In Which Our Dragons Have The Run Of The Facility

Ser Kevan Will Save Us

by DICK CHENEY

In the histories Herodotus describes a rarity: an Egyptian king not born into the nobility. Amasis was a drunk and a thief before he became king. He would wander, inebriated, into the homes of the rich and wealthy, stealing what he could to restore whatever fortune he lost at gambling. When he was caught he would be presented to oracles for judgment; some confirmed his felonies, others absolved him of any wrongdoing. When he became King he ignored the gods who had said he was innocent, and started to revere those who convicted him. This is something like the philosophy a Lannister uses to strangle his whore.

Tyrion dumped Shae, married a ginger over fifteen years her junior, and murdered her in her client's bed. I'm surprised he did not rip out her teeth afterwards and hang them around his neck.

was he reading on there, or just constipated from incest revelations? Either way, it doesn't pay to linger. Walk around, see what you feel when you move a bit.

Call me naive and innocent, but I felt that Tywin Lannister's protestations from his death toilette maybe had the ring of truth. Was he really going to let his own son die? It's not like he has a billion — he has two and one is probably going to need to be recast after he leaves Thrones and the unforgiving role of a one-armed guardsman for a career playing opposite whatever is left of Cameron Diaz.

cameron, being on the receiving end of a direwolf bite is humiliating, but you did the important work of making leslie mann look attractive in comparison

Just kidding Mrs. Diaz, I enjoyed your winsome cameo as the skeleton who slaughtered Jojen Reed. When some white fogey in a cave — subsisting on god knows what besides the fever dreams of young marsh boys — explained that Jojen had known of his own death all along, I screamed at the betrayalthon. I was with the idea that some little girl ("the Children" jesus George it took you five years to come up with that?) was entering Bran's dreams, since it seemed like maybe there could be some kind of romance there down the road.  Now that I know some creepy old Gandalf was "watching them their entire lives," my erection has been reduced to a mere shadow of what it once was.

an old man has been watching you in your dreams, Bran. You fine with that?

I recently was forced/cajoled/bartered by my wife Lynne into watching X-Men: Days of Future Past. The discussion about whether or not to see the movie went a little something like this.

ME: I feel uncomfortable watching a movie made by someone who I know forced young people to have sex against their will.
LYNNE: You loved Blue Jasmine.

I had no comeback for that, and also, Lynne promised to watch the second season of Under the Dome with me, even though she commented that Hank Schrader would never do all those things and Stephen King was "a fucking stupid crone."

that is the worst wig I have ever seen, and I've seen an episode of Modern Family

X-Men: Days of Future Past was the worst piece of shit I have seen in awhile. Time travel movies are always absolutely silly, but this took the cake. At one point Captain Picard explained to Gandalf that he really had no idea whether someone could affect the flow of time, even though sending Wolverine back to the 70s was the entire premise of the film. The worst part of X-Men: Days of Future Past was having to look at Jennifer Lawrence's ungainly blue physique the entire time, and James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender being forced by Bryan Singer to pretend she was appealing in any way whatsoever. Lawrence looked like a dirty blue towel wrapped around two exercise balls.

Afterwards I was so incensed I wasted my time with this utter dreck I convinced Lynne to allow me to use the galactic cap as reparations. (Menopause is for Democrats.) Watch this video, and thank me later, assuming you are okay with applying a preparatory adhesive to the tip of your jambalaya before sexual congress:

Stannis Baratheon's magical arrival on the scene to slay the wildlings was a bit implausible, but what the hey. This show will kill anyone off except Mance Rayder, he's the Ron Weasley of Westeros.

The creepy glance across the funeral pyre that Melisandre shared with our boy Jon Snow gave me chills. Funerals are a wonderful place to meet women, however, especially if the corpse in question was your OTP. Who knows if you might really click with her sister, or your King's shadow-birthing mistress?

was a double death out of the question? the likeability of these two makes Eric Cantor seem charming

The battle between the Hound and Brienne of Tarth brought up a lot of delicate mems of when I shot Condi Rice in the belly-button with a Civil War pistol in a violent reenactment of the Hamilton-Burr duel for my own amusement. I would be lying if I said I did not want the Hound to cut off the tall woman's sword hand so she and Jamie could be twinsies.

