One of the reason Game of Thrones bores me rather than annoying me these days is that I know most of its silly changes from the books will come to nothing in narrative terms, because like the Lord of the Rings screenwriters Benioff and Weiss are aggressively faithful to overall plot even when they obliterate character, theme, and nuance of narrative. In the past I might have been incensed about the Bran/Jon nonsense in "Oathkeeper," but in a season that's doing everything it can to stretch the last third of A Storm of Swords to cover ten episodes, the whole thing is just so obviously a way of marking time so they don't get to the climactic events at the Wall until the actual climax. I'm honestly surprised they only squeezed two episodes out of it. I'm also surprised they got rid of Locke; I was expecting him to be kept around until next year, to make future events in this storyline less ambiguous and more a matter of black-hearted plotting. I'm sure all that will still happen, just by a different mechanism.
