DVR: Week four

Game of Thrones: Kissed by Fire

Having paid off the Dany's Astapor stay last week, this installment moves several other stories forward as her newly minted army begins its march to Yunkai, the second stop on her Slaver's Bay tour.  The best material went, unsurprisingly, to Arya, displaying real bloodlust for the Hound's trial; the series has kept her a bit cleaner than the Arya of the books, but this week they seem much closer to one another.

As we enter the season's back half, the problems with the macro-level changes are going to be difficult to overcome: the poor decision-making on Robb's part is starting to haunt him, yet with the divergences from the book and the show's short shrift of the importance of honor in Westerosi culture, the exact nature and magnitude of his poor choices may blunt some of the impact of later developments.

Micro-scale improvement: removing Patchface, but giving his creepy, prophecy-tinted songs to Shireen.



Revolution: The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia

Whatever good came of this -- the introduction of the Georgia Republic, their obvious moral superiority to Monroe, and the reveal of a "good" use for the nanites -- tying the whole episode around a nuclear bomb that cannot possibly still work after fifteen years without maintenance, much less electric power* took me completely out of the story.  That the character moments are predicated on yet more backstory betrayals by Miles and Rachel further squandered the good of the world-expansion being done up front.

* If Randall had supplied the nuke, it would've handwaved the maintenance issue, but he explicitly did not.