In Which We Don't Want You To Say Her Name Again

General Mopeybrr Is Still Kewld

by DICK CHENEY

My hope that Jon Snow was going to die in his quest for obsidian was in vain. During the white walker attack, Jon — like any leader — spent the majority of the battle soulfully looking into the eyes of his opposing number. This was a tactic Robert E. Lee popularized at the Battle of Gettysburg until Ulysses S. Grant sent him a note informing him the staring made things a wee bit uncomfortable.

I can't help but think of all the time that Jon could have been saving that lovely woman's children instead of locking eyes with his counterpart. Jon's naivete is only eclipsed by the stupidity of the wildlings. They have a giant and uniforms (??) but they don't put scouts anywhere further than a few feet outside their camp?

Lieutenant Janice Winterbottom just shattered into a million pieces. Poor guy.

More impressive was how Torvald went from Jon's fiercest enemy to his absolute best friend in what seemed like mere seconds. The suggestions of homosexuality perpetuated by a now-deceased wildling leader may have just been a bit too on the nose. (King Crow also seems like a slur to me.) We still have a long way to go in accepting a strong gay hero, although I guess there was Top Gun.

As exciting as the white walker attack was, I don't understand why everyone didn't just move into the shallow water. It seems like water is a lot easier to find than dragonglass, so I suggest they arm the men of the Night's Watch with rompers and super soakers. It is a little dull to watch an enemy that is basically a zombie horde, so I enjoyed the debut of the white walker general, who I have named General Mopeybrr Coldpenis D.M.D. He reminds me of Olaf during contract negotiations on Frozen 2: Still Kewld.

Senator Coldpenis, I presume?

It was a little disappointing to watch the show create a great female character and then murder her one episode, but I guess they felt it might overshadow Sansa's weekly sexual assault. They don't even show it anymore, and somehow a scene depicting Tommen's hunger strike or Kevan Lannister refusing Cersei did not make it to air.

I liked that guy! He bought four oysters, and they were delicious!

These important developments had to be shunted to an offscreen role because we had to hear what Tyrion and the Dragon Queen finally would say to each other. The conversation went something like this:

DT: What do you think I should do with this orangutan?

TL: A queen that kills monkeys is not a queen that inspires the devotion of monkeys.

DT: Perhaps. What do you think I should do with this quiche?

"When I killed my father I had the briefest flatuence. I will tell you all about it over a cornish hen."

TL: For that answer, I'll need a 1996 Cabernet.

DL: You look cute, but you sure talk a lot about how you murdered your parents.

TL: Perhaps.

DL: Why did they cancel Mindy Kaling's show?

TL: She asked for too much money.

Dany's somewhat anti-climactic line about how she is going to break the wheel aside, her vision of restoring economical equality to Westeros was very noble. She's like the William Jennings Bryan of the Narrow Sea. She even looks like him!

Hopefully Tyrion is only the first member of the Dragon Queen's small council. Varys will swish his way onto the scene at some point, and what about that particularly introspective prostitute from season two? You don't think Tyrion suddenly became celibate now that the women of Mereen are open to his particular advances, do you? If they abandon Tyrion's chance at a real romantic relationship, I will never forgive GRRM.

Good thing Jon Snow got on that last boat. What would we do without his Jennifer Aniston haircut and pathetic simpering?

But seriously, I hope this is the last we see of the land beyond the wall. Mance Rayder was super annoying and old, and the rest of the wildings weren't much better. They only have one giant, and the exteriors were simply depressing.

Still, I am forced to admit that last night's episode was absolutely fantastic compared to the mess of the season it has been so far. I didn't even mind so much when Samwell Tarly was turning Gilly's near death into something that happened to him, or letting her heal the scrape on his face when it's been like, two weeks.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

Oh Jesus is he four?

"Birds of Films" - Sun Kil Moon (mp3)

"With A Sort of Grace I Walked To The Bathroom To Cry" - Sun Kil Moon (mp3)

In Which This Is Not The Sex We Were Promised Gilly

You're Hurting Me

by DICK CHENEY

I can make a short list of all the things I eagerly anticipated that did not live up to the hype:

Jurassic Park 3
The return of Arrested Development
Tidal
Wii U
heroin

and now sex between Samwell Tarly and his girlfriend Gilly. What happened, if you missed it, was terrible. She gave him one kiss (no tongue), climbed on top of him after shifting her underwear to the side, and said, "Am I hurting you?" in the voice I use when I am asking Lynne if there is any piaya left over from last night.

