Usually these posts are titled “Reviewing…” but in this case, for now our episode guide for “Mhysa” contains our complete, blow-by-blow recap as well as our book-to-screen material. The review itself will be forthcoming some time tomorrow. Why the delay? It’s turning a bit into a season overview piece, with a lot of references to past episodes of the series, and I’d like to mull it over a bit more before settling on how to go with it. The season finale is always a tricky thing to review, at least when it comes to Game of Thrones, and it deserves some extra thought.

But until then, check out the episode guide, and feel free to visit the A Song of Ice and Fire forum where there’s some lively, in-depth discussion of the episode going on right now.

We’ve gotten our winner for our 7” Iron Throne contest... but for the final episode of the season, we have an ever grander prize, once more courtesy of the amazing folks at :

This depiction of Tyrion Lannister at the Blackwater was a moment that David Benioff and Dan Weiss specifically suggested to Dark Horse as a possible subject for a statue, and is the first full-figure statue that they have produced for Game of Thrones. Standing 10” tall, the statue is actually part of a limited edition series of just 3,000 figures. Future statues will include Jon Snow with Ghost and a White Walker.

How do you win? This one is easy: follow us on Westeros.org and spread the word about this contest by including the #GoTTyrion hash-tag and linking to this post! We’re thinking that if we cross the 30,000 follower mark, we’ll be offering up an additional prize that some might find pretty interesting in its own right…

And yes, the Tyrion statue prize contest can be entered from any country in the world—it is not US only! (The second prize may or may not be available overseas, so we can’t promise that one will be available to an international entry.) We’ll decide the winner—or winners—come Monday after the final episode, “Mhysa”.

Tonight’s episode of Conan O’Brien will—quite amazingly!—feature none other than George R.R. Martin, according to the full schedule at the Team Coco site. O’Brien included a reference to Sunday’s episode, “The Rains of Castamere”, in his monologue on Monday; suffice it to says, there are spoilers:

  The digital release of the season 3 soundtrack is now available on iTunes and Amazon MP3, with the CD release due next month! See below for the details, straight from WaterTower Music:

As we suspected, the Red Wedding has sort of drowned out everything else about, “The Rains of Castamere”, dominating coverage of the episode. Linda and I have been invited to share our thoughts on the episode in a couple of venues. First off, I was asked to provide some comments to the New York Post, while Linda joined some other “megafans” to discuss the episode’s main event over at the Vulture.

And if you’ve missed it, we made our penultimate appearance on Thronecast for the season, as well as our usual bonus video, which I’m placing below the cut:

Just spreading the news for those who might be interested: North One TV, a media company, is working on a program related to Game of Thrones, and they would love to meet some Game of Thrones cosplayers to appear in their studio for the program.

If you’re interested, drop us a note at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and we’ll share the email contact for the producer!

Usually, we work for several hours on the recap, analysis, and book-to-screen breakdown for our episode guides and release them all together more or less in time with the west coast airing. But tonight, we’re deviating to share my analysis—a briefer-than-normal one, but also a more-focused-than-normal one—of “The Rains of Castamere”, which can be found here.

Naturally, there are spoilers, so read at your own risk. The rest of our content will, we hope, follow in a few hours.

Earlier today I was wondering about why we hadn’t heard anything about the season 3 soundtrack… and suddenly, there’s news! Shifting label from Varèse Sarabande to Watchtower Music, it looks like June 4th will see the release of the season 3 soundtrack on iTunes (with an additional digital “booklet” included as a bonus), with a CD release some time thereafter (no exact date yet, so far as we know).

The link above will include the full list of contents. In a certain sense, there may be spoilers in these track titles, so we’ll be providing them here as well below the cut:

No, nothing as grandiose as this... but you can have a miniature replica of the Iron Throne all of your very own through our Twitter contest!

Courtesy of Dark Horse, we’re offering a competition to win their 7” replica Iron Throne. Only one winner will be chosen… but for those who’ve been saddened by the fact that our previous contests have been US only, we’re pleased to announce that this competition is open to international entries. Yes, Dark Horse will ship this anywhere in the world where a postal service can reach!

How to enter? Simple! Follow us on Twitter and simply send out a tweet containing #GoTThrone. Please, one entry per account. We’ll announce the winner some time next week.

Game of Thrones: Ascent, the official social game created by Disruptor Beam in collaboration with HBO, has had great success… and they’re now expanding their reach. After launching initially as exclusive to Facebook, the game expanded to being available on Kongregate and will soon be available on Zynga. Now, Disruptor Beam has announced that the popular game is now also available on their official website. There’s fewer and fewer excuses to not try the game out, so check it out!

German matte painting artist Sven Sauer has shared an article from a German digital painting magazine that ended up having unprecedented access to Pixomondo, the international digital effects company responsible for the award-winning effects of the last two seasons of Game of Thrones. The article focuses on matte paintings, and features quite a few impressive images and details regarding the scope of the use of matte paintings on the show (there’s more than you might realize). Well-worth taking a look at.

The article also includes a video Pixomondo produced featuring some of its effects work on the series, which we’ve embedded below.

HBO’s official Youtube channel for Game of Thrones has posted an interesting video, focusing on the political marriages that are so central to this season of the show. The executive producers, as well as George R.R. Martin, provide commentary:

We have updated our episode guide for this week’s latest episode, “Second Sons”, with our usual complete recap, analysis, and book-to-screen break down. Enjoy!

This week’s extra video over at our Youtube channel may be delayed a day, as we’re a little short on time for recording.

We’re pleased to announce that Westeros.org is co-sponsoring a Game of Thrones pub quiz / trivia night produced by Geeks Who Drink. The event is called Fire Cannot Kill a Quizmaster and will be in twelve major cities on Saturday, June 8th.

Teams of up to six will play together during this eight round event that’ll cover everything on the HBO series up to that point (a small portion of material will cover the books, but with no spoilers past season 3). It costs $5 per player, so expect team prizes of between $200 and $500. Some locations will have costume contests, but feel free to dress up either way.

Find the schedule, times and event FAQs at their Facebook event page, and good luck!

Another late, late night and we’ve just managed to put the finishing touches on our review of “The Bear and the Maiden Fair”, written by George R.R. Martin himself. You can find it at out episode guide. for the episode.

And if that’s not enough, feel free to check out the lively conversations about the episode over at our forum, as fellow fans dissect and discuss the episode.