[Spoilers] EP605

[Morgain]

That penis was fake - it looked like  a stuffed sock. I mean I've seen a fair few in my time and never seen one the same colour and texture all over. FAKE CALL.

Loved Joras and Dany. He'll find a cure I have no doubt of that. The interest will be in what it is, how it works, and I think that will be important to the plot somehow.

Maybe dragonglass related? Both of those are stone type stuff.

[boodofmyblood]

9 hours ago, mnedel said:

I think people are misunderstanding the teleportation complaints. It’s not that we want to see the characters traveling but that they need to show the passage of time consistently in the show. Take Littlefinger and the wall as the most recent example. Messenger carrying news about Stannis defeat and Sansa escape would take about the same time to get to Littlefinger as it would take Sansa to get to the wall. Then, it would take Littlefinger at least a few months to assemble an army and march it anywhere near the wall. But, in the show, when we do see Littlefinger meet Sansa, it is as if only a few days have passed at the wall. This is the problem. It is absolutely fine to skip showing the journey but they must show the proper passage of time. It would be much better if Litterfinger showed up in a latter episode when Jon and co where near Winterfell or something (since it could be argued that it took Jon a long time to organize the wildlings army and march it south). The way it was presented it looks like he got to the wall in a matter of days hence the teleportation argument. And there are lots of inconsistencies like this in the show.

They actually did mention how much time had passed during this episode. Varys mentioned to Tyrion, Greyworm, etc. that it had been a fortnight since Tyrion's deal/meeting with the masters. I'm not a book reader and haven't studied the amount of time it takes to travel from place to place extensively, but about two weeks or a little more have passed since LF said he would join the fray based on that information.

Edited May 23, 2016 by boodofmyblood

[PlainJane]

Thought this was a fantastic episode. Only complaint is I'm growing tired of the Arya/Faceless Man storyline. I want her to quit training and go get some revenge!!

[briantw]

11 hours ago, Grizzly Mormont said:

Christ... Mazin is a house D&D made up, named for one of their friends. 

Source: http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/House_Mazin

Is this really a big deal?  It's not like House Mazin is of any importance to the plot.  It was a throwaway line of dialogue.

There are legitimate criticisms for the show, but this is not one of them.

Edited May 23, 2016 by briantw

[Fkw]

I'm really surprised they were so specific in showing the creation of the white walkers. I know there's a bit of danger applying events that happen in the show and linking it back to things that happen in the books, but I'm pretty obsessed with the idea that Bran is actually the knight of the laughing tree now. This ep. felt like a major game changer in a season where not a lot of stuff has really been happening. 

[Sansa's Hairnet]

56 minutes ago, Alex21 said:

There was a guy on Twitter saying that the magic the Wall holds might be undone by the power of the NK, what do you think?

I'm thinking the magic will fail when Bran goes south of the Wall with that mark on his wrist. After Bran was marked, the NK was able to break the magic that kept the wights out of the cave. Maybe the same thing will happen with the Wall.

Edited May 23, 2016 by Sansa's Hairnet

[Alex21]

22 minutes ago, Sansa's Hairnet said:

I'm thinking the magic will fail when Bran goes south of the Wall with that mark on his wrist. After Bran was marked, the NK was able to break the magic that kept the wights out of the cave. Maybe the same thing will happen with the Wall.

I don't know, I mean, the Wall is the biggest thing men built in Westeros, can a Mark just undo all that? As for the mark... I don't think is a permanent thing.

[boodofmyblood]

12 hours ago, Asma Ben Hamouda said:

They left me with 2 cliffhangers ;

• Why Sansa didn't say the truth to Jon
• What is the name that Varys heard from the voice in the flame

I thought Sansa didn't tell the truth to Jon because 1) she wanted to believe what LF was true and didn't want Jon to question it and 2) because LF's manipulation worked. His last line to her about Jon only being her half-brother (and the army being his not hers) got in her head. LF needed to make sure she didn't tell Jon about him being the one to deliver the news for as yet unknown reasons, IMO.  

ETA: I also really want to know what Varys heard from the voice.

Edited May 23, 2016 by boodofmyblood

[PromethiumWings]

So I have two questions. First of all, is Brann now going to the Wall or are they going to conjure up a hidden city full of the Children of the Forest that he can go to? And also, anyone else having doubts about George originally naming Hodor Hodor for this reason way back when? And while we're at it, here is a somewhat longer analysis: https://promethiumwings.wordpress.com/2016/05/23/a-review-of-s6e5-of-game-of-thrones/ 

[Ser Matt Dayne]

1 hour ago, PlainJane said:

Thought this was a fantastic episode. Only complaint is I'm growing tired of the Arya/Faceless Man storyline. I want her to quit training and go get some revenge!!

