Seven Kingdoms Scoop: Considering the successes and failures of ‘Game of Thrones’ season five

Well, here we are. Jon Snow is dead, House Baratheon is over, and Arya is the little psychopath we all knew she could be. Another season of Game of Thrones is in the books, and we’re all caught up now—book readers are on track with show watchers, and Benioff and Weiss are going purely into uncharted territory next year. My elitism at knowing more than you noob show watchers is officially done.

But what about this year? How did season five go? Did D&D successfully adapt George R.R. Martin’s fourth and fifth books, A Feast for Crows (published in 2005) and A Dance with Dragons (published in 2011)? Did we like the new things they incorporated from the still-unpublished The Winds of Winter (hopefully to be published in 2016, because I cannot wait any longer)? How successful were the plots they dreamed up entirely by themselves?

We all know I’m a recalcitrant grump, and if you’ve been reading my recaps, you know I’ve had beef. So let’s talk about the failures and successes of season five, since we’ve all had some time to recover from Sunday’s season five finale, “Mother’s Mercy,” and since reading those stupid Kit Harington interviews where he stupidly says that Jon Snow is dead for good and he’s not coming back to the show. Fuck off, Kit Harington, you beautiful dope! YOU HAVE TO BE WRONG. AGHHHH.

Anyway. Let’s start with successes.

FIVE THINGS GAME OF THRONES DID RIGHT THIS YEAR

+ The Night’s King. Look, is there anything else to say? The Night’s King was amazing. His “Come at me, bro,” mean mugging of Jon Snow was a thing to behold. I look forward to him turning us all into wights as soon as possible. COME BACK TO ME, NIGHT’S KING. DON’T EVER LEAVE ME. And please tell me where Benjen Stark is, god fucking dammit!

+ Drogon, Viserion, and Rhaegal. Sure, Game of Thrones has a huge budget, but so we couldn’t see Dany’s dragon children all the time given how much they cost to create. But oh, the moments when we did were fantastic. Viserion and Rhaegal eating people at Dany’s command? Yes! Drogon arriving to fly Dany away from the fighting pits? Yes! Drogon taking a nap right after because he’s a grumpy teenager who doesn’t really want to be with Dany all the time? Yes! Everything about the dragons was great this year, and if I have one quibble, it’s that in the books, Drogon arrives at Dany’s side when the Dothraki horde finds her in the sea of grass. That’s who Dany is—she’s fire and blood. So just having Dany by herself at the end of “Mother’s Mercy” was a little frustrating, but that doesn’t diminish the greatness of her children up until that point. Props.

+ Cersei Lannister. OK, so I had some issues with Cersei this season—having her suggest the Faith Militant be reinstated instead of being tricked into it, as she is in the books, was silly, and the whole her-and-Jaime-still-are-together subplot was also stupid. (Them breaking up is a major plot point of the books! It helps Jaime become a better man! Agh, grumble, whatever.) But everything that Cersei does after she gets locked by the High Sparrow is excellent work by Lena Headey, and that walk of shame through King’s Landing to the Red Keep in “Mother’s Mercy”—that was amazing, chilling, terrible. That stupid ringing bell and that stupid septa saying “Shame” over and over again will haunt my dreams. Yes, Headey used a body double (she was pregnant at the time of filming), but look at her face. Look at how expressive she can be with a slight smirk or a slight frown or a slight squint. Headey put on a master class during that walk, and her face when Ser Robert Strong picks her up and Qyburn promises that she’ll get revenge upon her enemies—yes. Yes!

+ Dany’s outfits. If there is anyone whose clothing has changed the most over the course of Game of Thrones, it’s Dany, who is fully in her Angelina-Jolie-queen-mother phase right now, with long gowns in varying shades of white, cream, and ecru. But oh shit, have the accessories been great. Those dragon necklaces! The detail work on her dresses! The increasingly elaborate braiding in her hair! Give your prep team a raise, Dany.

+ The Stark kids. To be totally honest, I’m not totally on board with everything the show has put Arya and Sansa through this year, but for the most part, we see all the Stark kids—including Jon, but minus Bran, who sat out this season, and Rickon, who is doing who knows what, who knows where—doing significant things this season.