I really hope she has bathed in the last five months.

Sam let out a small moan. I don't suppose the incest sex Gilly had beyond the wall consisted of her straddling Craster and asking him if her vagina gave him pain. After Sam saved her from what was at the very least looking like a menage a trois, the least she could do is tousle his hair slightly as she was riding him.

"SAM AM I HURTING YOU. AM I HURTING YOU!?!?!?!"

Undoubtedly this was Sam's first time. I would have serious problems if my virginity was taken just as soon as I had gotten my ass kicked. It sets a really bad precedent; e.g. are we only going to get down when some dude kicks me hard in the face?

Sam wasn't the only one not fully being pleased by his partner. Dany has to have sex with the man who is undoubtedly the worst actor in all of Mereen. He mansplains how to be a queen to her right after sex. Do you think after Lynne and I spent hours doing tantric to postpone the inevitable splashdown that Lynne was like, "You know, Dick, you should really slaughter a bunch of Iraqis?"? No. She said what any loving wife would say: "Thank you for the mess."

Khal Drogo would have loved this little guy. RIP Khal Drogo.

Pretty soon the Dragon Queen won't need his advice anymore. She will have Tyrion Lannister to give her the straight scoop on King's Landing: "Where does Jon Snow like to go to for dins?" "Where are all the cutest places to shop along the Kingsroad?" "Was Aemon Targaryen a flaming homosexual and was his boyfriend Ned Stark's dad, Tevye 'Juniorfell' Stark?" It's a rich lore we are dealing with here.

Now that the books have basically been ground up in the shredder and George R.R. Martin is more focused on empanadas than writing, we can start to really enjoy not knowing what is to come. Cersei's imprisonment in the Sept was the last thread of the novels, and it will be great fun because I am super sick of her collagen lips and frozen hair style. Margary Tyrell has never looked so good, I sort of understood why Tommen fell in love with her.

You know, irony usually takes more than ten minutes to unfold unless you're Amy Winehouse.

Stannis' move on Winterfell seems kind of silly now. He should have just sailed south. I mean who is actually going to mount a defense of King's Landing — the people who committed incest or lied are in jail. The only person left over would have been Ser Podrick, but he's not even around.

I really hope he gets the chance to play Hitler before a Sansa Stark fangirl assassinates him in 2025.

Littlefinger's cute scene with Dame Tyrell notwithstanding, I guess the idea is to make Jonathan Pryce a villain worth cutting down? He seems kind of morally ambiguous though. I mean, are we supposed to room for Team Thincest? I am confused by these moral boundaries, especially when Jonathan Pryce is giving speeches that are literally word-for-word articles from the pages of The Nation.

Sansa's reaction to her wedding night was a little patronizing. Asking a man to help her, especially one as narratively impotent as Theon, will be even more annoying if he is finally the principal who ends Roose Bolton's flaying ways. I don't like Roose, but that old woman he skinned looked a lot better without her epidermis than with it.

He's not going to be able to ever be pleased by a woman after this. Those Sand Snakes are just the best.

In Dorne, Bronn sang a song to a beautiful maiden. She used a poison known as The Long Farewell on him, which is actually the same potion I used to disassemble Ronald Reagan when his anti-abortion speeches started getting tone-deaf. I understand he thought a fetus was a child, but when I asked him to prove it, he just ate peanut M&Ms and watched Welcome Back, Kotter.

Provable facts are all I am interested in now. Subtlety and inneundo are completely lost in Game of Thrones, but this is simply because they have vanished in the real world. I still have questions about I, Claudius, as to what parts of the story are true. But with Game of Thrones the only question I have ever had is, "Would it be hard to bring myself to orgasm with my left hand if I lost my right in a welding accident or if Melisandre needed my blood for a potion?"

He may never have wintercourse again.


The story of Bronn settling in Dorne and having a beautiful young family with the girl who exposed herself to him is the kind of subplot Game of Thrones sorely needs. There has to be some coming together. It can't all be constantly only falling apart.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"Bronze Head" - My Brightest Diamond (mp3)

"Apparition" - My Brightest Diamond (mp3)

In Which Matt Dillon Was More Of A Figure Of Speech

Come Back To Us

by DICK CHENEY

Wayward Pines
creator Chad Hodge

When he breathes out, Matt Dillon's face resembles a puffy blowfish. Matt should have been on Lost. As Secret Service agent Ethan Burke, Dillon is fantastic at the only thing ever required of him on Fox's Wayward Pines, which is to bristle at unexpected developments in his life. When you think about it, Matt Dillon, 51, could have been much better than Matthew Fox or Henry Ian Cusick in their respective roles. By the way, I still wonder what happened to Matthew Fox. Did he die from remorse after his creative involvement with Damon Lindelof?

