. You really get a sense that D and D are either going back to adapting the books now after the half-uncanonical last season, or at least they are paying attention to fan theories in online boards, either of which is a good thing, because it at least means they sustain the feel of an adaptation. Nothing in this episode was a revelation. Everyone knew that Ramsay was going to kill Roose, though Walda's death was ingeniously grisly. Poor girl. Everyone suspected Euron may have killed Balon. It was all well acted, sequenced and put together, though. Cool Gregorstein moments, cool Tyrion moments, etc. Almost contained everything that we could reasonably want.
  9. Re Mel, how do we know that she isn't really still a red haired vixen, and she's only putting on a glamour to make herself look like an ancient woman in order to escape from the Castle, because she knows she's under threat from the rebels at the Night's Watch?
  10. The latter word is probably 17th century in origin. It seems to be adapted from 'pursy', meaning 'resembling a purse.'
  11. That's exactly what I said earlier. That whole 'pussy hair' exchange made no sense whatsoever. I actually like Emilia Clarke, but I dearly wish the costume department had decided to dye her eyebrows. The obvious clash between Clarke's natural hair colour and the character's is an annoyance point to this day. It's possible to be blond and have dark eyebrows, but not with that colour of hair.
  12. Since Areo has been mentioned, I have to admit I was disappointed not just with how easily dispatched he was, but also with how throwaway the character was, given that D and D had a chance to actually design a character on top of the cardboard cutout he is in the novels. Completely missed opportunity, there, as was the treatment of Trystane. And it does make no sense whatsoever that a coup by Ellaria could ever be greeted warmly by a public that did not exactly despise Doran as a leader even though his brother was held in more respect. If I'd been more bothered, I'd have given the episode a 7. I don't expect anything except an uncanonical diversion from the show version of Dorne about now. The Dornish stuff isn't that interesting in the books anyway. What I really resented was season 4's negation of the Kingsmoot and the appalling Asha (Yara) at the Dreadfort shite.
  13. I gave it 8. Solid, if hardly revelatory or spectacular. The Theon and Sansa, and Deanarys scenes were good, but nothing else stood out much in terms of advancing the overall plot. But poor Daenaerys. Not only does she have some guys discuss if she has 'white pussy hair' when it is obvious she doesn't because she has black eyebrows, but now she's condemned to live her life among a bunch of discarded old fogeys when presumably she only wants to jump the khal because he has an interesting beard. PS - The Dorne coup was not convincing, but I've given up on expecting D and D to treat the whole Dorne storyline either faithfully or sensitively by now.
  14. My Fictionaut page: http://fictionaut.com/users/iain-james-robb My page on Cosmoetica. Needs a bit of scrolling down: http://www.cosmoetica.com/vm.htm#Iain%20James%20Robb I have some other online credits, and have been printed by New Voices Press a few times in anthologies and Italia magazine. I have an e-book coming out in the middle of April. After that, I muscle down to writing my sci-fi/fantasy series.
  15. I think the reason why a Stark is named Donner might be because Martin skewered him.
  16. There's an old story from a 40s pre comics code comic book, Crime Does Not Pay, called Thug's Throne where some crook who I take it fancies himself as a king of the underworld winds up throned ironically by being put on the electric chair. The last panel of it is narrated as follows: "Ho - do I hear Steve complaining about the thone he won? T'isn't made of gold, but it's the throne fir for a thug. Heh, heh, every killer sits on this throne sooner or later!"  Given the startling similarities, I take it Martin, a well known comic book geek, must have had this in mind during the killing of Viserys. Of course, the dying man's head is covered as well, albeit in a hood and not molten gold.
  17. Shiera - "You want nice programme, but you want bad adapting". Lol.
  18. Ah, well, if that's the case then, my mistake. I thought they'd just dyed her public hair. Still not changed my mind about the 10.
  19. danny - Lena didn't use a body double. She's been full frontal in a movie once before: same body. It's just that she's not done nudity that much. Stills from the shoot were closely protected near the beginning of the season, and she admitted it was her and that she felt completely terrified. On another note, I honestly cannot believe 111 people voted this a 1. Even allowing for trolling, this episode was magnificent. I'm not sure exactly what people want.
  20. I gave it a10 unreservedly. An even better episode than Hardhome, and my favourite episode since the finale of season 4. Some people might complain about the length of Cersei's walk of shame as if this were in any way gratuitous, but GRRM devotes an entire chapter to it, and it is meant to get uncomfortable. At first you're titillated by the nudity and like to see Cersei getting her comeuppance, and then you wind up feeling a bit sorry for her despite her monstrousness because the High Sparrow and the people of the Faith are so loathsome. They absolutely nailed it, and big props to Lena Headey for not taking the cheap way out by using a body double or a merkin, and for the producers not showing her from the neck up and from behind throughout as I suspected they might have done. The Arya scenes were just excellent, as were the scenes with Stannis, Theon, Sansa and the Boltons. I'm not sure how much of this is ultimately spoliered or depends on deviations, but I'm quite sure Stannis is still alive. It would serve no purpose to Brienne's new commitments to kill him, and I think she's buried her sword in the tree. And Theon and Sansa both need somewhere to escape to, so D and D would have no reason to deviate from source enough to kill him off so soon. The Dany and Meereen scenes were very well handled. My only nit, and it's a minor one, with this episode is Tyene's appalling "You want a good girl, but you need bad pussy" line, which sounded like something from a really cheesy porno flick. I'd have preffered Jon's stabbing to be surrounded by some giant action and chaos in camp chaos as it is in ADwD, but again job well done. For those Unsullied demeriting the episode because of its number of cliffhangers, the fifth novel is more extreme in this, and actually leaves the fates of even more main characters and important minor characters in doubt than has been presented in the finale. What ultimately happens with Arya is the only thing they've not caught up with yet.
  21. I gave it a 9, though I partly have my tongue in cheek there. This episode had a few great moments, but did not cohere as well as previous episodes in the season. And stretches of it were downright bad and aesthetically disastrous. I gave it a point over the 8 it probably deserves on the basis it was compulsively entertaining, in much the same way that the best episodes of Spartacus were. But I do have an ironclad stomach for high kitsch. The Stannis scenes I don't really have a problem with; I got spoilered beforehand, but I guessed that this was coming and resigned myself to it happening; at least they were fairly well handled. Shireen's makeup job looked ridiculous, though, and was incredibly distracting. The Dornish and Wall scenes were watchable without being anything special. The Arya scenes were really good, and I thoroughly enjoyed the Dany stuff, but in the latter case for slightly different reasons than was intended by the people behind them. Emilia Clarke through this season has been a fairly rotten actress, but in this episode she hits new heights of woodenness. The Harpy revolt in the fighting pit was hilariously mishandled. You've got to love the terrible acting of the extras being massacred and burned, and the way the Harpy's Men all stand around doing nothing or let themselves be killed offhand while obviously waiting for cues at strategic points in the action, to allow Drogon to appear and allow the main characters to survive long enough for Dany to get away on her dragon. That hilariously Disneyesque scene where Dany flies away against an obvious green screen background was surely lifted directly from a How to Tame Your Dragon film. And how about Jorah coming into hand to hand contact with Dany without any risk of her catching greyscale? The last 10 minutes of this episode were so bad they were hypnotically good. So for reasons of pure entertainment I'm giving this a mark more than in relation to other episodes it actually deserves.
  22. Note: I thought I recognised that gorgeously stauesque Danish woman with the thick Germanic or Transylvanian sounding accent. She's called Birgitte Hjort Sorensen. She plays the lead female performer from Das Sound Machine in Pitch Perfect 2.
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