Spoiler alert: this season of GAME OF THRONES was simply terrific.  Not only did it break records for the series as a whole, but planted itself as a firm second place all-time show (in ratings) on HBO right behind THE SOPRANOS.

I don’t have much in the way of critique, although it is nice that a couple of the storylines seem to have (finally) condensed a bit with Jon Snow and Samwell finally arriving in the same place, Jaime Lannister getting back to King’s Landing and Robb Stark no longer in the game at all.  Although with Yara leaving to save Theon from his weird torture session, it looks like the whole of House Greyjoy is going to play a much bigger part next season.  Additionally, there are several more major players that the show hasn’t even explored yet, so the upcoming couple of seasons are going to be busy indeed.

A couple of the plotlines became tedious especially when it came to Theon’s almost-completely-unexplained torture scenes and Bran Stark’s awkward quest to get north of the wall with Hodor who ended up irritating the hell out of me.  ”Hodor, Hodor!”  Shut up, bro.

But the most tedious plot in GAME OF THRONES could be compared to your least favorite beer in the pack.  It’s still perfectly fine, just not as great as the others.  The Red Wedding scene topped literally everything before it, not just in shock value.  And the acting was beyond top notch by pretty much everybody the entire time.

There was an extremely interesting article up on IGN the other day about the show potentially catching up to the books, in addition to the complication caused by adapting the material past A Storm of Swords due to narrative differences.  Then there’s the issue with keeping the actors around for the long term and how to tastefully depart from the book.  The creators claim they are planning on a total of seven seasons, although this is one show that I would hope lasts at least twice that.

A+++ for GAME OF THRONES Season 3, now it’s time to bear a painful 42 weeks until the premiere of season 4.