In the next couple of weeks, we’ll wrap up our roundtable discussions of Game of Thrones Season 5 before moving on to the future. First: what was the least effective part of Game of Thrones Season 5?
DAN: It’s no secret that Game of Thrones Season 5 took a bit of a beating among fans, as many viewers called the show out for what they felt was week storytelling and lapses of logic. I suspect that time will be kinder to the season, after the full scope of the story the show is telling becomes clear—I’m already curious about how Season 5 will play when rewatched with adjusted expectations—but that doesn’t excuse some of the year’s missteps.
When talking about Season 5’s weakest plotlines, it would be silly not to mention the goings-on down in Dorne: they blew, more or less. However, the story I was most disappointed with was the one involving the sparrows, the Faith Militant, and the High Sparrow, mostly because I was so looking forward to it and the show failed to deliver.
It wasn’t all bad. For example, Jonathan Pryce was effectively implacable as the High Sparrow—on the surface, he seemed like a kindly grandfather, but he dropped hints that his character’s convictions ran much deeper, hints that the audience picked up even if Cersei didn’t.
Speaking of Cersei, this plotline recovered nicely when she was arrested in “The Gift.” Importantly, that episode also featured a conversation between the High Sparrow and Lady Olenna in which the High Sparrow outlined his egalitarian philosophy. That discussion, in which it became clear that the High Sparrow was a different kind of player, gave shape to the movement that had torn up King’s Landing.
That information should have come a lot sooner, though. When the Faith Militant are raised to power in “Sons of the Harpy,” it’s done with precious little in the way of explanation. They seem to have emerged from out of nowhere for no other reason than to provide the regulars with a new set of obstacles. Game of Thrones is a series where the antagonists, even the vile ones like Joffrey and Ramsay, have multiple dimensions. The sparrows and the Faith Militant didn’t have dimension, and that made it hard for viewers to fear, sympathize with, or even accept them as a legitimate part of the show.
Also, I wasn’t pleased with how the show simplified Cersei’s motivations when it came to the High Sparrow and his followers. In A Feast for Crows, she dealt with them for a number of reasons: she wanted the Faith to forgive the Crown its debt, she figured devout soldiers would be inclined to fight Stannis and his foreign god, and yes, she wanted to screw with the Tyrells. On the show, the last reason is all that motivates her, which makes it a little harder to take her seriously. The show can’t keep all the detail from the books, but it would do itself a favor by honoring their complexity where it can.
The sparrows, the Faith Militant, and the High Sparrow will all be back next year, so there’s still time to flesh them out. With the news that Septon Meribald, a key religious character from the novels, will (very probably) appear in Season 6, Game of Thrones may be well on its way to giving them some needed layering. Let’s hope.
RAZOR: I wanted a good story Dorne but all I got was a “bad pooosey.” Pack it up, let’s all go home, the worst part of Season 5 was that line right there. But, I’m a self-admitted windbag who likes to pontificate endlessly over moot points, so my choice for worst part of Game of Thrones Season 5 was Olly…or to put a bit of a finer point on it, Olly’s stink eye. From the first episode of Season 5, when Jon battered Olly into submission in the Castle Black training yard, the most reviled orphan in all of Westeros began to throw stink eye and shade at Jon with wild abandon.
Not only had Olly killed Jon’s girlfriend, but when Jon was made Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, he made the little shit his personal steward, a position coveted by the other stewards in the Night’s Watch. But Olly was not not satisfied with this, and kept tossing shade Jon’s way.
When Jon returned from Hardhome, obviously exhausted from a fight for his and the wildling’s lives, he gave his little steward a smile of friendship, only to have Olly frown at him like Donald Trump at an all-you-can-eat Mexican buffet. All season long, Olly’s scowling visage was thrown in our faces and I for one grew tired of the heavy-handed foreshadowing. As if we didn’t know Olly would be the one to drive the last dagger home when the time came to kill Jon.
