2016年5月30日星期一
2016年5月15日星期日
YA Retellings: an Epic Infographic
Posted on February 27, 2014 by Christi
This post contains affiliate links that help this blog continue to be awesome.
For generations, storytellers, bards, and troubadours — ancient and modern — have been putting new spins on old tales. One of the oldest collections of stories, the Bible itself, even mentions this in Ecclesiastes 1:9:
That which has been done is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
Epic Reads recently put together a gorgeous infographic specifically focusing on these retellings in YA — 162 of them, in fact. It could even be argued by some that a few of these original stories, like Romeo and Juliet, were based on earlier stories. You’ll find the infographic below, and a complete list of the retellings can be found here.
I remember loving Robin McKinley’s Beauty as a kid and thoroughly enjoying Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted some years later when I stumbled across it as a camp counselor (that one makes great bedtime reading for a room full of kiddos). Do you have any favorite YA retellings? Or favorite retellings in general?
This post contains affiliate links that help this blog continue to be awesome.
For generations, storytellers, bards, and troubadours — ancient and modern — have been putting new spins on old tales. One of the oldest collections of stories, the Bible itself, even mentions this in Ecclesiastes 1:9:
That which has been done is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
Epic Reads recently put together a gorgeous infographic specifically focusing on these retellings in YA — 162 of them, in fact. It could even be argued by some that a few of these original stories, like Romeo and Juliet, were based on earlier stories. You’ll find the infographic below, and a complete list of the retellings can be found here.
I remember loving Robin McKinley’s Beauty as a kid and thoroughly enjoying Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted some years later when I stumbled across it as a camp counselor (that one makes great bedtime reading for a room full of kiddos). Do you have any favorite YA retellings? Or favorite retellings in general?
2016年5月13日星期五
Why We Love Watching TV Characters Engage With Pop Culture
By Kathryn VanArendonk
On last night’s episode of The Americans, people gather around their televisions to watch The Day After, a made-for-TV movie watched by more than 100 million people when it first aired, in 1983. The Americans gets a lot done with this sequence — the images of destruction bolster Philip’s doubts about giving his country access to new biological weapons, but they galvanize Elizabeth into action even when she emotionally struggles with the mission. Paige and Philip have an entire horrible conversation about the end of the world and whether the Jenningses’ work actually does anything to mitigate that possibility. The movie brings everyone’s fears for the future into apocalyptically sharp focus.
It’s a striking scene. The movie plays out a hypothetical future for everyone on the series, acting less as a science fiction than a fable. The Jennings shoot each other meaningful glances as John Cullum, out of character, explains in somber tones that this material will not be appropriate for young children. After the movie ends, Arkady tells Tatiana about an incident a month before, when the Russians came frighteningly close to launching a nuclear bomb in mistaken retaliation. For everyone, this cultural touchstone makes literal one of the show’s persistent unspoken fixations — the thrumming, ever-present tension of a looming nuclear threat.
It’s also a quintessentially TV moment. It’s not that film and other mediums don’t embed culture into their DNA. But the sheer bulk and sprawl of a TV series allows for a much more expansive embrace of the culture it’s portraying. If a film is, by necessity, a single, painstakingly calibrated machine designed to do one specific task, TV has the space and the formal infrastructure to be flexible. It can give over an entire subplot to Elaine trying to write a Murphy Brown treatment; it can spare a few seconds out of its tightly wound final episodes to make a joke about Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium; and it can designate a glorious, loving minute and a half to watch Bill Haverchuck come home from school, make himself a grilled cheese sandwich, and laugh at Garry Shandling.
TV, in other words, has the time to weave itself into the culture it’s a part of, and its characters can be participants in their cultural worlds in the same way we are as we watch them. Mad Men is surely the most thorough and well-explored example of this kind of pop-culture interaction. Don’s fondness for art-house films, coverage of the Ali/Liston fight, Bye Bye Birdie, Paul Kinsey’s Star Trek script — there are too many Mad Men examples of pop-cultural intersection to begin to name them all. Mad Men's creator, Matthew Weiner, has been explicit about the show's use of its cultural context, explaining that “all of these things are used for thematic purposes in the story,” and it’s clear that this is happening in The Americans as well. Moments of pop culture on television can act like x-rays, letting us look past the superficial features of the show so we can see the skeletal thematics underneath.