The fault here was really Jamie's: if you want to negotiate the safe return of Arya Stark, send a diplomat; if you want someone who is sure to not protect the girl at all and magically leave her post and abdicate her responsibility when things get the slightest bit difficult, Brienne was a fine choice. Podrick was just like "smh miss u Bronn."

Ser Kevan, you must restore the pride to the Lannister name. Twyin did too much dramatic walking away and turning for my tastes att

Cersei suddenly losing her mind about her marriage to the super-eligible Sir Loras came across a bit over-the-top. She is destined to suffer in mediocre subplots for some time while the real man of the family, Sir Kevan Lannister, takes his rightful place as Hand of the King. Jennifer Lawrence will be the newly recast Sir Kevan, and I must say the role of a mature man in his fifties much more befits her natural talents.

missing you greatly Drogon. When God takes a life, do they try to chain him in the basement? Then why lock up these beauties?

Daenerys Targaryen's emotional, subterranean imprisonment of the only two dragons she had handy really made me feel things, but not like good things. It was confusing to me why two absolutely glorious creatures were kept in a hidey hole while Piper Chapman has the run of her facility.

My idea of a spin-off to bide the time until George R.R. Martin finishes things up is the happy adventures of Drogon the black dragon cruising through the Valyrian ruins, consoling and befriending all old folks who live there, irrevocably altered by the radiation poisoning from the Doom. Somewhere among that wreckage he may find the disturbed, half-mad mutants whose intercourse produced Emily Blunt.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording and a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can relive all the tears, fears and Hot Pie-related bon mots of this season of Game of Thrones here.

woody allen also has a really nice house.

"Hawthorne" - The Felice Brothers (mp3)

"No Trouble" - The Felice Brothers (mp3)

In Which We Hide In A Freezer During A Wildling Skirmish

I'm Really Starting to Hate the Wall

by DICK CHENEY

Lynne and I were once Thronesing in Bretagne with two of her friends, a couple. They loved Lynne and only tolerated me, so she insisted I drop some of my best Westeros zingers on them. "Don't worry about repeating your blog posts," she suggested, "They're too rich to visit kewt websites, they only read Thackeray and the English edition of Der Spiegel." I quietly amped myself in a tastefully decorated bathroom. I emerged just as Jon Snow was entering that ginger warrior in a cave and awkwardly shouted, "His come tastes like daffodils! Hot Pie! Something about how the burned guy with Arya Stark is a fucking baby!"

The rest of the evening did not go any better. When I launched into my extended rant about how Mance Rayder was based on Howard Dean their eyes began to glaze over. They thought Howard Dean was the name of a salad dressing, and they thought Mance Rayder was Jojen Reed's father. (I was shocked by the former, and kind of intrigued by the latter.)

do you have any idea how much it would cost to feed such a creature? And it died within minutes. This was just fucking stupid.

The Episode Beyond The Wall was boring and terrible. Thrones always seems to be getting its wars wrongs - they are either too exciting and stage-y to feel real, as this battle was, or they are too chaotic and desultory to really follow with any degree of precision. The worst part of last night is when the leaders of the two groups somehow organically faced off in sword-to-sword combat with each other and started doing pirouettes.

Actually, no, the worst part was when Jon Snow began to systematically disable the wildling army by himself and the watchmen behind Jon stood still like a clump of hair. Everything about the wildling attack plan was completely absurd and illogical, from sending people to climb the wall when there is a fucking gate into Castle Black readily available, to having a giant wield a massive bow. This was J.J. Abrams-level stupid here, so much so that when a preview for a new HBO show ran after the episode and it advertised itself as "From the Co-Creator of Lost", I couldn't even laugh at the idea that someone thought this was a toutable factoid.