I'm looking forward to her parting of ways with them, but dreading it at the same time, as once she deserts they'll mark her for death.

Even if she gets back to Westeros, she won't be safe, and it's fair to say they will get her at some point, but not before playing her part in the endgame. 

[conceptualinertia]

18 hours ago, Alex21 said:

We know now that the COTF created the Others (let`s believe that D and D are telling us the truth), one of the children states that it was because men were killing them.

How can be this possible when the Others appeared after The First Men and the COTF made peace?

Did I get something wrong, did I miss something? It seems to me the timing is just wrong

My understanding is that they were not originally "Others" but rather soldiers that fought for the CoTF.  After the peace was brokered they went rogue becoming the "Others."

[Sonoftheharpie]

I have never liked Sansa one bit, she betrayed her own father so she could play princess to Joffrey and has been nothing but a spoiled brat for the entire show....

Was just starting to like her a little this season, but hiding her discussion from Jon just shows her true nature... She's just like her annoying mother and the only thing she cares about Jon for is his wildling army... If you remember from the books, the Blackfish was basically programmed by Caitlin to dislike Jon from day 1 so I'm not sure how that one is going to turn out for him....

Also her 'gamesmanship' here is very lacking... Why not just kill LF and all his attendants and send word back to the Vale that he had been murdered by the Boltons on his journey home and to come to her aid immediately ?

Somehow once again that sneaky bastard will get the best of her and house stark... JMHO

Edited May 23, 2016 by Sonoftheharpie
Forgot something

[Grizzly Mormont]

3 hours ago, briantw said:

Is this really a big deal?  It's not like House Mazin is of any importance to the plot.  It was a throwaway line of dialogue.

There are legitimate criticisms for the show, but this is not one of them.

Yes, brian, it is a really big deal. How can you not know that?

[Fisch]

Thoughts while watching:

 - I said it last season and I'll say it again: I understand the technical reasons for limiting their presence, but the show's got a direwolf deficit. And after this episode, I'm starting to wonder if the showrunners ever fully grasped how important the wolves are in the books, whether they ever saw them as anything more than cool pets, and if they even liked that element of the books. The way they've ditched them this season is really annoying IMO. I say "annoying" because it isn't a deadly blow to the quality or continuity of the story, but it's a cheapening of an important element, of of my favorites.

 - Watched the ItE: I don't know how involved D&D are in editing these, but if they aren't responsible, I would think they'd have said something after the last two times they ended up spoiling details that will appear in the books. This is really getting obnoxious. And they - and GRRM for that matter - better have a damn good reason for why, if Bran can affect the past and even warg into it, he can't just rewrite the whole history of Westeros.

 - Meera killing a White Walker was the highlight of the episode for me.

 - "Why did you lie to your brother?" Good question. The "villain plants a seed of doubt" device can still be effective despite its overuse, but I wasn't inclined to buy it. I admit that may just be because I was annoyed by other aspects of this episode.

 - "The Blackfish has retaken Riverrun." That might have been fun to see. And what effect does that have on the Freys? Kind of forgot about them, didn't you?

 - The Kingsmoot. In the book, I could see its importance to the larger story, so even if I didn't like it, I could pay attention to it and have some vested interest. In the show - I just don't care.

 - The best scene in this episode may have been Mereen. Wasn't especially good, but it didn't annoy me in any way.

 - Dany's bit with Jorah felt kind of rushed and matter-of-fact. Not as badly as the Blackfish, though.

Overall - perhaps not a technically bad episode, but I was very annoyed by it, to the point where it affected how sad I could get at the death of a very lovable character.

EDIT: There is one scene better than Mereen. The mummer's show Arya had to watch, and her reactions to it, at the time and later to Jaqen, were fantastic.

Edited May 23, 2016 by Fisch

[Kyll.Ing.]

So... Littlefinger is out riding his jet horse again (or is it a TelePetyr?). There's a few thousand kilometres between the Vale and the Wall, and Mole's Town is hardly a few hours' ride from Castle Black, yet Littlefinger acts as if he has been travelling for a day at most. "The knights of the Vale are encamped at Moat Cailin." Yeah, that's further from Mole's Town than Helsinki is from Madrid, yet the show seems to treat it as if they're hanging out just down the road. Wouldn't be so bad if they didn't start off every episode showing us the map. And also that Winterfell is located smack on the only road between the two locations, so getting past the Boltons undetected would be a bit of a hassle. I'm merely having fun pointing out the ridiculousness, thought, it's not like I didn't like the scene. Sansa making Littlefinger speechless? That's a classic. Even though he manages to drop the line about the Blackfish taking Riverrun, which screams "too good to be true" so loudly that even admiral Ackbar would have commented it with a simple "duh".

