Mark the Red

I thought the best scenes were: (1) Jim Broadbent as the Maester and his dialogue with Sam. Total pro actor and the dog speach was compelling. (2) Hound, Thoros and Berric scene in its entirety. All three great actors, and I really find Berric's self doubt about resurrection believeable and endearing. If the hound becomes the true Warrior of Light of the books cannon, which I believe, it will be IMHO one of the most interesting character arcs in all of storytelling Ive ever seen or read. I suspect Sansa will have to be sacrificed to make this happen, which i doubt because she is so well loved in the fandom. Great episode otherwise!

Why green? Regardless, I'm pretty sure with Queen Cersei, Qyburn will be given a much wider berth to perform dark magic / necromancy. The color white probably signifies some Great Other power source. I can't imagine who else would be this queen in Damphair's vision????

Certainly a more credible oracle than some of the wild speculations on this forum. Cersei will be Euron's evil queen. I have no problem throwing down that marker here and now.

Well, it appears the white queen in the vision is definitely Cersei. Season 6 finale from GOT pretty much guaranteed it. Can't wait to see how the ironborn apologists reconcile this with their denialist ideology. I'm actually pretty interested in what you guys can come up with.

OK. Azor Azai is not a "Lawful Good" character. We get that. But he is a sacrificial, non-selfish person either. He / she will sacrifice himself to save the world. Anyone who thinks Azor-Azai, Dany, Jon, Tyrion is walking away from the end of these books is just plain not paying attention. But at a minimum he's not a sadistic a-hole idiot like Victarion. Victarion is not Azor Ahai. Stop being contrarian people. Its just not a reasonable thinking man's position.

Most serious and credible professional reviewers of these books knew exactly what the rusted iron door implied. Ironborn fanboi's and apologists can argue plausible deniability here, but that's on them, not me or GRRM. I guess that's what I like about GRRM, he trusts in the intelligence of the reader. For instance, in AFFC a now alcoholic Cersei says she had the serving girl flogged for shrinking her clothes in the wash because they did not fit her anymore. GRRM did not put an asterisk on that sentence and explicitly say to the reader "Cersei is getting fat". Your logic above would indeed hold: it IS possible that the serving girl did indeed shrink her clothes, because it was never disproven. But the story works so much better when you realize what GRRM did here in just one sentence: Cersei is so egocentric and power mad, that she would willingly inflict pain and misery on an innocent serving girl to reinforce her own self-deception and delusion about herself getting fat. In this "Euron-is-just -misunderstood/ he-a-good-boy/he-dindu-nuffin" thread's example, the story works so much better when you accept that Euron is a diabolically cruel and evil man, and ever has been. Trust in GRRM here people. It just works better with everything that's been written and will be released in Winds of Winter. Life's too short to paddle so strenuously upstream. Just let it go. Euron is a bad, bad man. Let is go....

I guess we'll just agree to disagree here. I don't believe your premise that there is no such thing as evil, and that all people are born good and made bad by externalities. Current events with ISIS are a great salient example: Thousands of pampered and wealthy Muslims have left happy families in the West and gone through considerable travel difficulties / efforts to partake in sadistic murders of unarmed civilians and gang rapes of girls, many under the age of 10. GRRM has no qualms whatsoever about making villains evil, and I cant think of a greater evil than the rape of children. Don't be so naive about Victarion apologists either. There are fanboi's here who actually think he is Azor Ahai. Really. I'm serious.

The woman in white is not Dany. No way no how. I'm no Dany fan, but no way she's going to be complicit in Euron's crimes. She'll use him to cross the ocean, but even that would be too much for her. Sean T Collins / Stefan Sasse over at boiledleather.com thought the white woman could be the same one who seduced the original Night King. My thoughts are that it could also be Melissandre, somehow corrupted. I'd wager on the female Other, but since the TV show hasn't made a single mention of it, the person can't be that important. Maybe the Great Other is a woman, and that's what it signifies.

