Dolorous Gabe

Well sure, she doesn't want to be "no one", but Kindly Jaqen signed her off as no one after she announced herself as Arya Stark of Winterfell and she's going home. Becoming "no one" should have many more connotations than just being able to put on a different face and voice. She failed her training, regardless of what Kindly Jaqen said. The blindfolded swordfighting, upon which her training seemed to be based, taught her nothing but how to fight in the dark, which is meaningless to the Faceless Men MO. Don't forget that she was never taught how to put on a face. She stole the face she used to kill Trant from the Hall of Faces and used it as if it were just that simple. And as I said, I have no issues per se with the fact that having successfully completed training her voice would change with the face change. It's the fact that her training was complete nonsense. There's no way the Faceless Men would be happy to have a rogue agent use their techniques but not their philosophy, which is what Arya is doing. For that reason, it's ludicrous that they signed her off as having completed her training. The show runners treated the HoBaW with such complete disrespect that even the Nameless not-waif girl didn't fit the criteria of the Order of the Faceless Men. Everything in the show is treated now as a means to an end, with no thought process involved. Jaqen isn't a main character. They don't need to tell a proper story for him. They do for Arya. The second paragraph is a fair point but the show runners are still playing it for shock value over telling an actual story. Like, why in the world does the reaction of the Frey girl matter more than giving us a satisfying story detailing Arya's plot to bring down the Freys? Much love to you, brother dawg, as usual

Haha love the comparison to 80s college movies! Yep, her training had no relevance to anything.

Exactly. And considering how massive it was for them just to get to the RW, dealing with the consequences for its instigators as something of a throwaway or an afterthought is pretty disappointing.

Read the line again. I know we saw her kill Walder. That was part of my point. I don't necessarily want them to show the secrets behind what the FM do. I want them to tell an actual story, not just skip parts of the story they can't be bothered to explain.

The problem for me is not that she can do this. The problem for me is a kind of hangover of last season, that she is clearly not 'no one' and that her training at the HoBaW was utter BS. But also, her operation at The Twins was only seen from an endgame perspective, which made it tedious. They couldn't be bothered to explain the logistics of infiltrating the kitchen, killing Lame Lothar and Black Walder in secret, transporting them to the kitchen and cutting them up in secret, then cleaning up the killing of Walder, hiding his body, explaining away the disappearance of Lothar and Black Walder. These should be little suspense stories. Instead we simply got the end of them. It's tedious. There's no build-up, so the payoff has no substance. It was even played as if we don't know it's Arya using Walder's face, as if we never saw her kill him last season, so even the intended shock moment of revealing that it's Arya is a failure of storytelling.

Gave it 5. It was better than I expected but my expectations were very low.

I'm sure it must have been mentioned but I recently finished the completely bonkers season 2 of Fortitude, with the ever-excellent Michelle Fairley and the marvellously crazy Richard Dormer. It's worth watching Fortitude just for Dormer!

6 The least problematic episode of the season. Most of the problems are nitpicks for me. But there certainly are problems, exterior and interior.

I'll help you out if you can't be bothered to check the conversation between SdlT and PP (but hey, it's easier to create straw men to attack I guess!). SdlT is suggesting that people are falling for the misdirection of analogical shiny objects (as in "oooh, look at the shiny things. How awesome!") in judging this episode. PP replied with a collection of "badass" elements as being the reason the episode was so good. SdlT then pointed out that such analyses very much supports his point.

Those who voted this episode a 10 are of course entitled to do so. I find it ridiculous that people complain about people voting at either extreme. However, in order to vote 10 for this episode you would have to be willing to give full marks to something that is flawed. I don't mind this. I've considered some films to be 5 star films despite flaws but they would usually be truly extraordinary in some other way that renders the flaws relatively inconsequential. And the truth is, this episode was far from flawless and that can undoubtedly be said objectively. It was probably the best technical episode in GoT history but it is riddled with laughable moments and ridiculous character choices. What are we to make of Sansa's choices? Doesn't Littlefinger's involvement somewhat undermine the beauty of the Stark victory? How did Jon not only survive but not even get hit by an arrow after falling for Ramsay's trap (pure dumb luck is not usually considered good storytelling)? Why did Ramsay shoot Wun-Wun instead of Jon and why did nobody in that well-populated courtyard do anything to stop him? Why did Viserion and Rhaegal wait until that moment to break out of their holding room? How were the Masters so shocked by Drogon coming out of hiding when we had previously seen him flying over the battle? Why did they invent a conversation between Theon and Tyrion that never happened and why did they spend so long on making Theon feel bad for Tyrion being rude to him IN BOTH encounters? How was Shireen's wooden stag still intact amongst the ashes of her burning? There is little craft to their storytelling. It's all about manipulation. I consider GoT more a product than a story. The best things they do from a writing perspective tend to be callbacks and parallels. As a product, it works. it's successful. D&D know their audience and the majority laps up the few episodes they spend the majority of their effort and budget on. But it is certainly not flawless.