Arya’s training in Braavos to be a Faceless Man has been some of the most consistent storytelling of the year, and although it’s weird how they rearranged her narrative in the final two episodes (blinding her isn’t a punishment in the books, so it’s annoying that it’s positioned so in the show), for the most part she’s fulfilling our expectations in the best and most horrifying of ways. Sure, Meryn Trant deserved to die, but like that? Feral, vengeful Arya was impressive, and her slicing Meryn’s throat in the same way that her mother Catelyn Stark’s cut was cut during the Red Wedding was a nice callback.

For Sansa, her placement in the Jeyne Pool storyline was irritating (all female trauma is the same, right, Benioff and Weiss?), but doing her best to fight back against Ramsay, being honest with her feelings for Theon/Reek, learning that Bran and Rickon are still alive, and finally fleeing Winterfell—that was forward movement. And how it derails whatever Littlefinger had planned for her, and for himself, will be interesting to see.

And of course, there’s Jon Snow. Poor, dead Jon Snow. Let me clear: I refuse to believe he’s dead forever, as Kit Harington keeps insisting in interviews with every publication that asks. There are too many clues in A Dance with Dragons that imply he’s coming back to life, probably at Melisandre’s hand, and having her return to the Wall in “Mother’s Mercy” felt like another clue. So maybe he’s coming back, resurrected by her. Maybe he’s coming back as some kind of wight/human hybrid. Maybe he’s sitting out a season, because Harington keeps saying he’s not coming back for season six, and will instead come back for season seven. Whatever it is, I can’t accept that Jon Snow is actually kaput. No. NOPE. No.

FIVE THINGS GAME OF THRONES DID WRONG THIS YEAR

+ Dorne. Jesus fucking Christ, what a fucking mess. Benioff and Weiss took my favorite location and my favorite characters and just ruined it beyond belief. If there was one colossal failure this year, it was this one. Why does Doran Martell matter? Why do the Sand Snakes matter? Why should anyone give a shit? 

Benioff and Weiss cut so much from this storyline before it even began that it never had a chance not to fail: They removed the most compelling character, Doran’s daughter Arianne, who is trying to crown Myrcella queen; they made the Sand Snake characters all terrible stereotypes (one’s mannish, one’s bitchy, and one’s slutty); they gave us the most abhorrent line of dialogue ever in “You want a good girl, but you need the bad pussy”; they got rid of any motivation for Doran; they wasted Jaime and Bronn in a meaningless mission; they turned Ellaria petty and childish instead of scheming and intelligent. It was just terrible. 

Clearly Benioff and Weiss didn’t give a shit about adapting this storyline in any coherent way, and it’s impossible to tell where it’s going to go from here—and most irritating because Arianne’s goal, in the books, is to crown Myrcella. She likes her, she thinks she’s kind and compassionate, she doesn’t want to hurt her. The Sand Snakes want revenge for their faither, but they’re layered characters, not one-note failures. But here we are, with Myrcella dead and Dorne totally underwritten. And why cast the wonderful Alexander Siddig at all if he’s only going to get approximately six lines in three episodes? Get the fuck out of here.

+ The fall of House Baratheon. It’s not that I’m necessarily surprised that Stannis ends up failing in his quest for the Iron Throne, but the swiftness with which it went down shortchanged the Baratheons, I think, and also kind of undermined Melisandre as well. In the books at this point, Stannis is still stuck in the snow outside Winterfell and Selyse and Shireen and Melisandre are at the Wall; Benioff and Weiss have said Shireen’s death comes from GRRM, so maybe that will happen in the future, but why didn’t this storyline have more time to breathe? And why did Shireen’s death have to be so telegraphed, with Stannis being a good dad one episode and then almost immediately deciding to kill her instead? The thing about Stannis is that he inspires loyalty for a reason—Davos commits himself to him for legitimate reasons in the books, and he should actually get the crown after Robert’s death—but the show makes him such a zealot so quickly that it does the character a disservice. And would Melisandre, so convinced that he’s a prophet, abandon him almost immediately?

And finally, I have to admit that Brienne’s killing of Stannis just fucking irritated me. Yes, Renly was nice to you once, but do you really believe he would been a good king? I don’t know. The overwhelming “righteousness” of her killing of Stannis felt too forced, perhaps because she’s on an entirely different trajectory in the books ... one which I find more interesting, because of a certain lady with a certain heart made of a certain stone. Ultimately, I’m sad for the end of House Baratheon, and I wish the show had handled it differently. “Ours is the fury,” indeed.