Wildings give you every opportunity they can to receive an ice facial. Cover your face good womyn.

Building a wall with an easily openable gate in general sounds pretty silly. If you're really intent on preventing people from entering your lands, wouldn't it make more sense to just put up an impenetrable ice wall? It's how Melanie Griffith prevented Antonio Banderas from having sex with her for over thirty years, and the ice wall seems to be decently successful at its tasks.

Maester Aemon Targaryen's conversation with Samwell Tarly was just as disappointing. This man is an important repository of historical information, and all he can do is go and on about some fucking lay he had sixty years ago? Samwell's affection for Gilly seems no more complicated than "I want to protect hurr", and it's a bit weird that after all he has gone through he is still super grossed out by a man getting an arrow through the neck. For godsakes two minutes later he put one in a guy's head.

"Maester, this is hard for me to say, but how do I make my pee-pee feel super warm and juicy?"

There was also something very pretender-y about this entire thing. First of all, it wasn't even the battle. It was only the battle before the battle. Second, there seemed to be no way an outnumbered force could have been victorious. But even more than that, it felt like play fighting. Recently Nirvana was honored at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Lorde performed "All Apologies", which it turns out was actually a very poorly written song when a super cute blonde guy isn't singing it. This battle felt like that - a reenactment rather than a bloody war.

"Post some of my break-up emails on Jezebel. Goodbye Jon Snow."

When I was meeting Lynne's buddies, I thought of when Jon Snow encountered all of Ygritte's friends: the guy with the beard, the guy with the bald head, the warg, Bates, Anna, Mrs. Hughes. At first Jon did not make a very good impression on them, but this was actually the right move. A woman does not want you to love her friends, she wants you to love her, even/especially at the expense of loving other people. Showing her that you can get along with others only reinforces a view that she is only another person in your life. This theory that I have just detailed explains every single one of Kevin Federline's children.

Ygritte had a decent body and a decent mind. I don't know if Jon really saw a future there, perhaps epitomized by when he had one of his archers kill her. As she was dying, the only thing she cared about was the one of two times when she had experienced unprotected sex with a man, like every woman who has never read Kathy Acker.

This could be a godsend at the border fence between the U.S. and Canada

Now that Jon Snow's OTP has been put on the cold road to becoming the sexiest ginger white walker since that dead older fellow, he is free to put his soda-can shaped penis anywhere he likes. Rumors have persisted that he and Daenerys would make a cute couple, but I actually see him more with Melisandre, or maybe Stannis' daughter, the one with the birth defect. After all, the guy is a bastard, and not much of a military strategist. Have you ever seen the caliber of women that Donald Rumsfeld cheats on his wife with? They make Gilly look like Rachel McAdams, who herself looks like a mannequin.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. Next week's recap of the GoT finale will number over 30,000 words, and undoubtedly contain 7-8 jokes about Cersei Lannister/Janet Jackson concordance. Await that at your own peril.

"You'll Lose A Good Thing" - Lou Ann Barton (mp3)

"Can't Believe You Wanna Leave" - Lou Ann Barton (mp3)

In Which We Romance A Eunuch Of Our Very Own

Mad at Ya

by DICK CHENEY

You know what's super kewt about a Wildling army on the march? They have their own hotelier, the best in the business. Every day you wake up in the Wildling army you have a copy of USA Today at your door, and housekeeping never arrives until you're ready to leave your tent. There's a lot of women in the Wildling army, so you can also be assured of a hot cuddle and perhaps some spelunking in the caves beyond the wall. Game of Thrones always makes me think of how I don't want to ever forget the good times in my life, like when that eunuch who looks like Barack Obama tried to masturbate in the river with his stump.

Couldn't we rule like a nicer place you guys? I hear Mereen has tons of adorable slaves.

Cutting off my balls wouldn't really do much. I keep a spare reserve of sperm in my cheek where a squirrel hides his food for the winter, and there is a second prostate at the base of my neck as well. (What other people call "morning wood" I call an idea.)

