Vee

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

Margaery is heading over to seal the deal with Tommen right away.

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 don't know if he's a monster, but I think he's a pretty shitty guy who gets a pass from fans because he's "funny" with Arya. I've heard people say he's a good father to her because look at what she's learning. This is a guy who kills children (unless my season 1 memory is wrong, which it may be), who abandoned his army after expecting them to die for the cause, and who has a hypocritical "code" that he uses to justify whatever he sees fit. There's no great life lesson here.

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.

I mustn't be communicating well today because I never said depiction of bisexuality was new. All I said was that it felt like an authentic representation of bisexuality, when usually it's treated as people being greedy, indecisive, or always needing to like one more than the other. But absolutely YAY for equal opportunity male-on-male nudity!

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.

I doubt she's going to see him any differently going forward. If she does, it will be because he doesn't do what she wants him to do. IMO, Jaime loves Cersei more than she loves him. As Jaime said, he's only been with one woman. Cersei told Ned that she loved Robert in the beginning. She was sleeping with Lancel when Jaime was imprisoned. She's much more Tywin's child than Jaime is, imo. Jaime wants to be honorable, even though he's failed. Cersei thinks that's childish.

That's about it. Jaime hit it with his sister and has spent most of his life thinking that's the world; Cersei is smart enough and has been through enough to know better, and has never IMO, not in the world of the show at least, had the same emotional investment in Jaime than he does in her. She loves him in her own way, yes, but in the end, in a pinch, she has and will always default to using him as a tool - a protector, an executioner, whatever. She's not as besotted as he is, she never was, or at least not since adulthood. It's never been a relationship where they have mutual understanding and agency, because Cersei has always had it over on him. That has nothing to do with the scene the other night, either; it's just how I've seen it from the start of the series.

I read a post about how they cut out things like her being catatonic after the Red Wedding. I guess that's for time, but it does make me learn more toward them seeing her as becoming a sociopath. I do see what you mean though.

She was absolutely wrecked by what happened at the Red Wedding. Her reaction was onscreen in those two episodes in Season 3. She wasn't catatonic, but she was certainly hysterical. I don't see how any of that makes her a sociopath. Nor does her enjoying getting revenge on that !@#$%^&*] knight make her a sociopath. Just because she enjoys becoming a, uh, swordswoman? and at times takes a little too much pleasure in what she's learning from the Hound doesn't make her a sociopath - and even as she did, she called the Hound on what she felt was unnecessary brutality towards innocent people. (And the Hound, while he can be rotten, is no sociopath either - he feels things keenly, even when he acts opposite.)

She's been going down a dark road, but it's all been fueled by her own loss and heartbreak and what she's suffered. Her reactions have all been based in emotion and trauma.

Except I don't think Arya is a sociopath at all - that's counter to her character arc in Season 3 as well as the last episode, IMO. She did enjoy getting bloody revenge on the knight in the premiere, but the writing isn't painting her as just some shallow little badass. She may or may not end up losing her humanity because of what she's been through, but she certainly had a reaction to the Hound's treatment of those villagers. Even though he had a point about them not being able to survive the winter, that didn't make Arya approve of it any more.

There's always going to be fan favorite characters on any show who the mass audience take to or the ones they don't, but I think the more committed audience takes to most of the characters. I think people like not just Tyrion, or Arya or Daenerys, they also can like Sansa or Bran or Cersei or Jaime or Brienne or whoever else - it's not either/or.

There's always going to be too-glib reviews of popular TV shows and obnoxious fans thereof. I try not to let them get to me in terms of your own viewing.

And I think it's unfair to say Arya doesn't feel anything - she feels plenty, especially at the close of Season 3. As does the Hound, who is a difficult person at best but who is not without humanity. But Arya's circumstances and tragedy have also hardened her to life and to what she feels she must do to survive where her parents didn't. That doesn't mean, though, that she didn't call the Hound out for his treatment of those villagers - she felt a great deal of sympathy for them. She enjoyed killing the man who killed the little boy from Season 2, but that was presented as something very bad for her - and even after that, she's already shown she's far from a sociopath. And the Hound, while at core a very traumatized person and a relentless, brutal pragmatist, is not a monster either.

