Vee

...but in all seriousness, here's this from Vanity Fair on the changes.

I didn't, really. I've seen her, I didn't like her or her dad, I didn't care, so I dropped it. You are right, though, Rauch knew where his bread and butter was, he knew what Erika could do and how much audience cachet she had, and he played those characters - Viki, Clint, Tina, Cord, etc. - hard.

I thought NCW made a good villain in Season 1, but he didn't really get me until Seasons 2 and 3 when they began peeling the onionskin. I will have to go back and rewatch S1 more during the off-season to try and catch some of the subtleties. It struck me how much Jon acted and sounded like Ned/Sean Bean during his stuff at the Wall this week. This is really his season to come into his own, I think, as a future ruler. That orphaned farmer's boy they rescued from the wildlings is darling, but I'm sure he'll die first when the wildlings come. I didn't mind the Bran mention, though it was a little kludgy - they have only so much time and real estate in ten episodes and a huge amount of ground to cover in various stories from the books. I assume Locke has been sent by the Boltons to try and snoop, to verify the location of Bran and Rickon - to try and kill the last original heirs to Winterfell. I worry about Osha and Rickon; I believe they are scheduled to appear this year. His allegiances aside, what I liked about that last scene was how many men stood with Jon this time - whatever the Night's Watch is made up of, you still have men there, however downtrodden and damned for their crimes, who are making their own form of honor, as opposed to being highborn like Jon and Bran (or Jaime). I thought that was a running bit this week, maybe it's me, but I liked. I remember Torchwood's Burn Gorman from last year, and I was surprised and thrilled to see him this week back again. The Craster's Keep situation is probably one of the most hellish and awful I've ever seen on the show, but boy, Owen Harper sure was made to drink wine from a human skull while drunkenly rambling about his lot in life. That was something else. I was hardly upset or anything that Bran and the kids got captured - I don't see why anyone would be. I thought it was an exciting plot development in a story thread that desperately needed some after last year (and no, I don't care if Bran wouldn't give his name in the books; he's a twelve-year-old boy lost in the wilderness whose friends are being threatened by a drunken maniac). I truly fear for all of them, especially Hodor and poor, beautiful Thomas Sangster. Jojen looked absolutely horrible this week. Edge of my seat with that stuff. It was a little mindblowing to see that whole Fortress of Solitude setup out there with the White Walkers. That was a trip. We can so easily forget about the real threat beyond the Wall, like all the characters do - out there, that weird [!@#$%^&*] seems to come from outer space. Great moment. I really liked Grey Worm and Missandei in Meereen, well played by Jacob Anderson and Nathalie Emmanuel. They do have chemistry, whether or not the actress is downplaying that in her new interview; I wonder if she was trying not to tip her hand. I do think Daenerys's absolutist approach in Meereen may well have consequences. She has a castle, she has her flag over it - now what? I was a little disappointed to realize Littlefinger believes he has the measure of the Tyrells ("my new friends are predictable"), and that he indeed might - I think working with him is beneath them, and to what end? Someone as smart as Olenna must know that Littlefinger is, according to Varys's approximation anyway (and Varys is rarely wrong), a terrorist - to him the climb is all there is. That's not a steady pair of hands for the realm; even if he claims he will be hands-off with them or a King Tommen, who's to believe him? Not me. I just don't want to see people like Olenna and Margaery go down to an operator like him. I think Olenna in particular is too smart for that. I did laugh at her quip about the garden strolls getting old. And I liked Littlefinger testing Sansa's mettle for court intrigue. He clearly intends her to be his mistress on the side from Lysa Arryn - I hope Brienne guts him like a fish, but I'm not holding my breath. We'll see what happens, I just would hate to see Littlefinger get the best of my favorite House. Oh, and I forgot to add, yes, I understand they made changes to the books tonight - they've made them before, this is not new. Doesn't bother me, I just watch the show! Welcome to my world, bitches! We're all on a crazy train! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MLp7YNTznE

Teddy Sears (who's gone on to a fair bit of other stuff) is the one who played the bartender, Chad Bennett. He was a winning guy, but the character had no personality. So of course Gary Tomlin signed him to a contract and tried to play a horrible summer romance storyline with him and Troy and Colin's little sister Emily (who explained, in a horribly labored and totally unnecessary bit of dialogue, how she'd changed her name from the "Carol" who'd been previously mentioned by the McIver brothers because children used to call her "Christmas Carol". Really?).