Bran manages to find a fine little homage to Lord of the Rings in his first White Walkers scene. In the zombie army, there's a long-haired skeleton with a smaller skull tied to the top of his head. Reminded me a lot of that orc from Return of the King. He also witnesses the creation of the White Walkers, but the question remains when this happened. Was it all those millennia in the past, at the onset of the Long Night, or did the Children revive their old arts to make a new batch of White Walkers just a few years ago? I mean, if they did it once, they could possibly have done it again. Question still remains why they would do it now, but at least it answers what the White Walkers were up to for all those years - they simply weren't around.

Some translators were probably crying themselves to sleep after watching this episode. "Hold the door" translates into "Hodor" easily enough in English, but, for instance, in French the phrase is "Tenir la porte". Unless Hodor is called Tenort in French, some translator will have one hell of a task explaining the name to his readers. Plot-essential, untranslatable puns makes the translators' work a lot harder, and the result rarely looks good. See for instance the Danish translation of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, where it's revealed that Voldemort's birth name was "Romeo G. Detlev Jr."

I'm a little sad to see the series invoking time travel. That's a whole bucket of worms I'd have preferred them not to touch. It appears to be a stable time loop, though, so that the past cannot be changed. Still, the explanation "It was Bran in the future all along!" doesn't sit very well with me. I'm also a little frowny at the fact that the Children of the Forest were carrying incendiary hand grenades. And their aim appears to be terrible, they blow a bunch of wights into smithereens as they approach the cave, yet they don't chuck a single one in the direction of the actual White Walkers. Nor do they seem to remember the obsidian trick. They have a good vantage point at the cave mouth, they have obsidian-tipped spears (stacked neatly against the wall of the cave mouth, not even three meters away), they carry bows and arrows, and the White Walkers walk slowly towards them. Obsidian-tipped arrows would have ended the White Walkers there and then in a few seconds.

 

Anyway, anyway. I enjoyed the heck out of this episode. I like to nitpick on the faults a little, but overall I'm having really fun watching it. I liked the scenes, the acting, the way the story is developing, and it was nice to see Varys thrown off his balance. Euron Greyjoy could have been slightly madder, and he has twice as many eyes as he should have, but overall, he gets a pass too. There are many TV shows out there that screwed up in way too many ways, but GoT has managed to stay enjoyable for me, at least. I like it.

[johndance]

19 hours ago, LulaMae Barnes said:

I CAN NOT BELIEVE IT!

When the show started,someone had a theory about Hodor actually being Rhaegar's son baby Aegon who was saved (instead of being killed by The Mountain and his people) and brought to Winterfell and the last words he heard from his mother Elia were "hold the door!" , that's why grown-up Hodor (alias Aegon) keeps repeating the word "Hodor".

I laughed so hard at this weird fan theory because it was somewhat absurd - but now D&D made it REAL. Hooray! I bow to you and your creativity! All hail fan fiction!

You do realize it's been confirmed this is accurate and not even close to fan fiction right?

[Sansa's Hairnet]

2 hours ago, Alex21 said:

I don't know, I mean, the Wall is the biggest thing men built in Westeros, can a Mark just undo all that? As for the mark... I don't think is a permanent thing.

Well, it's going to come down somehow, and there hasn't been any mention of the Horn of Joramun in the show that I recall. They just showed us how the NK was able to break the magic that kept them out of the cave after marking Bran though. Maybe the Wall uses a different kind of magic, but didn't the Children help build it too? 

[Hangatyr]

Is it possible that Bran did not cause the Hodors trauma? 
Bran wasn't controlling Wyllis when hodor began to fighting 
(after his eyes became white).
Wylli's eyes only turn white at the end of the episode. 
Only I find it strange?

 

Edited May 23, 2016 by Hangatyr

[VladimirDulud]

15 hours ago, Illiterati said:

I'm not sure he saw Bran.  It seems to me like Bran was warged into Hodor, and at that WF scene simultaneously he was warged into soon-to-be young Hodor, and Bran acted as a conduit through which he saw himself being killed by walking dead while being commanded to hold the door.  Imagine you're standing there by a cart, minding your own business, then suddenly, you are in ice and snow, trying to hold back a door while someone is screaming for you to hold it back,, and hatchets breaking through the door, held by arms with rotting flesh, and you slowly succumb, not in a dream state, but in a vision that is as real to you as that sunny courtyard had been moments ago.  Talk about PTSD.....

Night's King=Freddy Krueger

Weirnet = dreams

You die in the weirnet, you die in real life.

Captain obvious, I know. 

[Forlong the Fat]

4 hours ago, briantw said:

Is this really a big deal?  It's not like House Mazin is of any importance to the plot.  It was a throwaway line of dialogue.

There are legitimate criticisms for the show, but this is not one of them.

Almost as big a deal as GRRM's oblique references to the New York Giants, New England Patriots, and Dallas Cowboys.