Bowl o' Brown

Loved it. Gave it a 10. I could have done without the Ros and Pycell's PSA on benefits of good personal hygiene and the importance of stretching before doing your ploting. I love Varys, but his scene with LF didn't reach the bar they set in an earlier episode. Drogon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lots of things had to be changed for budgetary reasons. Huge battles between armies of 10,000+ men each is clearly beyond the scope of the budget. If you want to compare this to big budget movies like the Lord of the Rings movies go ahead, they had 285 million to spend on approximately the same amount of footage (across 3 movies). So for 50 million at LotR quality (cg, battles, sets, costumes, actors) we get approximately half of a single LotR movie. Clearly not enough to tell the story of 'A Game of Thrones'. Instead we got some great actors (feature quality), amazing costumes (feature quality), some terrific sets and locations (feature quality), no "epic" battles but more than a few well choreographed fights (good not great), and cg so far has been light mostly compositing and matte work (good not great, fingers crossed for next episode). All considered, the money they had was put to use where it had impact over the entire season and not just one "kick ass" episode. Aside from all that... I really liked the episode, gave it an 8. I'm actually a fan of the decision to knock out Tyrion, and not have him turn into some super warrior like he often does in the books. I never could accept the scenes where Tyrion becomes even somewhat capable at combat, but that's just me. Only one scene bothered me, somebody called it the "sleepover" scene, and I can't think of a better name for it. I would be able to live with it, if they got the Tysha backstory right, but tragic "golden ending" was omitted for some reason. Nitpicks, a comment about Long Claw being a bastard (hand-and-a-half) sword, and Frey's throne's back wasn't two tall towers connected by a bridge (like their sigil.. for some reason I remembered that description). Shea was meaner, than I recall. Oh and for the record.. The Varys & Ned dungeon scenes are some of my favourite scenes. Go Go Eunuch Power!

Great episode. Great moments. Maybe to many moments? I think so. I give it an 8. My big complaint is how much jumping around the world we did. We never had a chance to digest a scene, before being presented with another. So many big story scenes that it was almost sensory overload. I'd hate to be a non-reader trying to pick out everything of value in this episode.

Robert doesn't actually hunt, he is just there to kill something. Robert stays on horse drinking and complaining while the hunters they brought along find the boar's den (hole in the ground), and flush them out with dogs. The king only shows up to kill it when they have one cornered. That's what I remember reading at least.

Liked the episode, but the "hunting" scene featuring Big Rob, Renly, Ser Barristan, and Lancel.. WALKING in the woods was just ridiculous. Even if he isn't gone for days (weeks?) like in the book. I have a hard time believing Robert would walk anywhere for any decent length of time. He'd be sucking air before he found anything to stick his lance into, and how long will that tiny wineskin last? Would it really have been so hard to at least put them on horses? or at least start them off near some horses (or a small camp) and walk into the bush. Apparently it was, so what we get is 4 guys walking through the forest in their court clothes not hunting. I get that he doesn't have 20+ people following him everywhere when he is in the Red Keep, but when he leaves the castle, he needs an entourage. I'd admit it's a petty complaint if it wasn't done so well in a previous episode (ep2). When Robert and Ned took a break while on the Kingsroad to sit, eat, and shoot the shit. They had a much larger (and much more believable) entourage. That's about as much privacy a King gets when outside of his castle/keep. That scene needed some horses, some banners, a few servants hauling camp gear/supplies, a kennel master, and some barking dogs to flush out the boars. Yeah that one scene just went up in price significantly. I know. Don't look at me like that. They are the ones who set the bar in episode 2, not me. I'll give them a pass on the wildling encounter, where a bit more entourage would have been nice to see also. As I expected, Summer and Grey Wind were no-shows. I get it, it's hard to get animals to do passable fight choreography. I'll let others complain about it, as they've been doing since the start of the show. Aside from that, I liked the episode. Episode 5 was still better IMO.