“The Mountain and the Viper” is a reminder that in George R.R. Martin’s unforgiving Game of Thrones universe, some things are inevitable…
…bloodshed, for example.
Or that whenever there’s a cursory shot of buff, shirtless men…
…there’ll be a series of leering close-ups on naked women shortly afterwards. (Not that I’m especially complaining about getting to see Nathalie Emmanuel naked, but equal screen time would’ve made sense.)
It’s inevitable that trusting Ramsay Snow – sorry, Ramsay Bolton – isn’t the best decision.
And that poor Jorah is really, really, never getting anywhere with Daenerys.
Of course, it’s also a timely reminder that just when you’re starting to think things might just turn out right for your favourite characters (specifically, Tyrion, everyone’s favourite character), you get a transfixing dungeon dialogue that makes you wonder … is the reference to Paths of Glory’s famous cockroach scene deliberate? Are these the last words of a doomed man?
Is my faith that maybe, just maybe, things will turn out right for once, that someone will get a happy ending … is that faith misplaced?
Of course it is. Happy endings get crushed and then smashed on the floor, naturally.
Really, all you can do is laugh.
ccpopculture 
I can’t read this post because I have 40 mins to go before this airs here… but I will hopefully remember to come back. Lol!
Probably a good thing you didn’t glance at this before the episode! 🙂
Haha I read the books so I knew it was coming. Unless they changed it but they didn’t and I watch the episode with my sister and she freaked out! So good 😀
From a narrative level it didn’t surprise me too much; it would have been too cheap for Oberyn to save Tyrion there. On an execution level, though…
Haha yeah if you have been following Game of Thrones for any amount of time you should have seen this coming 😀
I felt this was coming during the episode, just because George RR Martin/GoT tends to go against what you’d expect, and it really looked like Oberyn would pull through. That said, I was still shocked when it happened, brutal, and Oberyn was a great fun, Han Solo-esque character, not the kind of character you expect to meet this fate
Yeah, it would’ve seemed a little cheap … almost like a deus ex machina, for Tyrion to have earned his freedom thanks to Oberyn. Still, the execution was just gruesome, in the best and worst way.