If it's any consolation, the show has diverged radically from the books, so it's unlikely that anything meaningful will get spoiled by them. The Vergers are taken from the book after Silence of the Lambs, for example.

Well, you've gotta upgrade to Lamp 2.0. It's got over 200 new features, including Intelligent Fading and Cloud Integration!

"Sorry, Billy. We got the kid from Attack the Block, and we can't have more than one black dude in this galaxy. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go call up Lupita Nyong'o and explain why having more than two women in the cast is unacceptable."

And if they're genuinely good, who cares? Most of them will probably suck, but that's not because they're based on an existing property. They'll suck for plenty of other reasons.

I think if Jaime's is smart enough to know that rape is wrong, he's smart enough to know what rape is.

Well, RT doesn't interpret. The critics upload their reviews themselves, and they give them numerical scores that correspond to their personal rating system.

Okay, so I still think that regardless of Jaime's moral character he would never rape someone. Hurting women, especially Cersei, is something that time and time again we're reminded of his disgust for. He remembers his anger at not being able to prevent the Mad King from raping his wife. In season 1, Ned asks Cersei if a bruise on her face is from Robert, and she replies that "Jaime would have killed him." He puts his own safety at risk to prevent Brienne from being raped. He says that he would rather die than be raped.

The message is clear.

Is Jaime a sterling example of moral fortitude? Of course not. But of all the ways to show that, they had to choose the one thing that we've been assured is beyond even his capacity for evil? Come the fuck on.

Anyway, my friend and I have been doing a weekly podcast this season, and we just did one discussing this episode. I encourage you to listen and explain to me why I'm wrong.

http://moviefail.com/2014/04/26/game-th … er-chains/

So, emotionally I understand what they were talking about in this movie. And I'm pretty sure I understand most of it intellectually. I'm not totally sure I grasp the details, but whatever. I didn't love this movie, but I think it's very smart. I think I like Chandor more when he's not writing dialogue.

None of that justifies awkwardly and unnecessarily forcing a rape scene into the stories of both Jaime and Cersei. There is absolutely no need for the scene to play out in such unambiguously nasty terms. Bottom line: Rape is not dramatically interesting. It's a cheap storytelling device that's almost invariably thrown in for shock value and nothing else, as seems to be the case here (this could spiral out into the coming episodes, but the director's comments seem to refute that.)

I can think of exactly one well-executed rape storyline. It was on The Sopranos, another HBO show, as it happens. In the episode in which Dr. Melfi is raped ("Employee of the Month," I think season 3), the show does three important things:

1) It doesn't shy away from the brutality and cruelty of the act. There's nothing sexual or enticing about it, and there's no half-assed attempt at ambiguity over whether or not it was consensual in an attempt to soften it.

2) It ties the act directly into Melfi's broader, series-wide arc, specifically in her internal strife over whether or not to tell Tony about it. She knows that he'll go kill this guy immediately if he finds out, but at the same time she doesn't want to cross a moral boundary and enter Tony's world, because she knows she won't be able to turn back from that. Which brings us to the most important point...

3) The plot is about HER. It's not about making the rapist seem darker and edgier and more "conflicted" or whatever, like this Jaime bullshit apparently is. It's about her reaction to it, and the position it puts her in, and whether or not she is going to make an ethical decision. I don't think we're giving enough thought to the fact that Game of Thrones just had Cersei, a main character, be raped for the apparent purpose of reminding us that her rapist is a bad guy. How is that not horrifying to everyone? Am I crazy? I can't possibly be the only person on this forum who finds this whole thing despicable.

It's not out in the states yet. I know it's highly anticipated by some because Bong Joon-Ho is a popular director, but I didn't like The Host at all so I'm not all that interested in it.

The real problem here is that the director of the episode and the actor who plays Jaime have both come out and said that the scene was intended to "become consensual" at the end. The fact that they think that's what they did is really disturbing.

And regardless of ALL of this, rape is not interesting. Rape is not complex. It's a bad storytelling choice.

Uh...is it just me or did the show just destroy Jaime's character?