Thematic uses of pop culture are most pronounced on shows like Mad Men or The Americans, where the series takes place in a familiar historical period. For these shows, culture has already become historical record, and so we can watch characters growing alongside a well-known and foreseeable path of pop-cultural milestones. Even more important for the long-running span of a television show, culture becomes a way to show time passing, like stretching out a measuring tape to see how much we’ve grown. We know years roll along on Men Men because we watch costumes and hairstyles change, but also because we watch Don sit down with Tomorrow Never Knows, and see him trying to shift his perspective into a whole new cultural framework. We watch Peggy get ready for a Dylan concert, and it is as clear a cultural foreshadowing of what’s to come as if she’d turned to the camera and said, “Gee, it feels like the times are a changin’.”
The measuring-tape model doesn’t necessarily apply to a show like Gilmore Girls, for example, which hoards cultural touchstones like so many collectible Charlie’s Angels plates. On that series, the incessant pattering deluge of pop-culture references (Grey Gardens, The Donna Reed Show, Pippi Longstocking, The Yearling, Paul Anka) becomes a shared language that builds a wall around Rory and Lorelai, defining their insular world as it inevitably shuts everyone else out. For Rory and Lorelai, pop culture is a way of expressing intimacy and connection, probably one of the most common uses of pop culture references on TV (and in life). It can act as a shorthand for building characters and looking for audience buy-in — even if you don’t know much about Leonard and Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory, for instance, some of your first clues about who they are will probably come by way of understanding what they like. Their T-shirts are emblazoned with pop-culture jokes and references; if you recognize one, it’s as though the show sent up a visual flare that says, “these are your people.”
And because television can be such an extensive, all-seeing mirror of the world it depicts, perhaps the most curious and telling examples are those series where little to no culture seems to exist. The fact that no major character on 24 has a favorite movie or takes a moment to sit down and read a comic book is indicative of a fictional world invested in urgency and wholly concerned with plot — who has time for pop culture when the world is constantly ending? By the same token, there is no more effective way to drain a series of its humanity than for its characters to exist in a cultural vacuum. The Girlfriend Experience, Showtime’s cold-as-ice depiction of the life of a high-class call girl, obstinately refuses us all access to its protagonist’s inner life. There may be no better way to express that than to note that I have absolutely no idea what her favorite television show is.
Pop culture works so well in fiction because it’s designed to create emotional responses — in us and in the characters. It is a flag of recognition, or of foreboding; it is a yardstick for the passage of time or an excavation of hidden themes. It can also be a self-congratulatory pat on the back at how great it is to have made something that brings joy to an audience (think of Sports Night’s Dana extolling the virtues of the Broadway musical.)
But pop culture works so well on TV in particular because one of the biggest strengths of the medium is just how much time we get to spend with its characters. They, like us, have the opportunity to see and respond to the culture in which they live — not just once, but often many times over the course of a series. Tony Soprano can sit and meditate over his Gary Cooper–inflected ideas of masculinity, and the Sex and the City women can dissect The Way We Were, and on Jane the Virgin Jane and Michael can sit and reconnect by catching up on Scandal. And on The Americans, where Elizabeth once deftly distracted her kids by offering to take them to see an Indiana Jones movie, we now watch the family together in front of the TV, watching the world explode. It’s a scene that works because of all of its thematic resonances, but maybe the most moving thing about it is the stuff that happens outside of the screen. When we see the Jenningses all sit together in a room, watching the same TV movie, it is as poignant and intimate as anything else The Americans has done. Even if we don’t recognize what they’re watching, the act of them watching it — of watching them consuming culture — is instantly familiar, and pleasurable, and personal. Watching good television is one of the best pleasures in life, but if there’s anything better, it might be watching a character you love love a thing he’s watching.
On last night’s episode of The Americans, people gather around their televisions to watch The Day After, a made-for-TV movie watched by more than 100 million people when it first aired, in 1983. The Americans gets a lot done with this sequence — the images of destruction bolster Philip’s doubts about giving his country access to new biological weapons, but they galvanize Elizabeth into action even when she emotionally struggles with the mission. Paige and Philip have an entire horrible conversation about the end of the world and whether the Jenningses’ work actually does anything to mitigate that possibility. The movie brings everyone’s fears for the future into apocalyptically sharp focus.
