It reminded me of the thing at the end of the first Harry Potter movie, where they are toting up all the points, and then start arbitrarily adding just enough points to let the protagonists win, and fuck you, Slytherin, please don't grow up to be evil necromancers!

Except Maester Aemon just put an exclamation point on pissing off the followers of a guy who had the support of nearly half their band of convicted criminals serving a life sentence, and embittered exiles or disillusioned idealists, any one of whom might suddenly realize how easy it is to sneak up on and kill an ancient blind man, and that by doing so, they might actually acquire a replacement doctor who can SEE your injuries while he treats them. But it was necessary for the drama, because they had to severely curtail the election scenes, to make room for Shireen teaching Gilly how to read.

The thing that boggles the mind is how HBO could possibly have greenlit a TV show based on books that did NOT include that critical scene? The whole Night's Watch plotline has been plagued from day one with this sort of crap, with important details and scenes excised or compressed so as to destroy their dramatic meaning, juxtaposed with original scenes that are redundant or pandering shots of Pyp or Sam making awkward dirty jokes.

And they cut the balls off of Dany's storyline as well, where instead of a no-win situation, trying to balance factions against the conflicting social mores of her culture and those of her new subjects, she has an easy and obvious moral issue that is simply unpopular.

I wonder why a group of assassins are so reluctant to let a lone foreigner with no resources into their secret headquarters (which IIRC, was actually a public temple into which people came and went [often rather thoroughly] as they wished, without even being checked up on or watched). That is not ironic. What is served by letting her wander around cluelessly hunting birds? If they don't want her, they can always dispose of her more easily in their secret sanctum, whereas if it turns out they DO want her, and rival pigeon hunters gut her first...

It might be a relief the more this show cuts itself loose from the books, assuming there is any talent in the writers at all. I'm largely unimpressed with Brienne's story thus far, and while the Jaime & Bronn team-up might be awesome in the making, it could also utterly murder anything good about the characters. We'll see.