I did a serious series of embarrassing air punches and garbled cheers when they cut to Podrick as Brienne's new wingman. That is fantastic. And not just because I lust after Daniel Portman in a terrible way. That Brienne/Jaime scene in the Kingsguard chamber (or wherever) is as close as they've come to a date. That got me. It's sort of a Remains of the Day thing, really - because of who they are and how they are, their stations in life, the way they're expected to conduct themselves, that was as close as they've come to expressing themselves to each other. Before I started watching GOT I'd only seen Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in the truly so-so Guillermo del Toro production Mama, where he was sort of just the hapless husband to bounce off heroine Jessica Chastain and the monsters. I thought he was kind of a vague prettyboy there, but on this show he's shown so many facets, layers; he's just incredible. It makes you want to see him in some sort of film noir throwback thing, wearing a fedora and talking fast yet still dashing and damaged. That Margaery and Tommen rendezvous was pitched just right, right on the line between sex and kid's stuff. Tommen was totally enrapt - Michelle MacLaren shot the silent gazes between them perfectly. Margaery is just the best. I'll comment on the rest in a bit, except I have to try and recall what happened to Locke last year - was he packed off to the Wall for chopping off Jaime's hand? He's played, of course, by the great Noah Taylor, who I remember best for the underseen and very good Max, where he played the young Adolf Hitler after World War I.

They're not changing the show around or adjusting the characters based on fan reaction - it's not like the bullshit we put up with on the soaps or some network show. On cable, especially from a preexisting template like GOT where the books have an existing story, these guys in particular are running the biggest show on television and they do whatever they want year after year. There is nothing and no one that could change that. If stupid TWD fanboys couldn't get half the women on that show killed off before the show damn well felt like doing it - and that's a show on basic cable, with mixed critical reception that is not the monster force that GOT is - then GOT is never going to do anything it doesn't want to do or [!@#$%^&*] with the characters just because the Internet said so. It is not worth worrying about.

I believe she did, yes. My point was, the show was sort of in a holding pattern for almost two years, maybe longer, once both Horgan and Malone were gone - sort of coasting on a handful of popular couples, the leftover material from the Malone/Gottlieb+Horgan renaissance. Not much seemed to move, really, that I can recall. It got boring, definitely. I liked Téa under the Labines though I couldn't understand why the show hadn't reunited Todd and Blair, I liked Patrick and Marty, I liked Max and Maggie, one of the last of the Malone couples, but stories just sort of meandered along. You had subplots like Carlotta with Hank and Clint, which I liked, you had the Hayes family - I loved Mel and Dorian - but until JFP there wasn't much galvanizing, exciting story again. Ultimately JFP proved ruinous to the show, of course, but by the time she showed up in '98 it was just exciting to see things happening and people taking risks again. I remember it was the Georgie Phillips story with Bo and Nora that pulled me back in as a teen, and looking back it was pretty tacky but it was still something happening again. RSW and HBS were initially thrilled about it, too, about their story getting a shot in the arm - they did a gushing interview about it for TV Guide. That didn't last. JFP told a lot of lousy stories, but she knew who to lean on to keep me watching - she played Erika Slezak, HBS and RSW all week every week, and when they came up on that big February sweeps period in 2000 where Nora learned that Lindsay had falsified Bo's fertility test results two years prior, which led to their divorce, and ran off to confront Lindsay at her wedding to Bo, I was absolutely glued to my seat. And the scenes were great. I could not stop watching. It was, ultimately, in the service of bad stories - JFP had no real intention of re-pairing Bo and Nora while her beloved Kale Browne still needed a frontburner couple - but she knew that she needed to keep them together and tease it in story perpetually, she knew how to lean on people and viewer loyalty to that history together and that made a lot of it work, superficially.