It’s a striking scene. The movie plays out a hypothetical future for everyone on the series, acting less as a science fiction than a fable. The Jennings shoot each other meaningful glances as John Cullum, out of character, explains in somber tones that this material will not be appropriate for young children. After the movie ends, Arkady tells Tatiana about an incident a month before, when the Russians came frighteningly close to launching a nuclear bomb in mistaken retaliation. For everyone, this cultural touchstone makes literal one of the show’s persistent unspoken fixations — the thrumming, ever-present tension of a looming nuclear threat.
It’s also a quintessentially TV moment. It’s not that film and other mediums don’t embed culture into their DNA. But the sheer bulk and sprawl of a TV series allows for a much more expansive embrace of the culture it’s portraying. If a film is, by necessity, a single, painstakingly calibrated machine designed to do one specific task, TV has the space and the formal infrastructure to be flexible. It can give over an entire subplot to Elaine trying to write a Murphy Brown treatment; it can spare a few seconds out of its tightly wound final episodes to make a joke about Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium; and it can designate a glorious, loving minute and a half to watch Bill Haverchuck come home from school, make himself a grilled cheese sandwich, and laugh at Garry Shandling.
TV, in other words, has the time to weave itself into the culture it’s a part of, and its characters can be participants in their cultural worlds in the same way we are as we watch them. Mad Men is surely the most thorough and well-explored example of this kind of pop-culture interaction. Don’s fondness for art-house films, coverage of the Ali/Liston fight, Bye Bye Birdie, Paul Kinsey’s Star Trek script — there are too many Mad Men examples of pop-cultural intersection to begin to name them all. Mad Men's creator, Matthew Weiner, has been explicit about the show's use of its cultural context, explaining that “all of these things are used for thematic purposes in the story,” and it’s clear that this is happening in The Americans as well. Moments of pop culture on television can act like x-rays, letting us look past the superficial features of the show so we can see the skeletal thematics underneath.
Thematic uses of pop culture are most pronounced on shows like Mad Men or The Americans, where the series takes place in a familiar historical period. For these shows, culture has already become historical record, and so we can watch characters growing alongside a well-known and foreseeable path of pop-cultural milestones. Even more important for the long-running span of a television show, culture becomes a way to show time passing, like stretching out a measuring tape to see how much we’ve grown. We know years roll along on Men Men because we watch costumes and hairstyles change, but also because we watch Don sit down with Tomorrow Never Knows, and see him trying to shift his perspective into a whole new cultural framework. We watch Peggy get ready for a Dylan concert, and it is as clear a cultural foreshadowing of what’s to come as if she’d turned to the camera and said, “Gee, it feels like the times are a changin’.”
The measuring-tape model doesn’t necessarily apply to a show like Gilmore Girls, for example, which hoards cultural touchstones like so many collectible Charlie’s Angels plates. On that series, the incessant pattering deluge of pop-culture references (Grey Gardens, The Donna Reed Show, Pippi Longstocking, The Yearling, Paul Anka) becomes a shared language that builds a wall around Rory and Lorelai, defining their insular world as it inevitably shuts everyone else out. For Rory and Lorelai, pop culture is a way of expressing intimacy and connection, probably one of the most common uses of pop culture references on TV (and in life). It can act as a shorthand for building characters and looking for audience buy-in — even if you don’t know much about Leonard and Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory, for instance, some of your first clues about who they are will probably come by way of understanding what they like. Their T-shirts are emblazoned with pop-culture jokes and references; if you recognize one, it’s as though the show sent up a visual flare that says, “these are your people.”
And because television can be such an extensive, all-seeing mirror of the world it depicts, perhaps the most curious and telling examples are those series where little to no culture seems to exist. The fact that no major character on 24 has a favorite movie or takes a moment to sit down and read a comic book is indicative of a fictional world invested in urgency and wholly concerned with plot — who has time for pop culture when the world is constantly ending? By the same token, there is no more effective way to drain a series of its humanity than for its characters to exist in a cultural vacuum. The Girlfriend Experience, Showtime’s cold-as-ice depiction of the life of a high-class call girl, obstinately refuses us all access to its protagonist’s inner life. There may be no better way to express that than to note that I have absolutely no idea what her favorite television show is.
Pop culture works so well in fiction because it’s designed to create emotional responses — in us and in the characters. It is a flag of recognition, or of foreboding; it is a yardstick for the passage of time or an excavation of hidden themes. It can also be a self-congratulatory pat on the back at how great it is to have made something that brings joy to an audience (think of Sports Night’s Dana extolling the virtues of the Broadway musical.)
