Only a couple more days until Game of Thrones’ sixth season premiere, and while that’s not enough time to marathon all fifty episodes of the series to-date (unless you’re unemployed or really dedicated), we here at Sling decided to help you prepare by selecting the very best episode to watch from each of the five previous seasons.
1. “Baelor” –This was the episode that made it explicitly clear to fans who had not read the books that, top billing or not, anyone can die on Game of Thrones. After nearly five years, it’s easy to forget how shocking Ned’s... Read More
Valar Morghulis and all, but seriously: Jon Snow has to be coming back. Sure, we’ve seen his dead body several times now, confirming beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jon is in fact dead – it doesn’t mean he can’t be resurrected. The only question is how many episodes before Kit Harrington gets to stare blankly again while people tell him he still knows nothing.
2. How long will Arya stay blind?
She’s still a fighter, no question, but it’s going to be hard for Arya to cross any more names off her list until she can see again. Maybe once she repays her debt to the Many-Faced God she can get back to... Read More
At approximately 3:30pm ET Tuesday, HBO released the first full-length trailer teasing season six of Game of Thrones, and – as with many of you who share our enthusiasm for all things Westerosi – our office exploded with excitement.
After watching, re-watching, and then re-re-watching before finally coming back to general coherence, we were able to string together real thoughts, sort of, about what our precious eyes had just witnessed.
Not sure what you saw? You’re not alone, but hopefully Sarah Moffatt, Oliver Ward, Phil Borden and Joe Puccio can help shed some light or, perhaps, make things even more confusing, because WHAT THE HODOR JUST HAPPENED.
We’re down to just a handful of characters who have managed to make it past George R. R. Martin’s (crossbow) trigger happy fingers. We’ve lost a lot in the last five seasons and it feels as though we can’t take losing any more of our beloved Game of Thrones characters – what is a world like where Cersei isn’t drinking wine and belittling everyone?
Alas, we are left with seven reasonable characters to consider for the Iron Throne, and with season six just seven weeks away, it begs the question: Who is fit to rule the Seven Kingdoms? Well, Sarah Moffatt, Joe Puccio, Oliver Ward and Sophie Vinograd do their best to make a case for each main character left standing.
7 Days in Hell premieres on HBO at 11pm on Saturday, July 11, and is available now to watch on demand.
As the real Wimbledon draws to a close, it’s a good time to look back at the greatest match ever played there. The greatest match in the history of tennis, for that matter: the 2001 Charles Poole/Aaron Williams match that stayed stuck in Deuce for seven excruciating days.
Of course, that match never happened, but the new HBO mockumentary Seven Days In Hell goes to great pains to make it look like it did, by using official HBO Sports iconography and personalities like Soledad O’Brien and Jim Lampley, commentary by real tennis stars Serena Williams, John McEnroe, and Chris Evert, and grave-sounding narration... Read More
It only took 49 episodes for Game of Thrones to finally give us what we really wanted, and it was glorious: as the Sons of the Harpy tried to assassinate her just as she finally gave them what they wanted – reopening the fighting pits – Daenerys was saved, and then airlifted out, by the wayward Drogon, who returned either in reply to her telepathic message or just because he sensed she was in danger. Either way, the sight of the Mother of Dragons leaving the quagmire in Meereen astride her fire-breathing firstborn was deeply satisfying, particularly as it really had a helicopters-off-the-Saigon-embassy-roof feel to it – she may not have actually left Meereen yet, but it’s clear enough that she can win neither hearts nor minds in this backward... Read More
After a really disappointing run of episodes that was starting to make people worry that this show was floundering as it began to run out of track – track in this case being material from George R.R. Martin’s books to adapt – Game of Thrones came roaring back this week with the best episode of the season and one of the best of its entire run.
“Hardhome,” named for the Wildling’s seaside enclave that becomes the site of a massacre at the hands of the White Walkers, serves as a brutal reminder that these characters haven’t been reminding each other that WINTER IS COMING for 47 episodes just so they’ll remember to bring a sweater; Winter represents an existential threat to humanity, as we see through the best action... Read More
Just when it was starting to feel like this whole season has been stuck on Herschel’s farm, this week delivered a number of plot developments, including the inevitable blowback from Cersei’s Operation Faith Militant landing her in a cell adjacent to her hated daughter-in-law, Sansa’s discovery that her brother, Jon Snow, is not just alive but Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and the meeting we’ve all been waiting for: Tyrion Lannister finally locked eyes with Daenerys Stormborn Targaryen, Breaker of Chains and Mother of Dragons.
