Grr, honor, grr, brother, grr... zzz.
Grr, honor, grr, brother, grr... zzz.

I'm a late adopter. Didn't get a cell phone until after everyone else on earth was on their third, resisted taking questions via email for Ye Olde Sex Advyce Column for a long tyme, and didn't start watching Game of Thrones until the fourth season was underway. Here's an ironic detail (as you'll see in a moment): we were on a snowboarding trip and there was too much fucking snow to go snowboarding—winter was coming all over the place—so we thought, what the hell, so long as there's a giant wall of snow outside the door to our cabin, let's watch a few of episodes of the first season of this show that everyone else is obsessed with. And three episodes in... we were obsessed too.

Oh, those were the days. We didn't have to wait a week between episodes or a year or more between seasons. We didn't have to wait two minutes between episodes/seasons. It was glorious. Then we caught up to season 4. And now we wait, with everyone else, for HBO/Martin/Benioff/Weiss to grind another season out. Not as glorious an experience, but still a great show.

So we watched the season 6 premiere last night, BECAUSE WE ARE OBSESSED, and I agree with Willa Paskin, TV critic at Slate:

The first episode was good and unsatisfying. At this point, Game of Thrones is an episodic TV show that has absolutely no use for the episode, which it treats like an arbitrary unit of time between opening and end credits. The show is made to be binged, chugged down in sufficient quantities to get full on the various characters. The cast is so big that in one episode, each main character only gets a scene or two.

This show was made to be binged—and binging was my first experience/interaction with GoT and, man, do I ever miss being able to binge on GoT. I suppose we could wait for each new season to end, lay in snacks and booze, and then chug them all down over a long, boozy, bloody weekend. But it's easier to avoid being exposed to/infected by spoilers for a show you haven't been watching—a show you know basically nothing about—than it is to avoid being exposed/infected by spoilers for a show you've been watching and know basically everything about.

So, yeah, I wanna second Paskin here: the first episode of Game of Thrones season 6 was unsatisfying. And it was unsatisfying because we didn't get to spend enough time with the characters we actually got to spend some time with. And there were scores of characters we didn't get to spend any time with at all—Bran, Petyr, Loras, Lady Olenna, Tommen.

You know what would free up lots of time in each episode? You know what would allow us to spend more time with the characters we get to spend time with and maybe a little bit of time with the characters we hardly ever to get spend time with? Or what would free up time in my counterfactual/revisionist reboot of the whole series? Cut the wall. Cut the Night's Watch and cut Castle Black and cut Jon Snow. Cut the White Walkers and the Wildings and Gilly and Samwell and "winter is coming" and the zombies and the giants and that ungrateful little shit there at the end and Jon Snow's doomed ginger love interest and their ridiculous sex scene in that fake-ass looking "natural" hot tub. Sic Melisandre on Ramsay and let Davos go and serve Sansa.

Am I the only one who finds the whole watch/wall/wildlings storyline... boring as shit? "Grr, honor, grr, brotherhood, grr, grr, grr." We spent more time in a single room at Castle Black in last night's episode than we spent in King's Landing with Cersei and Jaime or in Meereen with Tyrion and Varys. We spent more time looking at Jon Snow's dead body on that damn table than we spent with most of the living—and far more interesting—characters in Game of Thrones.

And does the show need the wall? Or the White Walkers? Or Jon Snow? Would a wall-less, Jon-Snow-less Game of Thrones be any less satisfying/fascinating/complex than the GoT we've got now? I don't think so. I think it would be more satisfying. Cutting the wall and the zombies—which we can get our fill of elsewhere—would allow us (or would've allowed us) to spend a hell of a lot more time with the more complicated, three-dimensional characters running around the rest of Westeros.