But pop culture works so well on TV in particular because one of the biggest strengths of the medium is just how much time we get to spend with its characters. They, like us, have the opportunity to see and respond to the culture in which they live — not just once, but often many times over the course of a series. Tony Soprano can sit and meditate over his Gary Cooper–inflected ideas of masculinity, and the Sex and the City women can dissect The Way We Were, and on Jane the Virgin Jane and Michael can sit and reconnect by catching up on Scandal. And on The Americans, where Elizabeth once deftly distracted her kids by offering to take them to see an Indiana Jones movie, we now watch the family together in front of the TV, watching the world explode. It’s a scene that works because of all of its thematic resonances, but maybe the most moving thing about it is the stuff that happens outside of the screen. When we see the Jenningses all sit together in a room, watching the same TV movie, it is as poignant and intimate as anything else The Americans has done. Even if we don’t recognize what they’re watching, the act of them watching it — of watching them consuming culture — is instantly familiar, and pleasurable, and personal. Watching good television is one of the best pleasures in life, but if there’s anything better, it might be watching a character you love love a thing he’s watching.
2016年5月12日星期四
Infographics About The World’s Different Cultures
- See more at: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2014/01/07/infographics-about-the-worlds-different-cultures/#sthash.337iY8Kc.dpuf
2016年5月11日星期三
In Celebration of Studio Ghibli’s Soundtracks: A Beginner’s Guide to Joe Hisaishi and Hayao Miyazaki
By John Twells, Jul 24 2013
Anime giants Studio Ghibli – the studio behind Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro [above], Grave of the Fireflies and more – will have their soundtracks collected on a new limited vinyl set. To celebrate the news, FACT’s John Twells looks back at soundtracker Joe Hisaishi and director Hayao Miyazaki’s relationship over the years, picking out some key pieces of music from the films that they worked on.
Joe Hisaishi and Hayao Miyazaki’s relationship started back in 1983, when Hisaishi was recommended to the filmmaker by a friend to create a soundtrack for 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Not long afterwards, Miyazaki established Studio Ghibli, and the two would work together on each one of Miyazaki’s long list of influential and beloved animated features. Hisaishi’s background was in electronic music, and indeed this influence is very much a part of his early scores. However, as Miyazaki’s popularity (and the budgets) grew, Hisaishi transitioned easily into fully-fledged orchestral scores, retaining his keen grip on melody and minimalism which was to be his calling card.
While Hisaishi didn’t only compose for Miyazaki (just check his exemplary score for Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls), the collaborations proved incredibly fruitful and allowed the two friends to develop a very distinctive sound and feeling to each of the movies. To attempt to think back to a classic Miyazaki production without bringing to mind its equally affecting score just feels futile. It would be like early Doctor Who without the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, or Dario Argento without Goblin, and this selection below highlights some of the duo’s finest moments.
Castle in the Sky (1986)
‘Main Theme’
Castle in the Sky wasn’t the first time Joe Hisaishi had worked with Miyazaki (that would be Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind), but it was the first collaboration under the Studio Ghibli banner and is still one of Ghibli’s most engaging films. The soundtrack was originally composed mostly on synthesizer, but since Disney didn’t believe there was enough music behind the original version (clocking in at a mere 39 minutes for a 126 minute film), it was fleshed out with a full orchestra and extended dramatically for its re-release in 1999. Hisaishi wears his Yellow Magic Orchestra and Philip Glass influences on his sleeve here, but the theme also maps out the kind of lilting, romantic melancholy he continues to utilize to this day.
‘The Path of Wind’
‘Bygone Days’
‘The Legend of Ashitaka Theme’
‘One Summer’s Day’
2016年5月10日星期二
NASA Just Announced 1,284 New Planets
There are now 3,264 known planets outside our solar system.
Mary Ann Georgantopoulos
Kepler is the first NASA mission to find potentially habitable Earth-size planets.
“This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth,” Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.
In addition to the 1,284 new planets announced on Tuesday, the Kepler
telescope discovered 1,327 so-called candidates that, once verified,
could be confirmed planets. NASA only classifies a candidate a planet
when the probability of it being so is greater than 99%. The 1,327
candidates do not meet that threshold, so more research is needed.
“Before the Kepler space telescope launched, we did not know whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy,” Paul Hertz, director of Astrophysics Division at NASA, said in a statement. “Thanks to Kepler and the research community, we now know there could be more planets than stars. This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe.”
