Jens wrote:What I liked the most about this episode is they are finally trying to clue us in about the aftermath of the war of the five kings. I have been re-watching some season 2 lately and they were doing a much better job of this back then, constantly bringing the news of Robb's battles with the Lannisters up in conversation.
I think the show is pretty awful at this stuff in general. Consider Gregor's fight with Oberyn Martell, for instance. Gregor's confession during the fight that he killed and raped Aegon Targaryen and Alia Martell had big political ramifications in the books. It's why Dorne threaten to join Stannis in the war of the kings. It's also why Tywin commands the maester to reanimate Gregor (or just keep him alive? I can't remember)... so he can execute him for political reasons.
I'm not sure anyone who watched the show last season understood that this was the reason Jaime went to Dorne to retrieve Cersei's daughter. I'm not even sure that it was the intended reason from the writers, because they never mentioned it. It was more, "Oh shit, Oberyn died in a fight he himself willingly accepted, we better sneak into a foreign land and retrieve the kid, because reasons." Which of course made no sense.
... And what has happened after the daugher got poisoned and died? Nothing! We've seen a two-second coup in Dorne this season where Ellaria siezed power (which also didn't happen in the books, because again, it makes no sense). No one in Westeros even mentioned the fact that Ellaria just killed one of their princesses. That's fucking ridiculous.
There's often a sense when I watch the show that the bigger purpose gets completely lost among the gritty action scenes and the constant cutting back and forth between storylines that really should have been skipped. They reintroduced Rickon Stark three episodes ago and he has still only been on the screen for two seconds with a mouth gag. He hasn't even been given a spoken line yet. And we're supposed to worry about him and keep in mind that he's some massive bargaining chip for the Boltons. Maybe if we had seen Rickon in the past few seasons we would have cared a bit more. He doesn't even look like he did last time we saw him. It's just a stranger with a Stark name now who (we're told) sits in a dungeon.