Daenerys' obnoxious aide harassing Grey Worm about how much of his dick was left was not her finest moment. She should probably just translate Dany's words into High Valyrian and leave it at that. Instead she was like, "Grey Worm. That name means penis...but what percentage exactly?"

"Roose, your new name is Schenectady Bergsdorf. You will rule the land of Juicy Juice. Now get on your knees."

Given the failings of public education in America we can only depend on constant Thronesing to educate our young ones.  We will repeatedly show them the scene with all those whores. Which scene? There's pretty much one in every episode, so I will leave it up to Lynne. Now that she has seen how castrating Theon Greyjoy is improving him in every way, she wants to do it to our border collie Drachma. I said no, but tbh it wasn't a firm no.

Catelyn Stark's new fashion line is all the rage in Riverrun. It's like she always said: before you go out everyday, remove one accessory, as long as it's not your diaphragm or direwolf. I'll get my coat.

It is impossible to not start to sympathize with the people who try to do positive things without relying entirely on their family name. I have to admit that Sansa's adorable new outfit engendered roughly the same feelings inside me that it stirred in Littlefinger, although this new Shailene Woodley habit she has of talking out of the corner of her mouth sort of makes me wish she had also gone out the Moon Door. Littlefinger amazingly plotted the perfect murder of the King of the Seven Kingdoms but accidentally left a witness to a super casual murder? Just no.

This was roughly the same look Ted Kennedy gave the girl in his car

Sansa's disturbing confession reminded me of the time Donald Rumsfeld weepily confessed to pulling an enemy combatant's heart out of his chest with his bare hands. He then hugged Condi Rice and stared at me like I was next. It was unnerving.

"My lady, wtf happened to your neck? Brb watching Season 1 for a comparison video. We will recast your role if you do not meet our demands. Goodbye."

Apparently from the map of Thronesland Jorah displayed in his cute little outdoor office, Mereen and King's Landing are separated by what appears to be a day's journey. What I don't understand is how he plans to navigate it entirely on horseback.

Yes, Sir Jorah Mormont was unceremoniously banished to Westeros after Barristan Selmy got in his only speaking part in the entire season. It's pretty obvious they shot all Daenery's throne room scenes on the same day given that the Mother of Dragons is also the Mother of Only One Outfit. Emilia Clarke's "acting" in these scenes was roundly terrible; her idea of showing anger is showing her teeth - but that is only a shadowplay a golden retriever makes to try to frighten her enemies (or horny eunuch slaves) away.

So, every single morning after in the Pitt-Jolie bedroom basically?

So after sleeping with every male or female prost in the entire city of King's Landing, Oberyn Martell turned out to be a loving brother and husband. Or was that his sister? I couldn't tell from the way they kissed, which is the way Littlefinger kissed Sansa and the way Ned Stark kissed his mother, Catelyn Stark. Kisses are very confusing in general; I was once kissed by Sarah Palin and I wandered around in a fugue state for days. I think she secretes LSD from her hidden cheek pouch: it would explain a lot.

Is the bug one of Varys' spies? Thinking ahead here.

In general this episode did a great job of making the exciting things boring and the boring things exciting, like when Tyrion touched a bug. (I guess metaphorically he was the bug? The lighting was so dim in his cell I struggled to care about what he was saying, but I sensed it may have been important. For example, could an antidote in the bug restore White Walkers to the humans they were before? Thinking out loud here.)

The battle itself was also a bit anti-climatic. Benioff, Weiss and director Alex Meyer eschewed using music to build the tension, preferring to focus on Tywin and Cersei's reaction to these events. It all came off a bit cold, like maybe the seven gods really were against Tyrion? I guess what I'm saying is that he deserves to die and I hope he burns in hell.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about the second season of House of Cards. You can view an archive of his Thrones reviews here.

"All In My Mind" - James (mp3)

"Quicken the Dead" - James (mp3)