Mary Ann Georgantopoulos
NASA on Tuesday said 1,284 new planets had been
discovered by the Kepler space telescope, marking the biggest batch of
exoplanets ever announced at one time.
Nine of the planets could potentially be habitable due to surface
temperatures that would allow liquid water to pool, NASA added. The
Kepler telescope, which launched in 2009, has now discovered 21
exoplanets with similar characteristics. Kepler is the first NASA mission to find potentially habitable Earth-size planets.
“This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth,” Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.
The recent discoveries more than double the
number of exoplanets that have been discovered by Kepler. There are now
3,264 known planets outside our solar system, 2,325 of which were
discovered by Kepler.
“Before the Kepler space telescope launched, we did not know whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy,” Paul Hertz, director of Astrophysics Division at NASA, said in a statement. “Thanks to Kepler and the research community, we now know there could be more planets than stars. This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe.”
Game of Thrones: Oathbreaker, season 6 episode 3 - review: what's wrong with Jon Snow? Rickon's plight, and other talking points
BY Ed Power
Season six of Game of Thrones officially has our undivided attention thanks to ongoing helpings of black magic, time travel and infanticide. But could the show maintain its breakneck momentum going into the third episode?
After last week's double bill of baby killing and necromancy – you probably haven't heard but apparently minor character Jon Snow walks among us again – there were surely grounds for worrying Oathbreaker might add up to one magnificently damp squib.
Yet fears of anti-climax proved largely unfounded as show-runners David Benioff and DB Weiss delivered a generally satisfying dispatch.
We flashed back to a young Ned Stark tangling with the Targaryens and witnessed further Church v State tensions at King's Landing, the delicate ecumenical stand-off complicated by Lannister secret weapon Ser Robert Killbot.
In Jon Snow news, the Lord Commander (Kit Harington) was coming to terms with being suddenly, gloriously alive again. Here, the big shock is that he has officially unambiguously quit Castle Black. "My watch is ended." he told second -in-command Edd as he stomped away.
You could tell Snow was serious because, in the evening's final scene, he ditched his official Lord Commander Shoulder Pads of Doom before striding down a long dark tunnel and towards a destiny as yet unmapped. It was a gripping ending, delivering the catharsis viewers had waited for, apparently in vain, from the opening credits.
Where was the awe and terror of the reanimated Jon Snow?
Following 12 months of grieving, second-guessing and wild theorising, it appeared inevitable that the immediate aftermath of the Stark scion's return would be a right royal letdown. His resurrection had been perfectly played with Snow bathed in an eerie blue that gave him the pallor of a crypt adornment.
How then to follow what has already taken its place as one of Game of Thrones iconic scenes? This was the conundrum at the Wall, where the Night's Watch was absorbing the re-emergence of a beloved leader last seen being used for Piñata-practice by Ser Alliser and his co-conspirators.
In the event, the handling of his comeback verged on perfunctory. Jon was shocked, Ser Davos was shocked, Melisandre was shocked - and also convinced that it was Snow, not her dead master Stannis, who was destined for greatness. And yet, the denizens of Castle Black came across spectacularly blase; Wildling boss Tormund Giantsbane spoke for many when he used the event as an opportunity for a joke about Snow's manhood.
This was not the seismic reckoning fans will have anticipated and you wonder why Benioff and Weiss went to such efforts drawing a veil of secrecy around the Snow's death and rebirth in the first place.
Granted, Harington was persuasively grim-faced as he sat bolt upright and stark naked on the resurrection slab - but that same enigmatic grumpiness has been his default setting from the very beginning. He certainly did not convey any of the awe and terror you would expect of someone who had stepped into the beyond and back. It is entirely possible he was not asked to. Game of Thrones seemed to want done with the entire death storyline as quickly as possible.
If there was a payoff it was watching Alliser and the other traitors held to account for their attack on their Lord Commander. The execution scene was Game of Thrones at its most swaggeringly nasty, with teenager Olly among the turncoats sent from the gallows. Yes, the four corpses dancing as they dangled was horrible. But, let's be honest – if gratuitous grisliness was a deal-breaker we'd have give up on this show a long time ago.
Rickon is back (who is Rickon again?)