IIRC, Brynden the Blackfish is Cat's uncle. I was amused to spot another Rome alumni as Cat's brother Edmure - Tobias Menzies, who played the tortured Brutus on that show, son to Lindsay Duncan's Servilia. Rome wasn't quite as good as GOT, but it was definitely the prototype for HBO. I don't think the Hound is self-righteous - I think he is the opposite, almost nihilistic. He knows what he is, he condemns himself and everything around him. But he holds onto some small shred of decency, in his own savage, backwards way. I like Gendry - he's just there to be a nice, sweet boy at this stage, really, whatever his future may be. And I always found Joe Dempsie to be a good actor. I never saw Sansa as isolated from her family, not in any real way, anyway. They clearly loved her and considered her one of them in every way. When we met her she was just the typical tweenage girl who wanted to be out of the North and turned up her nose to everything - it was just typical growing pains, including her sibling rivalry with Arya. I loved that scene with Cersei and the Tyrells, Joffrey, etc. in the sept because it was clear Olenna could and would sympathize with Cersei (up to a point, anyway), could turn her - and Cersei clearly yearned for that identification and understanding, but in the end she defaulted to what she always defaults to, which is either callous bitchery and tyranny over the vulnerable, in the case of that conversation with Olenna, simply ceding to the conventional wisdom of her father and that power system. And seeing someone who could do something she can't, that she has no capacity for doing - Margaery doing her continuing Princess Diana bit with the people - reminds her of what she could be and won't.

I think the new guy is fine, handsome and a better actor. I've already gotten used to him. But I slightly preferred the old one if only because he was sort of the exotic prettyboy you can see turning Daenerys's head, probably for worse than better in the long run. He fit the role better.

I remember gossip that Susan was up for the ill-fated Lily Walsh recast on ATWT when Chris Goutman refused to come to terms with Martha Byrne in the mid-late 2000s. She didn't get that part, or she turned it down. I don't know of her doing any other soaps. Patrick and Marty (and most of the show, for that matter) was not the same after Michael Malone was forced out. They were coasting for a good long time after that, on the fumes from his and Linda Gottlieb's success, riding those popular couples (Patrick and Marty, Antonio and Andy, and in a more diffuse way Todd and Blair - they didn't use them as a united couple in love so much as united in angst over their not being together after he returned from the dead) without much in the way of good story for them. I loved Patrick and Marty and Antonio and Andy so I could take a lot, but it left the show in a sort of drifting limbo, which is where Jill Farren Phelps found it.

I really was not plugged into fandom at that age, but I remember the magazine covers screaming about it in the supermarket, and I was certainly shocked and heartbroken as a kid when Todd was killed off - I'd come to love him with first Rebecca and then Blair, despite his being this scary villain when I started watching. I also wasn't entirely surprised when he came back. I remember thinking it was a stupid waste of time that Marty insisted on marrying Dylan and that Patrick and Blair were screwing around. No, I've never seen that interview. That's neat.

Michael Malone has talked before about how he had at one point intended for Max and Blair to be endgame, a la Gone with the Wind or something - something about Scarlett and Rhett, he has a lot of those kind of analogies. He was surprised by how Todd and Blair took off instead. Susan Bedsow Horgan has told the story more than once about how they were approached about Thorsten Kaye, by a creative scout presumably, and given twenty-four hours to come up with something for him on their show before he was offered up to, I think, AMC. Overnight or something, she and Michael Malone came up with the character of Patrick for Marty - they knew they would need another strong male lead to off-set Roger Howarth, who was ready to leave, and so they went for it. The DePaivas did have chemistry onscreen - especially in that one notorious scene where they make love in Vegas or Atlantic City or wherever, something that is still pretty racy for daytime. It's just that what they had was nothing compared to what they had with other people, and the pairing was boring and bad for their individual characters.

I'm afraid it wasn't - RH left the airwaves before my time, really. I came to first appreciate it only when I got older and it started running on cable, and I had friends who were huge fans. I didn't care for Dylan Moody. I'm not sure anyone did. I definitely didn't care about Suede, who was dead almost immediately after I started watching.

I absolutely adored Patrick and Marty as a kid. I had been a huge fan of Susan Haskell and Marty since I'd started watching a couple years prior. I identified with her fiery character a lot, she was who I wanted to be as a little gay kid - a strong young woman with lots of big wild hair. They don't do that much anymore on soaps, they don't let young characters be a force unto themselves regardless of a pairing or an easy box to fit them in story-wise. It took them years to find a man and a partner who could match Marty (who wasn't her rapist, or Andrew, plus they'd alternately diverted or miscast the various Kevins and never pulled the trigger on that) and that was okay because Haskell could carry it. The same held true for Melissa Archer's Natalie years later, and then Kelley Missal as Dani on OLTL 2.0 last year, but I digress. Anyway, you have to understand that my mother was big on our Irish roots and so I was surrounded by, like, the music of Clannad and [!@#$%^&*] in my house all day long, and Irish culture and all that stuff was big at the time, and so between all that and my existing love for Marty, and Thorsten Kaye's great work in the role I was hooked pretty much immediately. IIRC the IRL relationship was public knowledge pretty quickly too.

