Waititi is incapable of dealing with the twin horrors of oppression and indoctrination beyond cheap-seats sentimentality and joke-making.
The series is ultimately content to luxuriate in the well-established tension between its central characters.
The episode gives the audience exactly what it expects, and absolutely nothing else.
The episode has the good sense to respect our familiarity with these characters, and as such it doesn’t beat around the bush.
Director Shane Black’s streak of puckish nihilism is an attitude that makes him a perfect for this franchise.
In war and through violence, Game of Thrones is as clear and compelling as it gets.
The episode manages to set up future conflicts without interrupting its rapid pace.
When Game of Thrones leans on its history, it takes on a resonance rarely found in fantasy.
The show is no longer holding anything back in story or tone, and it’s making this fantasy world feel all too real.
The latest episode of Game of Thrones finally starts uniting the season’s threads, often through blood.
The episode sees the writers ruthlessly beginning to sew up loose (or underdeveloped) plots.
It’s long been a given on Game of Thrones that “All men must die.” The question, then, is less a matter of whether they will, but how they will.
If there’s one thing the frenetic White Walker-packed climax of “Hardhome” proves, it’s that at the end of the day, talk is cheap.
The problem these men face is that there are plenty of boys who find themselves in positions of power, and that’s not even mentioning King Tommen in King’s Landing.
The film has a tendency to embrace the action genre’s more obnoxious elements, but there’s a proudly no-nonsense air to its nonsensicality.
The unifying element of “The Laws of God and Men” may be the profound silence of the show’s architecture.
Game of Thrones’s best season yet comes with a typically great transfer and enough extras to please devotees for days.
The series feels like it has some firm footing and a newfound sense of certain direction that was lacking intermittently in the second season.
Whether you pay the gold price or the iron price, HBO’s top-notch box set of the show’s second season is well-worth the investment.
After last week’s thematically spastic episode, it’s refreshing to see that a simple and direct, albeit unambitious, theme unites the various plot strands here.