+ All that sexual violence. SO MUCH OF IT. I had a very long rant about the Sansa storyline and her rape at Ramsay’s hands earlier in the season, so I won’t rehash, but that’s only because I have so many other examples of (needless) sexual violence to choose from this season. Gilly’s almost rape, and her having sex with Sam as a kind of reward for saving her—gross. Myranda’s threats against Sansa, specifically her private parts. The solicitations of Arya as she poses as not-Cat-of-the-Canals in Braavos. The terribleness of Meryn Trant’s pedophilia and girl-beating; did we really need that exclamation point of a reason for him to be awful? Couldn’t Arya killing him for his murder of Syrio Forel be enough? Did we need to see him rejecting every prostitute as “too old” before beating young, not even pubescent, girls with a wooden whip?

Jeez, it just felt like so much this season—too much. Sexual violence is a shortcut for Benioff and Weiss at this point (and they are hypocritical about it, too, given how much they said they “love” the Jeyne Poole storyline but then criticized GRRM’s details about what Ramsay does to Jeyne, like what they force every other female character to go through on the show is OK) and it may be easy for them to write, but it’s exhaustingly repetitive to watch.

+ Olly. Yeah, we get it. Olly is angry at Jon Snow. But there was no worse example of foreshadowing in a season full of it than Olly’s mean mugging of Jon Snow over and over again, episode after episode, until he finally rammed that dagger into Jon’s heart. (Don’t forget that the show had him kill Ygritte, too, because apparently Olly is the one kid designed to wreck everything Jon Snow loves.) Yawn.

+ Littlefinger, and his various allies. Do you have any idea what Littlefinger’s endgame is? In the books, it’s clear: Consolidate enough power under Sansa to have her rule the Vale, and then eventually reclaim Winterfell, ultimately to Petyr’s benefit; still, though, he is creepily in love with and enthralled by Sansa, who he considers the daughter he could have had with Catelyn Stark but also a replacement for her, and their relationship is off-putting and weird but also believable. In the show, we’re meant to believe that Littlefinger knows nothing about the Boltons—even though he’s supposed to know everything—and would abandon Sansa there, even though he’s done so much to keep her by his side at all times until then? What? Why? It’s nonsensical, as his continuous double-crossing. He’s aligned with the Boltons; now he’s not. He’s aligned with the Lannisters; now he’s not. It’s in Littlefinger’s nature to be duplicitous, but in a season where so many characters seemed to spin their wheels, Littlefinger did it the most, and the most unnecessarily.

Oh, and all character development given to Ramsay Bolton is too much character development. That’s just true.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Who the fuck knows? So far, early stories in Entertainment Weekly (which really operates as a Game of Thrones PR machine than a critical publication at this point) and other areas have claimed that Jon Snow is dead/Kit Harington isn’t coming back, that Jaime will have an expanded role next year, and that various other characters are being cast to continue growing this universe, including maybe Sam’s family and maybe Theon’s uncle Euron Greyjoy (the entire Iron Islands plotline from the books was cut out this year, so it seems like they’re getting the super-streamlined-Dorne treatment next season).

But at this point, I think we all need the break. This season was bleak as shit, and I saw my favorite location and some of my favorite characters underdeveloped and undermined. Plot lines were developed and then forgotten, pushed forward and then dropped. Characters we love—Brienne, Jaime, Varys—disappeared for huge stretches of time, only to be plopped back in at the end with little effect; others were unnecessarily killed off (R.I.P., Barristan Selmy); and others were pushed into goofy plotlines (no, I am not a Missandei and Grey Worm believer, I have decided) that then went nowhere. And once again, the women of this world were mistreated beyond belief, both by characters within Game of Thrones and the showrunners in charge of it. Sand Snakes, I’m sorry for you.

Ultimately, I’m curious about where we’ll go next year, now that we’re into entirely uncharted territory, but I’m not confident about it given the unevenness of this season and its intrinsic frustrations. With these 10 episodes behind us, I’m at a Night’s-King-shrug level. Check with me in 10 months and maybe I’ll have a different reaction. But for now, I don’t really care about whether winter is coming.