Even the article that was just linked shows that her last words were not at all her "accepting" or "wanting" Jaime like she does in the books.

I'm sorry but there's a big difference between a couple enjoying a little rough sex and whips and chains, whatever and a couple that has been raping each other for years on end (or at least the guy has according to those who want to give the writers a free pass on this epic BS).

The books and even the show to a small extent have only shown Cersei and Jaime to be quite passionate about each other when it comes to love making but NEVER have they implied that one took the other against their will just for sh*ts and giggles or funsies.

But we're not talking about the books, we're talking about the show. And on the show, Cersei, as I saw it, just kept chanting "it's not right" while wrapping her legs around him. I'm not talking about them raping each other, I'm talking about really disturbing [!@#$%^&*]. Which is what I felt the scene showed them and their relationship to be.

And I'm sorry, but since you've made the comparison twice now, I find rough, ugly sex between twisted people who've been doing this for years to be very different from the scene on DAYS where E.J. held a sobbing Sami at gunpoint and raped her in a car on the side of the road. I watched that live; it was rape. So I guess we can all see these things differently.

I understand what you're saying, Vee. I guess the problem I have is that I don't trust Jaime around any women after this. I don't just mean in romantic relationships, I mean in general. I do think he and Cersei had a very toxic relationship, with power struggles, an unhealthy relationship. But all I could think was if he can do this to her, then what is he going to do to other women? I can't say this is just because of Cersei or Cersei drove him to this, because I feel like if I do that, then I'm blaming Cersei. I know that isn't what you are doing, but I feel like that's what the scene does.

No, I get that argument and I sympathize with it. I don't think it's simply that Cersei does it or that Jaime does it - I think they both do it to each other, and I think their father made them this way (and maybe another generations of incest, who knows). And it goes beyond the physical. I don't know if either of them can ever have a functional, decent romantic relationship with anyone else, but I know they can't with each other.

I don't think Jaime has been raping her for years. And I do think the scene between them last night ended with her going for it as well while hating herself - chanting "it's not right" while wrapping herself around him. But I do suspect that sort of ugly tableau, with the iffy lines of consent, the violent action, the need to prove something to one or both of them, is not new for either of them. When we first saw them together, as lovers, he was doing her doggy-style in somebody else's tower amidst the hay and the dirt, and I just never saw that as being about respect. IMO their whole relationship is built on dysfunction and how they equate sex and their need for each other with all sorts of thorny things, including power. And from the start, Cersei had the firmer hand.

The show claims they didn't do the scene just to show Jaime was "still bad" and not a woobie hero, and I agree with that. But I think they did the scene to show just how deep the sickness between them goes, and how easy it is for both of them to fall back into old patterns. In a sense, IMO, they are both addicts. That's what I thought would happen when Jaime returned to King's Landing at the end of last season and I was dismayed to see it in the trailer, when they showed the beginning of the scene (Jaime grabbing her and kissing her), but I wasn't surprised. Their relationship is the filth they live in. They tried to make it work again in the ugliest way possible, with a scene that polarizes the audience, and it should polarize them IMO because what it sends back, no matter how any of us read the scene, is that that relationship and who they are together, how they treat each other, just doesn't and will never work. There's just nothing good in it for them.

I thought Cersei told someone (Ned?) that she hadn't let Robert consummate the marriage in years - that she'd just had him between her legs and "finished him off in other ways" to trick him, as he was generally drunk when he came to her bed. I was under the impression that their dead son, the one she told Catelyn about at Winterfell at Bran's bedside, was likely the only child she and Robert had ever conceived.

