Four Episodes, Zero Patience

There was a specific pleasure to the weekly Game of Thrones ritual—the delivery food, the bad lighting, the communal suffering with whoever showed up—and then the first four episodes of Season 5 got leaked all at once in April 2015 and blew the whole structure to pieces.

"The Wars to Come," "The House of Black and White," "High Sparrow," "The Sons of the Harpy." Four titles sitting somewhere on the internet, asking what kind of person you were. The morally upright could wait, week by week, for HBO to deliver the goods through proper channels. Everyone else could put on the eye patch, find the files, and consume a full month of television in one sitting like some dragon-addled glutton.

I don’t remember exactly what I did. I’d like to say I waited. What I remember is that the leak felt less like a gift and more like a hostage situation—the weekly ritual was gone whether you watched the leaked episodes or not, because now you had to actively choose not to, and that choice has its own weight. Daenerys would probably have had someone executed for the whole thing. I just ate the takeout anyway.