Based on last week's great scene with Tommen and Tywin and some footage from the preview trailer, I got a sinking feeling that Them Tyrells work fast.

There was a great scene near the end of Season 3 where both Cersei and Tyrion finally come to terms with each other as the closest thing to friends and siblings that they must have been in years - they're both in the same boat thanks to Tywin's machinations, and there's no sniping from Cersei or other bullshit and they have to commisserate because they have no one else. I hoped it might lead to a new understanding between them, but the truth is Cersei is too hidebound, too proud and too locked in her own mindset, the one Tywin and life have engineered for her (and to a lesser extent, Jaime) to ever really trust in Tyrion, I suspect. She's turned on other people who could help her or be of mutual interest, like the Tyrells, and I suspect spurning Margaery and the Tyrells so viciously will be her undoing. Those women are much smarter than her. She doesn't know any other way to think or live other than always on the attack, and it's going to finish her off someday. I think in her heart, on some unconscious level she knows he didn't do it - it's not his way. But she is incredibly angry and frustrated, and they did once vow vengeance on each other. I think both Sansa and Littlefinger and Arya and the Hound are now on their way to the Eyrie. I hope they meet up. I am also amazed Sam has apparently yet to mention Bran's visit to Jon - or maybe it was offscreen. I really loved Sansa and Tyrion's marriage, however brief, and I hope it's not totally over. My fear is that Littlefinger hopes to annul it and wed her himself to try and make a bid for ruling the North (as well as fulfill his psychosexual obsession with Cat). Of course, the Boltons rule it now, IIRC. Littlefinger was poised pretty much as one of the core villains in his big scene with Varys midway through last season. He's a conniver; it's all he cares about. The truth is Robb and the Starks likely could have been saved, at least for a while, if he'd kept Talisa as his mistress on the side. It happens all the time, certainly all the time on GOT and even in our real world; just Camilla Parker-Bowles it. I don't know if he'd ever have won the war given all those other blunders, but he would have been able to keep Frey in check.

Perfect.

I think Oberyn's been shown more with the men - specifically, Olyver - than any women, other than Ellaria Sand who is his longtime partner. If anything they've amped up the fact that he is into men at least as much as women, it's not some winking sideline where he throws the dudes a bone (literally, I'm here all week!). I think it's a functional character because whatever he gets up to in the bedroom, however stunning a man he is (and God, he is stunning) I think his real motive and story function is clearly his vendetta against the Lannisters. I don't really care what they do or don't do with Loras, because since the beginning he has been a supporting character at best, and it was long ago established that the males in House Tyrell are the pawns of the women. It was clear both he and ultimately Renly turned out to be out of their depth. I enjoy him but I don't think he's there to be gay so much as he is there to be another example of the deconstruction of the shining knight - in that not only is he not there for the damsels (like Sansa's adolescent crush in Season 1) but he's also just a cog in the wheels for Olenna, Tywin, etc. I don't think Tyrion was overexposed in Season 3 or anything. He had a lot less to do, frankly, and I remember people saying he was underused. I thought they were treading water with him until he wed Sansa, and I think they had to do some of the same with Daenerys, Bran, etc. at times in Season 3. It looks like Bran's story is starting to pick up, though. And speaking of gay or bi Starks, I think if it's anyone it'll be Bran with Jojen Reed in about five or ten years. I dunno, man, I know there's probably nothing to it but I swear they look at each other the way I used to look at Rider Strong on Boy Meets World.

That's what you get for writing your lines on your hands.

I don't think Stannis is one-dimensional at all. It's all in the eyes and the posture. I love that fucked-up dysfunctional suburban family setup on Dragonstone, with the added addition of Melisandre as the crazy preacher from down the lane. If Stannis could ever get out of his own head, how he thinks he should behave, what he's internalized as to how he should act as a Baratheon ruler, he could do very well allying with the right person. But that's most of the characters in power on this show. I'm not sure any of them will come out of it alive, but hey.

