The Killer Snark

I don't know if this was deliberate, but there was a famous Star Trek actress called Arlene Martel. She played Spock's wife. Arianne Martell? Any takers?

Yes, I know. For some reason it's been playing around a lot in my mind, though, recently. I used to love 2000AD.

Has anyone ever read the excellent 2000AD series Bad Company that ran in the late 80s and early 90s? Part 3 had a big showdown between two of its characters who detested each other near the end and it panned out something like this: De Racine, a handsome snarky lech, decides to save the day against Protoid, a seemingly invincible alien who is the entire series' most despicable character. Because De Racine is a walking arsenal of tricks (his body has been modified so that his body parts double as weapons, and he also has poisonous blood) and has superior intelligence, he effectively hands Protoid's ass to him on a platter, but gets caught off guard at the last minute when he's effectively won the fight (he actually gets literally grabbed by Protoid's spaceship: it turns out the Protoid character is subservient to the ship, which is the real alien) and gets killed gruesomely via facial/cranial mutilation. Protoid is a shapeshifter, turns his arm into a pair of giant scissors, and cuts De Racine's face off, attached to the bone, from the back of his head. Implied, but there's evidence this is what happens. Does anything about this scenario remind anyone else of the showdown between Oberyn and The Mountain? Especially since this episode of the comic series was issued about ten years before A Storm of Swords came out. Note: I referred to this more elaborately about a year back, citing a whole load of similarities in characterisation and context, but it was worth revisiting again.

I gave it a 10 the first time round. And I still would. It was majestic. The episode I really hate in this season is episode 6. The one thing wrong with e10 however is the absence of revelation concerning what happened with Tysha, which provides a bit less explanation as to why Tywin had to die.

I always thought the moving fort of the Reeds was reminiscent of the moving castles in Larry Niven's Ringworld books. I may have brought that up before. Someone else brought up the similarity between 'Howl's Moving Castle' and ' Howland Reed.'

Thanks, Lykos. Glad to see that it wasn't just me.

I've been shut out of the site for months because it wouldn't let me log on with my password. I tried to register a new password during that period but none of the email links I got worked. I only got back in with my old password today. Has anyone else had this problem? I was worried for a while there was a site glitch that had deleted my account.

Re LotR: has anyone mentioned the similarities between 'halfling' and 'halfman' before, or between the aliases 'Underhill' and 'Underfoot'? I already mentioned months ago that 'Tirion' was an elven kingdom, near Lorien I believe.

The arrival of the ancient Targaryens from the East following the Doom of Valyria is clearly modelled on the arrival of the Dunedain from the West following the sinking of Numenor, IMO, having just finished the appendices to LotR.

And both are clearly homosexual. Well spotted. What I've remarked on here myself is the similarity of his menagerie to the folly of Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, who devoted so much of his time and energy into building an army of supertall men, who he never risked in battle because they seemed to fulfil for him a real fetish. He stated once that he'd never really felt desire for a woman, but found nothing more beautiful than a very tall man. The Potsdam Giants, as they were called, were often kidnapped into his service, and were as much as seven feet tall. This also is clearly referenced in the giant men in stilts The Little Pigeon keeps in his service. So that's a double reference.

Metopheles - Undoubtedly. I picked up on that as well.

It was bungled to a fairly large extent, and I'm a big fan of David Lynch, but it also suffered coherence-wise in the cutting room. The Sci-Fi Channel miniseries was much more faithful, which I found very good, though it was variably received: but they made a bit of a mess of adapting Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.

Another thing about ASOIAF and Dune is the 'show, don't tell policy', which I think is most notable in how Herbert and Martin treat the backgrounds of certain characters. Surely I can't be the only person who's ever noticed the following: Lady Fenring attempts to distil the Harkonnen gene-flow by impregnating herself to Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, but you're never actually told what happens to her child. In Children of Dune Prince Farad'n shows up. It is heavily implied that he is not Wensicia Corrino's biological son and was adopted from the Fenrings. He has obvious Kwisatz Haderach breeding stock potential. Jessica senses something is weird about him from the first but can't quite place what it is. He winds up married by Leto II to his sister. If you then skip a novel you're told that Leto II subsumed the Harkonnen bloodline into that of the Atreides descendants who were produced from his breeding programme, which obviously started with his sister. Hence, Farad'n Corrino is actually Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen's son. Leto II must have sensed that, so he wished to wrest control of the Harkonnen bloodline away from House Corrino. None of this is explicitly mentioned. In fact, I'm the only person I've so far come across who's been able to work this out. Very, very similar to the way that Martin plays around with L+R+J and possibly also the possibility of Tyrion being a Targ.

