Game of Thrones: Season 4

Have you watched the preview for the season finale? If not here it is:



Look closely. Four of the things I mentioned are directly hinted at, and there's been enough talk about one looming development that it's likely we'll see that too.

Also...

Sleazy, have they? Do you have a link, curious on BR choice

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EDIT: On second thought, I'll just PM you.

Heres a cool point and click Map they set up for the show...

http://viewers-guide.hbo.com/game-of.../episode-9/map

Good episode...so many things going on that I had to decompress and may have to watch it again before next week.

The young boy who handled the lift duties on the wall (the one that Sam told to fight)---was he the one you mentioned that made that fatal arrow shot? I couldn't tell who that was on the stairs with the bow. I thought it was someone a bit older.

I knew that the person who got arrow-shot by the guy on the stairs was going to get it, and I knew (as I'm sure even other non-readers like me did) what that person's last words would be. Still, since we hadn't seen a lot of that person this season, did it feel a bit anti-climatic like it did to me?

My favorite moment of the whole show, and something a non-reader like me knew nothing about was the Scythe. Wow, that was an unexpected and devastating weapon. Bloodthirsty me, I was hoping to see them use it again.

This episode was directed by Neil Marshall, who directed season two's Battle of Blackwater episode, so I was expecting a lot. I love Marshall as a movie director, and as the director of the Blackwater episode, but still, this episode, for some reason, left me wanting more. Maybe because of the "wow" factor of last week, or just the rush of everything happening so quickly in this one. Anybody else feel this way? Don't get me wrong, I loved it, but there was a lot of hype for it to top the Blackwater episode, and I'm not sure it did. Still, epic stuff.

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"Miss Jean Louise, Mr. Arthur Radley."

I know I'm really late, but I was really impressed by The Watchers on The Wall.

Having read the book, I'm surprised it managed to capture the epic scope of the battle. The Mammoths and the giants were incredible, and the one-shot from the Giant might be the highlight of an awesome episode filled with spectacular moments. The fight choreography was superb too might I add. Neil Marshall did an awesome job, as he did with Blackwater. I hope he's the go to guy when the show needs to film massive episodes like this.

This 4x09 has been a good one, a proper rhythm taking into account that it was 50 minutes with the same story. I'm impatient to know what's going on with Tyrion and this has not bothered me too much. Just one detail: I would have loved to watch the fight among the six brothers and the giant.

It's been a while, but I think that wasn't in the books. So it was a pretty awesome surprise for me.

Don't recall that either.

They handled her death differently too I think (could someone confirn?), though I'm sure reader s will have guesssed that since the introduction of the boy

Yeah, in the book Jon finds her after the battle (the first battle on the south side of the Wall, which happens separate from the large battle with Mance's army), and she's already been shot and dying. During the fight, he realizes he was shooting arrows at the wildlings, and wonders if one of his arrows was the one that hit her. It's never clear who actually killed her.

Cool, that was my memory of it. Not sure how feel about the change, her death was probably most poignant for me on the show so far

You know, they stretched out the wildling storyline so much this season that I found myself wondering if anyone even cared about Jon and Ygritte anymore.

So much time had passed since their split last season (basically a full year, plus a couple months), not to mention they started categorizing her as nearly a stone-cold killer... more so than Martin really tried to illustrate in the books. She was absolutely devastating in last Sunday's episode. Her passion and love for Jon notwithstanding, homegirl had to go.

Well from the preview it looks like Jon Snow will find Mantz right away. I thought they were gonna save that for next season.

Right now I can honestly say, I have no idea whats going to happen next episode.

They need to get Jack Gleeson (Joffrey) and Iwan Rheon (Ramsay Snow) to portray a couple zombies on The Walking Dead. Why? So Darryl can kill them, thats why!

Luckily, they work on a good show!

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Oh there are worse ones...

What I meant was that Theon doesn't get enough screen time for me to care about the character, as is the same with the others I mentioned. He's maybe had a total of 10 minutes during this entire season, none of those scenes being impressive. You say 'supporting character', but in any other show, Theon wouldn't even be considered that.

I said nothing about my favourite characters; what I said was that the show as a whole would benefit of cutting some characters and focus more on character development. You would have perhaps noticed that, hadn't you been crying like a little schoolgirl about me saying something 'wrong' about your precious show.

Kindly point me to the part of his disagreeing with you that resembles "crying like a little schoolgirl."

And his main point--which you seem to just be ignoring entirely--is that the things you don't like about the show are completely and utterly fundamental to the kind of story it's telling. It'd be like saying you'd like Westerns more if not for all the cowboys.

I kinda get what you're saying, and since I've read the books and you haven't, there's no way for me to see the show from your perspective. It probably does seem like there are way too many characters, and the seemingly minor ones are spread too thin over the show. But the other reality is that, without those characters, it wouldn't be A Song of Ice and Fire.

That said, I think we can all agree that Martin's story isn't perfectly suited to a television show, especially when there are only 10 episodes per season. And it would have been impossible to translate to film. Obviously, some hard cuts have been made (there are some characters in the books that never made it into the show), and that's the reality. Still, I think they've done a good job of cramming most of the important stuff in and keeping it from feeling too overstretched. The pacing on these latter episodes have been pretty consistent, I think.

But it's always going to be easier for those of us who have read the books because we're more familiar with the characters and the plot. Perhaps Theon really isn't as developed as he should be in a show of this type, but at least he's in there. If he wasn't, that would be a gaping hole in the story we know.