I'm glad Martin weighed in that the scene is not necessarily as consensual as some may claim in the books. And I think that Vulture article covers what I saw as well - she's wrapping herself around him, clinging to the table not to try and get away but for some bearings. And more than the blocking, this kind of venom and ugly [!@#$%^&*] is how they work, what they've become in their family. I think Alyssa Rosenberg at the Washington Post said something similar as well. Whether it was or it wasn't rape, whether it was or wasn't wholly consensual, what I never sensed was that it was new. It's something they do together, that they've done to each other. And I've always felt Cersei had the upper hand over Jaime in the past - always, always. She had the control in that relationship. She was the one with the power, he was the one in the Kingsguard, condemned as Kingslayer - he was at her beck and call when we met them. When he left, she just grabbed Lancel. When he came back changed, and when he had spent a year not at her beck and call, leaving her to the whims of the ebb tide of King's Landing, she found him to not be the man he was and immediately rejected that. I don't think Cersei has any kind of safety valve in Jaime, but I do think they found some vague solace in each other. He thought she made him a man, she thought he would always be the fallback guy. Now neither of those things are true and he is trying to get it back and can't.

She needs Jaime to deal with Tyrion. That’s really what that scene is about. It’s her saying, “I want you to kill him,” and Jaime saying, “I don’t see why I would kill him.” That’s probably the main reason she consents, is to pull him in, because she’s results-oriented, period. The only man she really feels any respect and admiration for, and authority for, is her father. Beyond that, she loves her children. I think — and I say this personally — she’s largely using Jaime and he hasn’t figured it out yet.

This I agree with as well, from the Vulture piece. But I don't truly believe either Cersei or Jaime respect their father so much as fear him, and in their home they have confused that with respect and admiration. He's abused them, he's created what they are. It was clear in Season 3 just how much he's been belittling and controlling their views of themselves - all of them, not just Tyrion.

I tried looking online at some of the criticism but when I got to "it ruins the beautiful Cersei and Jaime relationship," I closed that tab.

It was gonna take more than a road trip with Brienne to fix what's wrong with Jaime Lannister. The question is if he'll get there.

As for whether it was true to Jaime or their relationship, IMO yes because I think they've done this sort of [!@#$%^&*] plenty before, these sort of ugly, quasi-consensual scenes even if we as the audience have not been privvy to it. From what we've seen on the show they're sick people. But that's me. Nobody wants you to keep your views to yourself, though. It's okay to disagree.

I don't know if either Jaime or Cersei saw it as rape - I didn't see it as necessarily rape by the end of the scene, myself. I thought it was abruptly and a bit poorly done, but I suspect a lot of scenes like that have played out in their lives together. I doubt that's the first time they've gotten that harsh with each other.

Jaime has a monster in him like so many other characters on the show, he does monstrous things, but he's also pathetic. Cersei is a monster but that's not all she is; she's also pathetic and like Jaime, a fascinating, quasi-tragic character despite how loathsome she can be - there is a horribly wounded nobility to just how wrongheaded she is, what made her that way and what she has had to become in order to live. And what Jaime did with her tonight was pathetic, too. I did read those articles, and I think what Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was trying to convey is that it's just symptomatic of their awful life together - this kind of ugliness is what their family has bred and what they breed. I see people online who actually root for Cersei and Jaime's romance, find it functional, or think that Jaime was going to have some strictly heroic track going forward and I think they're off their nut. That's bringing something subjectively personal to the characters which is not a part of who they are or the story the show is telling, in my eyes.

The side issue is that there's always been a segment of the fandom which expects progressive conversation generated on the Internet to be fixed to and imprinted upon a quasi-medieval world, or any show on television, the same way a handful of people were offended by True Detective being a show fixed around two men, even though their misogyny and fatal flaws were explicitly burnt into the texture of the show and condemned. That's not gonna happen and IMO it shouldn't. I dunno if the show will address Jaime and Cersei's ugliness tonight going forward. In the universe of the show it may or may not make sense for that to happen. I do think the way it was shot was mishandled, but I think Coster-Waldau's interpretation of the scene and the characters is the same as mine.

As for the rest of the episode, I thought it was pretty good. Especially Tywin quickly taking Tommen under his wing, and Cersei sort of crumbling internally to see it. Soon Tommen will be just like her and Jaime, and Tyrion. It was all in her eyes. Also, Podrick's goodbye was heartbreaking.

I didn't call Littlefinger being behind the assassination. I fear for Sansa. God knows what he's up to.