Happens constantly in the novels. When Duncan Idaho returns as Hayt in Dune Messiah he has metallic eyes which are commented on throughout, because the supposition is that the Bene Tlielax who brought him back gave him false eyes so that his feelings and inner motives wouldn't be known. Actually, Herbert is not big on physical character description. You get identified with the characters mainly by their hair and eyes in spite of the fact that melange addiction has made most of the major characters' eyes pure blue.

I was about to mention the House of Atreus. You beat me to it. There's obvious structural similarities between ASOIAF and the Dune series too, though. Both are POV based, the first three Dune novels are House based, both feature character thoughts as dialogue in italics, feature mostly grey characters (including heroes) and operate on an 'anyone can die or get grievously injured' basis that is more gruesome in ASOIAF but sometimes more preposterous in Dune.

Uthosian - I think I pointed out the similarities to what happens with the Atreides on Arrakis and to the Starks at KL before, but isn't the Atreides' sigil an eagle? Anyway, I also pointed out the similarity between Bran's metamorphosis as a child to that of Leto Atreides II, and the similarity between an empire founded on sandworms to an empire founded on dragons. There are reasonable similarities between the lives of Paul and Daenarys, Arya sounds similar to Alia, 'direwolves' is obviously based on 'D-wolves', the Fish Speakers bring to mind the Unsullied, the Face Dancers recall the Faceless men, etc. And there's the resurrected characters in ASOIAF as compared with gholas. And the sexual imprinting of Melisandre as compared to that of the Bene Geserrit and also the Honored Matres. There's even a bit in one of the Dunk and Egg tales where one of the Fremen...sorry, the Dornish...speaks of not weeping to not "waste water on the dead" in order to point out this is all deliberate, because the phrase is straight from Dune. All we need is for the main characters to start going off on long Tao-Buddhist libertarian monologues to further hammer through the point.

Lady Stoneheart's omission may prove dramatically to be an error, but really with where they were in Brienne's storyline, I'm guessing there's no need for the revation until she gets taken by the Brotherhood without Banners. They could actually postpone that until the latter part of next season without disrupting the narrative shape in any way.

I'm really pleased in this season with how well the Arya/Sandor arc has turned out. I was really close to groaning as Brienne wound up where she seemed had no right to be, but the fight was pretty epic, and after the alterations earlier in the season the logical way to wrap things up.

Mother of Dragon - Sandor does lose his ear, though, but it's against one of Gregor's cut-throats in the inn where the fight took place brought forward in time in the season before he meets Brienne here. In the novel, she's left unsure until Quite Isle that he was supposed to have died but might still be alive.

Master and Commander - A two! Good grief! That's really brutal. And I thought I was bad for giving episode 6 a 7 because I hated Asha's botched Dreadfort rescue, but that was more than just a mild divergence: that was actually plain bad.

It really was in joint place with episode 7 as the finest of the season, and one of the best so far in the series. I was really worried about where the Sandor, Brienne and Arya scene was going but it worked out narratively and dramatically perfect. I'd have preferred the full list of grievances of Tywin towards Tyrion being made more apparent, because he really is one of the worst characters in the whole series and deserves worse than what he gets. Let's hope we don't get cheated out of Gregor's full gruesome fate through mortification. Apart from that, the only thing they got wrong was the anticlimactic Bloodraven revelation, so I hope they actually do justice to the transformation of Bran. Anyway, it came at the end of a thrilling build up that has been so far the highpoint of Bran's travellling far North. The scene with Dany letting go of her dragons was genuinely heartbreaking, incidentally, though I was underwhelmed by the way that Martin treated that in the books.

There was no real space to fit in Lady Stoneheart, I think Martin jumped the shark in bringing back that character anyway, but I can sort of understand dramatically why people wanted her to feature at the season's end. The only thing that really bugged me, as I actually did say earlier, was the Bloodraven appearance. Bran gets to see in advance in the novel what he'll pysically have to sacrifice and go through at the end of his mission, and in the show he just gets confronted by an old man on a wooden throne.

I can't find my review. It was a really long one, so I'm not going to retype it. I'm just posting in anyway to say I rated it a 10.

You're both right of course, come to think of it. A mode is the highest number in a statistical range of values. A median is the middle number between the three highest values in a statistical series. 8 would be an average. The median is 9. Very pedantic, however, people, but technically you are right.

It would have been a while back, but it's counting up the average of recentish lower than 8 votes.