I must not tell lies.
Quick takes: So we’re now caught up, basically, with Jorah and Tyrion where they were in the books, only we skipped thousands upon thousands of pages, and also the other dwarf, Penny and her stupid fucking pig, which is FINE BY ME.
What’s not fine? Turning the Sand Snakes into footnotes, Margaery’s trial into an extended and unfunny gay joke, and SANSA STARK INTO A FUCKING RAPE VICTIM WHILE REEK WATCHES. Yo Martin, can you please show up for this shit? I kept rooting for Sansa to take a dagger out of her sleeve and slit his skeezy throat, but apparently all she’s going to be good for here is setting up fucking Theon’s redemption story. Because that’s what’s important here, that Theon Fucking Greyjoy get to be a good guy again. I am grossed out. Show, you were better than this.
My money is always going to be on Olenna Tyrell over Cersei, because Olenna don’t play. You do not screw with the grandchildren. Sure, Loras likes questionable dudes and Margaery can’t keep a husband alive but none of that matters. They’re the grandkids and they win.
Arya wants to be no one, and that’s the whole problem.
She wants to be no one so badly, and can you blame her? Here’s how it’s worked out so far, in every skin she’s slipped into. Arya Stark? Dead dad, dead mom, dead siblings, burnt-down castle, banished her own fucking dog by way of throwing rocks at it. Arry, a boy on the way to the Wall? Dead friends, nearly kidnapped by dudes who wanted to bite her face off, last link to home — Yoren — murdered along with almost all her friends. The Hound’s traveling companion? Eating mostly dirt, getting her head bashed in, listening to the Hound talk about how he wished he’d raped her sister.
Good times, all of it. You can see the appeal, can’t you, of being Faceless, after that?
She wanted to forget it all. Everyone she loved, and everyone she hated, and everyone like the Hound who was both. (This episode was infuriating in a lot of respects but Arya being struck for lying that she hated the Hound, oh, that rang out like a church bell.) She wanted to forget it all hard, and don’t think of an elephant, you know? You don’t ever push away something you don’t want to keep close.
Here are a thousand faces, Jaqen showed her, and you could be any of them. Don’t tell me you want to be no one. Choose one, and go.
A.
I don’t want any redemption story for Theon, I’d be just as happy to see him bite it. And if Sansa doesn’t straight up murder an asshole or two by season’s end, imma be pissed
Very disappointed that the first episode in which the screenwriters walked on their own, i.e. without a lot of source material, fell on its ass and so royally. The clumsy Dorne fight scene made me cringe and I walked out of the room before the Ramsay-Sansa nonsense. As a reviewer in The Atlantic said, “Gratuitous sexual violence is bad enough, but gratuitous sexual violence in a ridiculous storyline that not only doesn’t advance our understanding of key characters but rather makes us more confused – that may be the greatest sin of all.”