End to end, Game of Thrones Season 5 was a 10-hour long affair, much of it filled with talk. Characters talked about their hopes and dreams, cracked jokes, made speeches, and generally rained down words upon the audience. This week, the writers at Winter is Coming discuss the best lines of the fifth season. Be sure to vote for your favorite in our poll!
(Note: There were so many contenders for this poll that we decided to break the category up. This week will be “Best Line,” and next week will be “Best Exchange,” which will focus less on one-liners and speeches and more on conversations. If you don’t see one of your favorites in this poll, it may yet show up next week. If we forgot anything, we apologize. As mentioned above, there’s a lot of talk on this show.)
DAN: I’m still not convinced that Stannis Baratheon, the One True King of Westeros and the Lord of Grammar, didn’t deserve more screen time in “Mother’s Mercy,” the fifth season finale. Whatever my misgivings about his last stand, I loved his final line, spoken right before Brienne executes him for killing his brother Renly. “Go on, do your duty.”
Simple, direct, and so, so Stannis. From nearly the first moments we met him, when he was editing the text of the letter that announced his claim to the throne, it was clear that Stannis looked at the world in an incredibly rigid way. Right was right, wrong was wrong, obligations were to be honored, and rules were to be followed.
And yet, over the next couple of years, he increasingly muddied these waters for himself. According to the normal rules of succession, the Iron Throne was his by rights. But in order to get it, he was willing to violate the rules forbidding kinslaying, killing both his brother and his daughter. In the process, he snuffed out any spark of humanity left to him, and died having lost almost everything.
And yet, he still held on to that rigid sense of responsibility, which comes through in his last words. After all, Brienne also believed in honoring her obligations, and she had vowed to kill the man who had killed her King Renly. Stannis recognized that she had a right to her vengeance, and that allowed him to face his death without wailing or pleading for his life. In the end, I think Stannis took some small comfort in the fact that, despite all his sacrifices and failures, he was at least killed according to the rules.
KATIE: “I am Sansa Stark of Winterfell. This is my home. And you can’t frighten me.”
It was Sophie Turner’s tonal drop and the quiet intensity that simmered over the words—the kind of intensity that would have made Margaery and even Cersei proud—that sold this line. Sansa has always been a strong character, but before her strength relied on a sort of tactfulness; she had to watch her tongue around Cersei and Joffrey. But Myranda is no one, the kennel master’s daughter, and Sansa won’t be manipulated again, least of all by someone driven by petty jealousy.
Sansa had been afraid for much of her time in King’s Landing—when she was forced to name her father a traitor, when he was beheaded in front of her, when the mob attacked, when Stannis’ army approached, whenever Joffrey hurt her or threatened to do so. She was out of her element, separated from her family and her home. But now she’s back to her roots, and it doesn’t matter that her home has been infiltrated by her enemies, because Winterfell is hers. She has been beaten down but never broken, and while she knows that her suffering isn’t about to end, she won’t let it define her.
Everyone had been getting hyped about Dark Sansa ever since she descended that staircase dressed in black in Season 4’s “Mockingbird,” but this is the point where she really shines—naked, taunted, amidst some of her family’s greatest foes. These conditions make her vulnerable, but she’s in Winterfell, and this is where she finds her strength. Sansa is such a relatable character, to me and to so many others, and it made me soar to see her continue her fight. Despite what happens after, despite the wedding night, all I had to do was remember her words and know that they’re more than a show—they’re a promise that Sansa will survive through her tragedies, through her fear, and that she’ll work for the vengeance that Littlefinger encouraged her to get.
As much as her words were a declaration to trip up Myranda, as much as they were a promise to Sansa herself, they were also a threat: Winterfell is hers, and she will drive her enemies out of it.
ANI: Game of Thrones is many things to many people. The show is incredibly popular in my home town of Washington, D.C., as those in power love watching the political machinations and palace intrigue. Others see it as a global warming parable, with the White Walkers standing in for a deadly change in weather that cannot be controlled or stopped, but fought through and survived. But where I think the show works on a higher level—and why I think it has resonated with so many—is that it’s a parable of the 1%, the rich versus the poor, the little people being trampled on by the powerful. To me, it’s the story of how one outcast young woman, who was born an exile and an orphan, rose to power and will overthrow the carelessly cruel people in control.