But why does their being fan favorites make them one-dimensional? In the case of this show, anyway, I think the only people reducing them or the show's other characters to one dimension are some myopic fans. I don't think that reflects the actual writing of the characters, myself.

I don't think that fan reality is any part of the show. Especially now. They've always done whatever they wanted, it's not like the soaps that used to bend to fan feedback or a teen drama on basic cable or something. This was all filmed months ago. I think if it was about fan feedback we'd have seen Daenerys and Drogo, a hugely popular couple in Season 1, together forever, or Robb Stark taking back the North, or Tyrion just getting one over on his family instead of constantly being humiliated and ground down (I think he will be getting his own back once and for all by the end of this season, so that'll be nice). Instead they did other things, and especially since Season 3 they have doubled down on characters like Sansa - they said specifically how much they wanted to focus in on her and beef up her character and they've done that, are continuing to do that, and they've talked a lot about how some of the audience or critics misjudge and misunderstand Sansa, etc. This is a series built on books from another source, I really don't think they're going to invert the show based on fan feedback now. Speaking of Sansa and Arya and the Hound - might they be meeting soon after all? I mean, if Arya and the Hound are headed to the Eyrie, isn't that Littlefinger's current de facto base of operations, as he's supposed to be wooing crazy Lysa Arryn?

I just think it's not so much about what other people say about the characters online as it is about what I see when I watch the show - I don't care if someone is or isn't someone else's favorite vs. someone else or how they treat Character X or Y, I just watch it as it comes. I can't internalize fan feedback on the Internet. The Hound is a complicated character - he's nasty, he's brutish and he's done terrible things. But he's not his brother (the Mountain), and he has, like so many other characters on the show (including the Lannisters) been brutalized and abused since childhood and reared to a certain way of thinking. He killed the butcher's boy on the King's orders at Winterfell, like most of the knights and soldiers in Robert's employ would have, but by the time Joffrey's reign rolled around even his sense of duty had had enough. He saved Sansa, he stopped her from being raped or worse by both Joffrey and the folk in the streets, and then he abandoned the fight at Blackwater because he had no respect for Joffrey or for their use of wildfire on the battlefield. He was tired of living by someone else's code. That's not to say the Hound's code is so superior - he is a brutal pragmatist because of the life he has led, and he often goes too far, as he did in the last episode. He seems to go looking for a fight, for death. But he also sees the harsh realities of Westeros and that changing world clearly for what they are, more than some others. The ultimate question for me is will he change Arya more, or will Arya change him more, or a little bit of both. He already stopped her from dying with her family at the Twins, and he didn't have to do that. I hate some of the things the Hound does, but I understand him and I find him extremely compelling to watch. It's the same with Cersei or Jaime, where I condemn a great deal of their behavior and find it ridiculous, but I understand and sympathize with them more now, over the last two years, than I ever thought possible before. That's the whole show, really, and most of its characters IMO. The books, and the show, I think, are about that kind of deconstruction of classical fantasy characters: The evil knight (the Hound), the evil queen (Cersei), the brave hero (either a Jaime or a Robb/Ned/Jon Snow, all of them found lacking except for the bastard son and the cripple), the helpless maiden (Sansa). Nobody is what they entirely appear to be at face value.

Well, it's a personal thing - I just haven't been exposed to as many inauthentic representations of bisexuality as you. I can count scenes like those you describe that I've seen on one hand, but that's me. I found the scene the other night to be more graphic than Renly and Loras's - I don't remember Finn Jones ever losing his pants on the show, which drives me nuts since he is amazing to look at. Olyver, OTOH, is often naked, both with Loras and now Oberyn. And I thought I recalled Oberyn having to put his pants on as he got out of bed to talk to Tywin, but I'd have to go back and rewatch.

I find both Pedro Pascal and the other guy (Will Tudor?) exceptionally attractive and I think it's definitely eye candy, but I don't find it to be anything too new. Perhaps in terms of showing bisexuality, but I honestly don't think that's some new, edgy concept. I'm just glad to see more and more equal opportunity male-on-male nudity and sexuality on the show. It's been a while since Renly cacked it, but it's good to see the guys still getting play.