The people who are finding this season distastefully sadistic still got a bit of ammunition for their thinkpieces, as yet another rape scene was barely averted at Castle Black, and Ramsay showed Sansa just how much worse he could make things for... Read More
Last night’s was a particularly eventful episode of Game of Thrones, particularly compared with last week’s outing. So much happened that it was hard to keep it all straight:
The Slave Formerly Known As Theon was forced to watch as Sansa, a girl he was raised with as ward to her father, is brutally raped by her new husband, Ramsay Bolton. We can only hope that the trauma of this event will wake Theon from his Reek reverie and move him to help Sansa take down the Boltons, maybe by undermining them from within when Stannis arrives.
As the Sparrows continue their inquisition into Loras' sexual proclivities, Queen Margaery is asked to testify about whether she’s ever known her brother to lie with another man. Her denial is... Read More
It is not very often that Game of Thrones just comes right out and tells you what the themes for an episode are going to be. In fact, it’s only recently that these shows have seemed to have themes at all; the showrunners have been quoted as disdainfully stating that “themes are for book reports.” But last night Jon Snow, Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, was instructed by the Maester to “kill the boy so that the man may live,” and that sentiment echoed across the episode.
First, as Jon Snow enlisted the default leader of the Wildlings to look past his distrust for the crows and save his people by bringing them south of the wall before winter comes, and with it, a white walker invasion.
There are few things more dangerous than a militarized religion, as we have been seeing in our world for generations, so Cersei’s move to arm the Sparrows might seem like a good strategic move—she was able to immediately imprison Ser Loras, to whom she is betrothed and has no intention of actually marrying—but it seems very likely to backfire in the near future. She’s already getting some blowback from her daughter-in-law, the Queen, whose outrage over her brother’s arrest is likely to blow up in Cersei’s face. How long until Tommen sends her away to Casterley Rock—or somewhere even more distant? She’s sent most of the small council away, there is no proper Hand to the King. What happens if Tommen tries to get rid of her and she refuses... Read More
This week the characters of Westeros slipped into new identities: Jon Snow took the helm as the new Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch; Margaery became the Queen; Cersei became the Queen Mother (or is it Dowager Queen? I’m as confused by these designations as Margaery); Sansa was betrothed to Ramsay Bolton; Brienne decided to become a mentor to Podrick; and Arya tried to shed her identity entirely.
There’s more: Theon may be able to reclaim his identity (if not his manhood), so brutally stripped from him by a full season’s worth of torture at the hands of the Boltons, when he’s reunited with Sansa, his childhood friend. Tyrion declines the services of a whore, negating half of his entire identity (the other half being drinking) for reasons that... Read More
Heavy is the head that wears the crown, as Daenerys continues to learn in her effort to turn Meereen from a slave state to a benevolent dictatorship. Her effort to install a little due process along with law and order badly backfires, as she orders a fair trial for the (clearly guilty) representative of the Sons of the Harpy who slit an Unsullied throat in the brothel last week; the prisoner is killed by another former slave while in custody, and this time the Mother of Dragons skips the trial and orders the former slave publicly executed, setting off a riot. Even the return of the wayward Drogon is fleeting, as the largest dragon barely says hello before taking off again.
Arya arrives at the House of Black and... Read More
It feels great to be back in the Seven Kingdoms, even when the realm is as splintered and unstable as it appears in the wake of Tywin Lannister’s death. “The Wars To Come” shows the calm before the storm, before the mad scramble to fill the power vacuum begins.
Stannis Baratheon intends to recruit the Wildling army to march under his banner to retake Winterfell, but Wildling king Mance Rayder refuses with his life, against the advice of Jon Snow; Tyrion and Varys arrive in Essos, having fled the scene of Tywin’s murder, where Varys reveals he’s been hoping all along for a Targaryen restoration, which means we’ll soon have scenes between Daenerys and Tyrion (I vote they give that meeting a full, uninterrupted episode); Margaery plans to solidify... Read More
There has never been anything on television as cinematic, as expansive, as compelling, and as flat-out entertaining as Game Of Thrones, HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels, which begins its fifth season on April 12. This show is so dense with story threads, it’s hard to keep them all straight, and after ten months off it’s hard to remember where things left off. So by way of a refresher, here are seven questions we have going into season five:
1. Where in the world is Tyrion Lannister? After losing his trial by combat when Prince Oberyn’s end-zone celebration led to a graphic kneecapping and head-crushing at the hands of The Mountain, Tyrion was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit: poisoning his... Read More
The first nine episodes of Better Call Saul have been far better than they had any right to be. Where fans once feared the show might tarnish the legacy of the near-perfect run of Breaking Bad, it’s turned out to be every bit as compelling, thanks to stellar writing, inventive direction of a piece with the Breaking Bad house style, and a lead performance by Bob Odenkirk that his past work has never even hinted at. Last week’s episode was probably the best of the series so far – something I think we’ve said three separate times so far – and the stage is set for a great season finale. (10pm Monday, AMC)
The war between North and South can be seen through... Read More
