'Thrones' return a stunner, but can’t tell you why

It was inevitable that the social networks would be ablaze with comments on Sunday with the premiere of Season 6 of the hit fantasy TV show “Game of Thrones”. Everyone was dying to find out whether Jon Snow was really dead. And what they got, as AFP delicately puts it, was “a huge curve ball”.
The news agency is tiptoeing on eggs not to spoil the moment for readers who haven’t yet seen the episode, and Soopsip won’t ruin it either. But, look, you have to be dead yourself or studiously avoiding the Internet if you don’t already know.
The hashtag #GameOfThrones topped Twitter trending for hours before and after the HBO premiere. Before the show aired, everyone was wondering about the episode’s title, “The Red Woman”. Did it refer to the Red Priestess Melisandre bringing Snow back to life after he was bumped off in the closing moments of the previous season?
    No, as it turned out. The title alluded to the “big reveal” that came at the end of the latest instalment. Duane Brown of the Houston Texans football team reacted like this: “What. The. Hell?” British newspaper columnist James Delingpole claimed to be “slightly upset” that nothing in the episode “really upset me”.
    Everyone involved in the production had insisted Snow was definitely, irreversibly dead, but conversation among fans has focused on how, rather than whether, he will be resurrected.
    With more than 20 million viewers per episode, the show’s return had been touted as the biggest TV drama event since JR Ewing was gunned down in 1980 in primetime US soap opera “Dallas”. Atlanta, Boston and Denver all had theatre screenings of the show. And in Britain, weekly listings magazine The Radio Times ran a live blog starting two hours ahead of the broadcast.

    Squeeze those lemons

HBO had another big night on Saturday when Beyonce cemented her status as the “queen of surprise releases” on Saturday, issuing a new album and video called “Lemonade” via a hotly anticipated onehour special on the cable network.
        During the show, Reuters reports, she appeared to address longstanding rumours of trouble in her marriage with rapper Jay Z. After song lyrics about being cheated on, Beyonce made clear in the last tracks of the new album that she’s decided to reconcile with him and continue in the marriage.
In a preview earlier this week, the singer teased fans with a snippet promoting the show, mysteriously intoning, “The past and the present merge to meet us here. What are you hiding? Why can’t you see me? You’re the love of my life.”
Fans, who wondered if Saturday’s show was to be a concept video with new music from the R&B star, found out that was pretty much the case, with chapters carrying titles that riffed on stages of the grieving process, such as anger, denial and forgiveness.
Videos also featured appearances by the mothers of two black men, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, whose shooting deaths – in Brown’s case by a police officer – trained a spotlight on US racial tensions.