Hahahahahaha Love it! Creatively it made sense to me, so I gave myself an A+

Agreed. There really is no way the Freys would just let such a thing happen.

I think the Hound/Beric/Thoros sequence saved it from being the worst ever GoT episode. That's as positive as I can be.

That really was a terrible episode, about as bad as the first episode of this season. KL was okay, fairly interesting all things considered. The only scene I enjoyed was the Hound with the BWB. The preceding sequence with the Hound killing those men was absolutely dreadful though. I cannot think of a single word that reasonably describes just how bad some of this episode was. Meereen, Riverrun and Braavos were some of the worst sequences in the entire series. Even "execrable" doesn't do them justice.

I was extremely surprised by it ending. I didn't think 90 minutes had passed. For greatness, it probably needed to delve deeper into the heart of the conflict and not gone all-out for what essentially amounts to a very well done exercise in suspense sequences.

I just watched '71, a film about a British soldier's experience in Belfast during the troubles. It had Richard Dormer (Beric Dondarrion) in. I saw it while randomly searching through Amazon Prime's film lists and decided to watch it because a friend's father served in Belfast in the 70s and recently passed away. I know it was an experience that haunted him for the rest of his life. Good film. Powerfully directed and acted. Maybe could have done with being about 15 minutes or so longer to get in some exposition and character development but it built the tension up very well and conveyed the complexity and madness of the situation in a balanced way. The climactic shootout and aftermath also manages to elicit complex reactions in the viewer and feels like it will stay with me for a while. I just felt like something was missing though. A very good film that feels like it could have been an extremely good film. Still, I would absolutely recommend it.

Gave it a 5. I liked much of the first half. Lyanna Mormont was fun, even if it felt like a further knock at the Starks that Davos was the one to convince her. Jaime at Riverrun made me wish this had happened instead of Dorne. I liked that it had a pre-credits sequence. They don't do this enough and could use it more often to give little hints about other things going on. However, exposition is still too often told rather than shown. They do not get that balance right and prefer to write lots of distinctly average monologues instead of tell the story in a visual way. At times it's more like a play than a film. And of course The Waif is not only a bad servant of the HoB&W (for holding personal grudges and wanting to kill Arya), she is also a pretty terrible assassin!

Haha I love your positivity 'sniffer. I very much groaned! I mean, Sam's a smart fella. How long does he really think he could realistically hang onto it? And for what?

Anyone else think Show!Randyll looked and acted very much like Book!Tywin?

This is a great post, excellent analysis. I'm less bothered about the predestination element than you because I don't think it detracts from the journey. The excitement and emotion of the final sequence gave an incredibly unrealistic impression of the episode. Pretty much every other scene was either outright bad (the Iron Islands) or distinctly below average (your analysis of Sansa/LF is spot on). I think I saw more merit than you did in Arya's scenes (although I totally agree about the stick fights) and less merit than you did in the Dany/Jorah scene.

Agreed. Even then, season 5 of The Wire is vastly superior to 99% of everything else on TV. The newspaper story at least had many interesting points to make about modern journalism that tied nicely into the overall themes of the show. And in season 2, the tragedy of the Sobotkas has an almost Shakespearean air about it. Taken individually, 2 and 5 are almost certainly the weakest and 4 is a standout extraordinary achievement. Taken as important parts of the whole, the issues with 2 and 5 become somewhat irrelevant.

It was suggested that the wights are controlled by the WW when the NK raised them at Hardhome. The wights are essentially the WW's minions. In a war situation, if the leaders are leading the charge with their henchmen following behind, it would be silly to aim attacks at the henchmen rather than the leaders. So, killing the WWs may or may not destroy the wights but either way it seems silly to me that they didn't attack the leaders who could just walk straight through the fire shield.

I gotta say, I don't think what Bran did was time travel as such. I think it can be explained as an anomalous glitch caused by Bran trying to warg Hodor from a vision from the past in which the younger Hodor is present. Bran cannot change anything that has already happened but we might find that Bran is responsible for something else that happened in the past. In a world where magic exists, I don't see a problem with it. I had much more a problem with the moronic CotF taking down wights instead of using obsidian to take down the three WWs, and then when one of them tries to, plunges the blade straight into the WW's armour. So stupid!

So I just watched episode 5 a second time. That big finale is excellent in a lot of ways. It's very flawed but the good elements do outweigh the problems. But this brings a false impression of the episode as a whole. Up until the final sequence, every scene is either outright bad (the Kingsmoot and aftermath) or pretty redundant (Sansa and LF or Arya stick fighting yet again or Dany and Jorah) apart from Castle Black, which was okay as an establishing scene for the next phase leading up to Bastardbowl, even if it makes a complete mockery of "The North Remembers"

The Dark Knight isn't brainless. At its heart it explores the relationship between order and chaos in quite an interesting way. We are way off topic here though.