Of course it's poisonous. They're brother and sister and they trust no one and nothing but their own; they were driven to the depths of that dysfunction by their tyrannical, domineering father who has been emotionally disembowling them for years. They've made at least one demented, psychotic child. I'm talking about the television show when I talk about them - they have no functional, real relationship with anyone else (Jaime's relationship with Brienne is still embryonic at best). They fucked at Winterfell and Jaime casually tried to kill Bran for seeing them together. They joked about killing John Arryn over the same secret. They use and abuse each other.

Even though the books aren't IMO relevant to my talking about the tweaked continuity of the show, I've read the book excerpt and I don't agree that it would be better. I think the TV scene was harsh and abrupt and probably unnecessary, but I understood the point it was trying to get across and I think if they'd done the original scene, with her begging him and saying 'oh, you're home' as they swoon and copulate over their dead son, it would have been sheer camp. I think the violence of the scene in this episode gets across what they really are together, which is sick and wrong and terrible for each other. As was made abundantly clear for both of them last year, everything about their family is bad for Jaime and Cersei, especially Cersei, who's been sold off as chattel at leaast twice in her life.

And I don't think it's a comparison with E.J. and Sami on DAYS - E.J. held her at gunpoint and raped her in the passenger seat of a car. Jaime and Cersei's scene was definitely vaguely consensual at best, but it has a context. And I heard her saying 'it's not right' but I saw her pawing at his clothes - I thought she had succumbed to his advances while hating herself for it, but I also thought it wasn't shot clearly enough. At least, that's how I saw it. It was awful and I question the wisdom of the choice, or at least the pacing. But I do think it was intended to be awful. And I think people who thought Jaime was on a 'hero's journey' over the last couple years and are outraged by this have forgotten the pilot. They can't reduce the character to another sad-eyed antihero, and they definitely can't excuse what he and his sister are to each other. IMO it's not some great, equal relationship, some solace - it's disease. That's what that scene represents, the ugliest end-state of those characters as they are together.

I've seen scenes like that play out before and I know what he's talking about. It's ugly, but it's not the same thing as how soaps romanticize rape and rapists. It also has a lot more to do with how Cersei and Jaime are, IMO.

Jaime is not a good man - he's been carrying on an incestuous affair with his sister for years and he opened the series by pushing a little boy out a window to his intended death. Almost every 'protagonist' left alive on GOT is compromised, Jaime especially so. I hated how he took glee in bringing down Ned. I could barely look at him or care about him at all until Season 2, when they begin dissecting who he really is. But for all the goodness in him, both he and his sister are still deeply toxic people. Whether or not he chooses to move out of that cycle of poisonous filth is another story. But the scene they had together - the dysfunction, the vague consent (which I don't think was that vague by the end of the scene), the violence, all of it in front of their dead son - I think it's part and parcel of who they are and how they work and how they treat each other, how they see power and control and how their sexuality is so bound up with twisted ideas about that stuff as well as about each other.

IMO, it's supposed to be about his (and their) relapse into the sick muck of who they are together. The Lannisters are terrible for each other, and Cersei and Jaime are terrible for each other. The only way Jaime knows how to feel like a man is by being the swordsman and the man Cersei desires - they've fucked anywhere and everywhere, he made light of knocking Bran out a window mid-tryst. He wants desperately be that man again but he's not anymore, because of the loss of his hand as well as because of his time away, his self-reflection, his friendship with Brienne, etc. He thinks he can reverse it all and go back to being the man of the hour by 'seducing' Cersei again, in such a repulsive context. But nothing about it is supposed to paint him as a good man, or them as a good couple - they're horrible together. It's not supposed to be alright, it's supposed to be awful. The scene wasn't romanticized and he wasn't; he took advantage of her vulnerability, he victimized her, and they fell back into their old sick pattern. It just goes back to how they and their family are ruinous to who they are as human beings.

I willl say my biggest complaint about the scene was that it was, IMO, very abrupt, too abrupt. I'm interested in why they made the change to the original scene, which was apparently a lot more bodice-ripping with her begging for it or something. That would've highlighted the sickness in them just as much, but maybe they felt the show had made Jaime's character too safe and 'woobie' in Season 3, and that's a valid concern - he's not just misunderstood and lonely.