That’s why the speech the High Sparrow gives towards the end of “The Gift,” just before he has Cersei arrested, resonated so deeply with me. It was clearly a moment the show had marked as important, as the opening lines (“Strip away the gold and the ornaments, knock down the statues and the pillars, and this what remains: something simple, solid, and true.”) were featured not only in the first trailer for Season 5, but in later trailers as well. This is the moment of revolution, the fall of Marie Antoniette, Les Miserables done King’s Landing style. The whole speech is full of contempt and loathing for the upper classes, and the promise of revenge against them: The Tyrells’ finery will be stripped away, their lies knocked down, their hearts laid bare for all to see. And so it will be for all of us. High and low alike.”
But nothing quite kicked as hard as the final line: “What will we find when we strip away your finery?” At that moment, Cersei looks up and sees the trap of her own making close around her. What indeed?
RAZOR: For all the problems I had with the writing of Season 5, there were still some pretty amazing lines. As the site’s resident book purist, I tend to lean toward lines that are direct quotes from the books. Yes, I had problems with previous seasons altering lines. In season 3, Roose Bolton should have plunged his knife into Robb Stark’s heart and said, “Jaime Lannister sends his regards.” Instead we got, “The Lannisters send their regards.” In Season 4, right before Littlefinger sends Sansa’s Aunt Lysa flying through the Moon Door, he whispers, “Your sister,” completely ruining one of the better lines in the books. He should have said, “Only Cat.”
Even this season had its fair share of altered lines, and for the most part I had no problem with the changes…until it came to Jon’s decision to execute Janos Slynt. This is yet another iconic line from the novels that every book-reader I know was excited to hear. Yet when the time came, instead of “Edd, fetch me a block,” we were smacked in the face with the foreshadow hammer and got “Olly, bring me my sword.”
As you can see, I take important lines from the books quite seriously, as I consider them to be integral to the story of A Song of Ice and Fire and therefore Game of Thrones. For that reason, my favorite line of Season 5 was what Lyanna Mormont, the acting head of House Mormont and the lady of Bear Island, wrote to Stannis after he requested that she and other Northern leaders swear him allegiance: “Bear Island knows no King but the King in the North, whose name is Stark.”
The importance of this letter cannot be understated. At the time Stannis receives it, the North is still in chaos following the nearly complete destruction of Winterfell and House Stark. Most of the great Northern Houses have refused to recognize the traitor Roose Bolton as the new Warden of the North. As we saw in the show, and often times read in the book, the North remembers, and in their minds House Stark must once again rise to power. So when a Southron Lord who claims to be the rightful King of the Seven Kingdoms demands fealty, it seems only fitting that the Great Houses of the North refuse to bend their knee to him.
This letter holds even more weight when you realize that Lyanna Mormont (named for Lyanna Stark) is only 10 years of age. With so many high lords and ladies killed or captured during the War of the Five Kings, their children have had to step up, and Lyanna was obviously taught to be loyal to the Starks from an early age. How will all this play out? I hope to see in Season 6.
CAMERON: Speaking of lines from the books, am I ever glad that “Kill the boy and let the man be born” made it into the show. The show frequently struggles to depict the inner lives of its main characters, something the books do so well due to each chapter being written from their points of view. Most of the characters have mantras that express their fundamental faiths, or ideas they are struggling to accept as true even though they recognize them as sound.
This is especially true of Jon and Daenerys in A Dance With Dragons. Though expressed in slightly different terms—one of Dany’s mantras is “If I look back, I am lost”—Jon and Dany are both being forced to grow up while sitting as leaders of the Castle Black and Meereen, respectively. The connection of the hardships of leading to the pains of growing up makes both characters relatable without divorcing the readers from their suspension of disbelief. It’s very eloquent, really.
So getting this line, which haunts Jon Snow to his last (?) breath, into the show was an excellent touch. It didn’t have to be repeated as often here, either: the big lines in TV shows always leave an impact.
Next: Will Tudor (Olyvar) talks Game of Thrones spoiler control