[@NecroKnight] I can probably come up with a summary sometime tomorrow. But if you really need it, you can always have Miri take a backseat on the ship. 

[@bloonewb] No need for that Bloo, I have returned, as was promised. If I do ever become indisposed for a prolonged period though, I might need to designate another Co-GM to help run things. If anyone is interested, please contact me. 

Also, that was quite a doozy of an episode. 

[hider= Thoughts] 

On the whole Tyrell situation, I feel that was a hell of a send-off for the Queen of Thorns, she will be missed. I believe the Lannister victory over the Tyrells can be attributed to

1) Randyll Tarly is probably the finest strategist living in the Seven Kingdoms, him working together with this new pragmatic and cunning Jaime would absolutely beat whoever the Tyrells had in charge of the garrison, probably a standard Master-at-arms. 

2) The Lannister army is the most hardened in the Seven Kingdoms after all of the constant wars and the tight ship that Tywin and Kevan ran. The Tarlys would have made up the core of the Tyrell's considerable army, but with Tarly's defection and the defection of other Reach Lords presumably, you're talking about an army upwards of ten thousand men who would be much more hardened and battle ready than the Tyrell garrison. The Tyrells probably already had most of their forces deployed elsewhere in preparation for the coming battles and weren't expecting an attack so close to home. Even Jaime says they fought as good as the circumstances could allow. 

Other thoughts

3) This doesn't mean the Tyrell family is gone, just Olenna and her favorites. If we were folding this into our own canon, we could say that Willas was either sent away or taken prisoner by Jaime only to be freed and Garlan was in the field with the main Tyrell forces, and couldn't do anything to save Olenna. The Tyrell House is also very expansive and the family is spread all over the Reach, the ones in Oldtown or different holds would have escaped the battle and even if they didn't they probably would have just been taken prisoner. Personally, I feel we should wait until the season ends to get a full picture of the political situation and think how that can be integrated into our own canon. 

4) That said, I do like the idea of folding the Siege of Highgarden and death of Olenna into the backstory. It would add a lot more weight to the troublesome implications of Tommen and Alerie's forthcoming marriage, and would believably fuel a lot of political tension in both the Reach and the West and among Houses Lannister and Tyrell. Dickon Tarly, was just following his father's orders and likely would have bent the knee to Willas and the Crown after the defeat of Cersei's coalition and his father's assumed death in the war. This could mean tension between House Tarly and House Tyrell of course too. 

5) This defeat as a whole is supposed to even the playing field between Daenerys and Cersei, taking it from where it was looking like a curbstomp in Dany's favor to Cersei actually dominating so far. 

[/hider]