You remember Rickon, yes ? Sweet, curly-mopped lad? Easily mistaken for a charred shepherd boy? Youngest child of a family of prominent land owners whose members have since embarked on a range of interesting careers?The missing-presumed-forgotten Stark princeling made a shock return (or it would have been shocking had Maisie Williams not let it slip in an interview that he was back).
Alas, he can't have been very pleased to be in the frame again as he was gifted to the Boltons (well, Ramsay and his dogs) as a gesture of fealty by oikish House Umber.
Ignored for three seasons, now a humiliated bargaining chip. Even in obscurity, the Starks can't catch a break
How close did the flashback come to proving R+L=J?
Can we take this opportunity to praise the show-runners for reneging on their initial pledge to never jump around in the time line?The earlier death of Myrcella was given an added poignancy by the season five flashback to Maggy the Frog's prophesy to a young Cersei that her children would all wear "golden shrouds" (two down and one to go, Tommen).
Now, peeking over the shoulder of Timelord Bran, we whooshed back to young Ned Stark and the Tower of Joy (can somebody please, please take this as a band name). Held captive within was Ned's sister Lyanna and what a thrill it was watching the Warden of the North storm the battlements.
There have been broad hints that the Tower of Joy would solve the mystery of Jon Snow's parentage (it's generally accepted Lyanna was Snow's mother). But tonight we made do with Ned tackling Targaryen super-swordsman Ser Arthur Dayne in breathlessly choreographed combat.
Robert Aramayo (The Tourist, Nocturnal Animals) made for a convincing young Sean Bean and it was fun reconnecting with Westeros's one, true unsullied hero, in those halcyon days when his head was still attached to his shoulders. Oh noble Ned, whatever you do in the future, don't trust those Lannisters.
Do we need another Daenerys Goose Chase?
Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) is one of Game of Thrones most engaging characters, a mix of contradictions that somehow adds up to a compelling and plausible protagonist.It's just as well she is so fascinating because, since acquiring her dragons in season one's Dothraki death barbecue, the show has wasted her on an interminable road trip across Essos, aka the continent where nothing important EVER HAPPENS.
How our hearts soared as the Sons of the Harpy finally forced her storyline up a gear last year. But now, imprisoned in the Dothraki widow colony and due to stand trial for flouting tribal laws, she is bogged down once more.
Daenerys we adore you - but please come to Westeros so you can impact on meaningfully on the wider plot.
Cersei and Jaime need to just start killing people
What fun it is has been witnessing twins-with-benefits Cersei and Jaime plot their bloody revenge against the Sparrows, Sand Snakes, Tyrells and anyone else who has ever thrown them an iffy glance across the mead hall.But the preliminary scheming has gone on a bit and decisive action is overdue. Cersei (Lena Headey), to her credit, was lip-smackingly menacing as she and Jaime gatecrashed the Small Council. But her thirst for vengeance requires follow-through, with the novelty of the Queen Mother stomping about in her cropped "peeved Cersei" haircut dimming rapidly.
Also failing to convince was the High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce) talking Angry Tommen (Dean-Charles Chapman) down from a ledge with a speech about gods and wisdom and why it's okay to throw your wife in the clinker if she has offended the divine. Now that his dander is officially up, it is implausible Tommen would fall for the Sparrow's zen claptrap. In a season full of subplots and reversals, a turncoat Tommen would surely be a volte-face too far.
It was great to see the return of the Gilly and Sam rom-com
The only vaguely normal romantic pairing in Westeros were on a choppy sea voyage. But their relationship was about to enter even stormier waters as Sam (John Bradley-West) dropped the bombshell that Gilly (Hannah Murray) could not possibly accompany him to the men-only Citadel, where he was to study to be a Maester.Instead, he would drop her off at the family castle. She resisted - but not too much. The scene was tender and sweetly underplayed – and interspersed with some qualify comedy vomiting by Sam.
Arya is still trapped in the House of Meh and White
Shapeshifter Jaqen H'ghar (Thomas Wlaschiha) was one of season two's most beguiling fixtures precisely because we were told so little about his motives.But what once was enigmatic has become rote and predictable as Arya (Maisie Williams) continues in her new role as problem pupil at the House of Black and White.
She may have gained re-admission to Jaqen's cabal of Faceless Men (with a bonus restoration of her eyesight) yet it remains very much up in the air whether this is going to lead anywhere interesting.
We can tell you what isn't interesting: endless blind stick-fighting. Can we just get on with it please? We're starting to feel deflated every time Arya appears on screen.
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