Her hair looks like Play-Doh.

Matt's wife Theresa Burke is played by Shannyn Sossamon. She seems an unlikely choice for a long suffering wife, but director M. Night Shyamalan finds something in her androgyny. Wayward Pines is, I am not sorry to say, better acted, better cast and better performed than anything J.J. Abrama has been involved with. Matt is drawn to the town of Wayward Pines searching for his missing partner Kate (Carla Gugino). One day he wakes up into an idyllic and charming town. Naturally, the only thing he can think of to do is leave.

Carla became a little too close to Matt Dillon on the job. It is a bit too soon for another adulterous hero, but Dillon is also perfect at conveying the properties of mistakes. He is no more responsible for their occurence than God is responsible for the tragedy of The Mindy Project's cancellation. Unlike other actors, his errors all come across as feckless, guiltless.

The Rock is very sorry for how he acted last night. She's very lucky her husband was a helicopter pilot.

Things manifest differently for a woman. Dressed up in the style of decades earlier, Gugino looks like a strumpet even when she is Taylor Swifting about how conflicted she is about having sex/intercourse with another man's wife. Gugino, 43, is finally beginning to look like a woman in middle age, but her girlish appeal is still intact. Wayward Pines wins you over with its perfect casting and pace more than any actual substance.

It's nice to see a Scientologist can still get work.

In a bar in this mysterious, final town Matt Dillon meets Juliette Lewis. It feels like Lewis has been around for so long; the shocking news is that she is only 41. Her chief talent consists in making manufactured surprise look completely genuine. The fun comes when we simply watch her react to Matt's loopy questions. She gives him her address if he needs somewhere to stay, and it is at that address where he finds the body of a  missing cisgender federal agent.

Terence has trouble juggling multiple roles because of his utter devotion to the Stanislavsky Method.

Looking for answers — as well as his wallet and firearm — Dillon heads over to the sheriff's office. There Terence Howard is quietly fulfilling his contract with Fox, the same way Nucky's brother on Boardwalk Empire has magically been cast on every single HBO show since. Matt eventually has a breakdown and winds up in the hospital, where his real troubles begin. He cannot drive out of the town of Wayward Pines, since there is a massive electric fence circling the habitat.

Say what you want about M. Night's questionable taste in material/Scientologist actors, but he is fantastically talented at atmosphere and tension. Wayward Pines is incredibly fun for this reason. Here Chad Hodge (The Playboy Club) has an actual mystery that will deliver according to the novels it is based upon, rather than the strategery of Carlton Cuse taking notes for Lost's direction from message boards.

He has the best back of the head in television today. I want that hair as a wig.

Mr. Cuse recently bestowed upon us the rather dull third season finale of Bates Motel. The prequel to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho succeeds entirely on the charisma of its star, the brilliant Vera Farmiga. In contrast, Cuse's newest show The Returned, also airing on A&E, is about as exciting as Lost-Jin flashback episode. You will not be surprised that The Returned concerns a massive cast of people all returning to a locale after they are believed to be dead.

In what is a major step forward for Carlton, there is barely anyone from Lost on the show, not even Nestor Carbonell. (Michelle Forbes was too good to exclude on this basis.) In what is not a major step forward for Carlton, The Returned concerns a group of white people from very different backgrounds and circumstances struggling with a mystery that has left them in an isolated place. Apparations and figments of their imagination recur, and they cannot make sense of the specifics of their lives. Lost should have died a long time ago.

Michelle Forbes should be in every show.

There is actually something deeply wrong about these many reincarnations of Twin Peaks. For all its perfection in mood and atmosphere, Twin Peaks was actually tongue-in-cheek, which many of these projects seem to ignore entirely. There is not really even one joke in Wayward Pines or The Returned — like Lost, they are utterly sincere interpretations of the same basic theme: understanding human beings at the level of a community rather than at the level of a person is a waste of time.

Treading over this ground might seem a little dull, but as long as Matthew Fox and Evangeline Lilly remain on the outskirts of employment and general good will, I suppose I can accomodate this trend.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is most known for his disgust with the ending of Lost and being the former vice president of the United States.

This should have been what was in the hatch.

"Just Saying" - Jamie xx (mp3)

"Stranger in a Room" - Jamie xx ft. Oliver Sim (mp3)