Extended epilogue, more like.

Those were pretty much just spectacles. No character development, and in the case of the dragons, just rendering the tension of the coup pointless.
As far as I am concerned, this sort of thing keeps destroying any credibility to Daenerys as a character: she's not a badass ruler, she's a spoiled little girl who is in a position that a lot of clever and powerful people worked to put her in, which she nearly ruined on more than one occasion, and she had the good fortune to inherit a superweapon. She has achieved or earned nothing on her own, and everything through inheritance, favor for her family's former position, and the lust of competent people.

That was kind of amusing, I suppose, except in the books, his men would have eaten that up with a spoon, and they scorned him for his pragmatic solution to their threat.

You know, there are a lot of times in the book series where characters make ironic allusions to ignorance being bliss, and snarkily implying that those who lack real knowledge or awareness are “the wisest of all.” I feel like that applies to people who haven’t read the books. They think they are watching an exciting, intelligent and original story, rather than a half-assed adaptation with clichés and tropes replacing character development or world-building.

A Song of Ice and Fire strikes a reasonable balance between having characters behave pragmatically, while also acknowledging that people do things for romantic or inspirational reasons, and sometimes even succeed. A Game of Thrones arbitrarily has ridiculous pragmatic justifications and then ludicrous mood swings and changes of mind by characters for absolutely no reason, undermining their pretentions at practicality, and then has to have more arbitrary switches later on to get the plot out of a hole they’ve written it into. And all too often, rather than the constraints of the medium that the show’s defenders cite for the changes, it seems like they are doing it to service contemporary entertainment values.

They seem to think that an audience capable of accepting giant wolves that bond with children and obey them, or fire-breathing bird lizards or a fireproof teenager (something Martin was very careful to avoid confirming), will not be able to accept the wild and crazy notion of an honorable and decent man marrying a woman just because he slept with her. So they completely re-write a new character into the story (and cut screen time from the scenes were in the international best selling novels, but were not good enough for a barely-profitable [if that] TV show), and have to invent reasons why the character would throw over an ally and bring on so many problems for this girl. And what is the so-superior love interest and character? An exotic woman who is alien to his culture, and thus able to speak disdainfully to him! Because it’s not like they had one of those storylines running concurrently with Jon & Ygritte, or have transformed another relationship into one of those with Tyrion & Shae (and, by the way, set up yet another inexplicable character flip when Shae proves to have been merely a mercenary all along). Yeah, a third identical relationship is a much more reasonable way to go than have the character torn between two different demands of honor! No character development to be mined from that story, as played out in the books, not to mention the issue of how they are supposed to work the scheme with the Lannisters into all of this. Maybe Tywin is just the kind of guy who stumbles along on lucky breaks with all his enemies getting themselves killed. Which means that Tyrion’s importance is completely destroyed for the future books as the one guy whose anger and resentment bring down the power bloc no general or politician in the Seven Kingdoms could.

And taking Daenerys storyline in the show on its own (since by now, it has abandoned any connection to the books, beyond the name and pet species of the protagonist), why on earth are we supposed to be invested in this entitled little snot’s success? Are we supposed to root for ANY kingdom to fall under the sway of the daughter of a madwoman and brother of a rapist whose main character traits are demanding people conquer countries for her or foot the bill for her wars or feeding her armies, and horrifically killing anyone who mildly displeases her? She seals Doreah alive in a safe, because a slave-prostitute had sex with the ruler of the city in which she was held captive, after her khaleesi’s leadership saw all the rest of her retinue murdered? Because Daenerys declared her free in the middle of a desert, Doreah is now totally responsible for all her actions, and her declining to wander away to die in a strange environment constitutes a moral responsibility to absolutely do only what and everything that Daenerys might want of her, under pain of death forever? Fine, you don’t like that she hooked up with a ruler (whom she never would have met if Daenerys hadn’t befriended him because he was willing to indulge her tantrum and let her into the city without having to prove that she was, in fact, the mother of dragons), that means she’s fired and has to stay behind when you go off and have adventures. It doesn’t give Daenerys the right to murder her. Combined with her human sacrifice of a woman who gave some very excellent reasons for not returning her mercy with loyalty in the finale last year, we have seen no reason to put her in charge of anything more than a girl scout troop. What she really deserved from that vision of her husband and son was a rebuke for causing their deaths with her whims and adherence to her alien ways. She’s the equivalent of the “ugly American (Westerosi) tourist” but she acts, and the show plays it, as if she’s the sophisticated and superior one.

And could the Other have looked more retarded?