Just curious. I'm not moralizing and actually really am interested in your truthful answer. What exactly pushed you over the edge, here? You thought he was awesome before when you knew he was: (a) Raping his younger brothers as children (b) Raping his sister in law, resulting in Victarion killing her in shame (c) Mutilating his crew (d) Raping the children of House Hewitt in front of their parents (e) Killing thousands of civilians the world over (f) Dismembering Baelor Blacktyde for not bending the knee What pushed you over the edge from your previous position? Mutilating Pyatt Pree? Cutting out Falia's tongue? Being mean to poor ol' Aeron? What was the bridge too far here? I really, really, really want to know.

You people are unwell. He killed his brothers when they were babies. He rapes, tortures and kills at will, and enjoys it. He molests children. He is the ULTIMATE psychopath and a very, very, very, terrible person and any red-blooded reader of the books knows it. I've read enough of this thread to call BS on all the Victarion is awesome, Euron is awesome, my favorite character, etc. etc. Stop it. I know Sinnie is just troll baiting being his first post and all but this thread is going off the rails. These are very bad people who routinely do bad things, and everyone including GRRM admits it. Stop making excuses for it.

Clearly House Umber will be bringing fake Arya to Ramsey. Perfect storyline timing and will be the reason to draw Jon / Sansa back to retake Winterfell as well as the Manderly betrayal. Its not Rickon. No way. Fake Arya. It is known.

double post

I agree. Varys is an A-hole. If he cared so much about the realm in the books, he wouldn't have fostered the civil war to begin with. Why not just sneak Ned Stark out? He knew Joffrey was going to kill him and all hell will break loose. Varys is just like Littlefinger: creating Chaos so his end game (Faegon) can claim the iron throne.

omg dude. I'm wetting myself laughing at the bro comment. Hilarious. PM me the offensive content removed part. :cool4:

I thought this episode was fantastic. So did a lot of my sullied friends who watched it. I am a Stannis fan. It accomplished excellently what I felt it needed to accomplish: (a) Establish that Jon Snow AND the Night's Watch have true grit; the Oath Recitation under the gate as the Giant approached was excellent TV and story telling. I absolutely loved Samwell's line to Gilly about "Keeping promises to my brothers is what men do." Especially in light of recent events..... (b_) Wildings are savage and WILL kill everyone (c) Samwell Tarly is becoming more of a man; despite all the hate on this thread I like what they are doing with Sam: I believe Sam to be the most relatable character for most of the people who watch the show. Overweight, timid, but bookish and intelligent. I'd wager HBO has done some market analysis on this and I'd wager a lot of people really like Samwell and Gilly. I sure do. All my unsullied friends do too. They are relatable and based on the characterization of Samwell I believe great things are in place for him in WOW and ADOS. To be honest, I find Samwell infinitely more likeable than Sansa, Littlefinger, Brienne but thats a whole other thread. (d) Dramatic death of Yrgitte; very well done and all my friends teared up. Mission accomplished by D&D. Very well done. (e) The Night's Watch won the battle BUT at too great a cost (f) Giants are totally awesome. I like Stannis a lot, but I feel all the criticism of him not being in this episode was unfounded. This episode was about the Night's Watch. Period. Full Stop. Stannis is NOT part of the Night's Watch. This is almost exactly how it played out in the books too. There is plenty of time for next episode for Stannis to save Jon's bacon. If I recall, the whole battle of the wall with Stannis was like a page or two in the book; why does it need to be a 30 minute spectacle anyway? Plus all we saw of Stannis in the book was the following day when Melissandre takes Jon to the top of the wall with Stannis. That conversation between Jon and Stannis on the wall was infinitely more interesting to me than the actual battle of the wall. Also, just because Tywin is getting capped next episode why does this diminish the fact Stannis saves the Watch any more? I am bittersweet for the Tywin scene because we are going to lose one the most compelling actors on the show (Charles Dance) and at the same time we are going to lost one of the most uninteresting actors on the show (Sibel Kikelli). I hope the Tyrion strangulation scene is awesome. I have been looking forward to it for 3.3 seasons worth of shows. God I hate Shae. This was an excellent episode. I liked it more than the Blackwater because the good guys won this one. Fantastic TV. PS: I watched the surprisingly good Godzilla movie this weekend and I found this episode even better in terms of special effects. No small statement that.