David Benioff and Dan Weiss have done a lot of things right with Game of Thrones, but Olly is not one of them. Originally, the part wasn’t going to be as big. It was Dave Hill, a writer’s assistant, who suggested brining Olly to Castle Black and making him a permanent member of the Night’s Watch, thus setting him up as one of Jon’s murderers. Hill was promoted for the suggestion, but Benioff and Weiss should have fired him on the spot, kicked him off the set, and never let him write for HBO again. This is how much I detest the character of Olly…plus kid’s got a super ugly cry face.
KATIE: While certain storylines—namely the one involving the Faith Militant—were disappointing to me, that had less to do with the plot itself and more with the fact that, as a viewer but not a reader, I was initially lost due to lack of proper exploration. It didn’t take too long to catch up, though, and for the most part I was happy with Season 5 (which does, admittedly, have a little to do with the fact that I can’t compare to the books). But, as mentioned by my colleagues, there is one plot that continues to grate on me: Dorne. What a buzzkill.
With each episode in which we spent time in the formerly elusive Dorne, my faith that the storyline would come to a satisfying conclusion dissipated, bit by excruciating bit. They had all the ingredients for an interesting ride, but failed to deliver. The scenery was fresh, and the costumes flashy enough to be fabulous but not ostentatious; Indira Varma was, as always, a goddess among mere mortals, and Alexander Siddig rocked out his role, so it was disheartening that they had so little to work with. As far as the much-promoted Sand Snakes go, they didn’t stand a chance. If anything, Henwick, Sellers, and Castle-Hughes at least deserved some better lines, especially on a show that’s so often hailed for its masterful dialogue.
If the producers want to salvage this storyline in the future, I can only hope that my as of yet inexplicable suspicion about Trystane ends up justified. It wouldn’t erase the Sand Snakes’ cringe-worthy dialogue, nor would it excuse Jaime and Bronn’s uncharacteristic and sitcom-esque idiocy, but perhaps it would make it so that we could all move on to better things. Alas, for now, I’m sticking to this grudge.
CAMERON: The worst part of the season for me was just seeing how so many plotlines chose the easy way out, sometimes inexplicably. Sending Sansa back to Winterfell and Jaime to Dorne were both interesting choices that allowed the show to continue adapting from the books while maintaining a storytelling structure for the season. But both of those storylines went in directions of seriously questionable taste. Ellaria was already lacking good characterization (in season four she largely represented something Oberyn wanted to fight for, a physical manifestation of his anger and bloodlust), so this season she…gets to replace one of the coolest characters in A Feast for Crows (Arianne Martell) and take the whole plot into dour bitterness. There was no real reason for the Sand Snakes to be so one-dimensional either, but with major characters now divided between Westeros and Essos, there was never going to be enough time to develop them very much. But couldn’t they have just been acting more like sisters and less like Ellaria’s goons? I kind of hate how excited I was for the Dorne plotline now that I’ve actually seen it. I should’ve expected less.
Meanwhile, I’ve only gotten more uneasy with how the Sansa/Ramsay storyline played out as time has passed. Is this really what needed to happen in order to show how Sansa has grown? Wasn’t there another way for her to witness the horror of Theon’s deconstruction that didn’t make me look away from the screen? (Basically, Ramsay ruins everything he touches and he’s just got to go.) Maybe it would have been a little less dramatic for Sansa not to marry Ramsay, but the show has been trying to outdo itself every single year; eventually, you reach a breaking point, and nothing is dramatic anymore. Instead, the show chose to double down on its worst aspects, and it made me much less excited for the next season if these kinds of changes are going to become the norm, just for the sake of topping the previous year.
ANI: Now, I understand that Game of Thrones is not infinite. Unlike GRRM’s imagination, it cannot expand on every plot to the Nth degree. This is a show that had to fit everything in its chosen installment bracket (usually based on the books) into 10 hours a year. And I understand the show is not made of money. It may have the biggest budget of any show every in the history of things (or close to it), but in the end choices have to be made. Do we spend that extra cash on Hardhome wights, or Dany’s dragon ride? Sometimes the calls are tough.
But one call that thoroughly drove me mad this season was the choice to skimp on extras in Dany’s story in Meereen. I know this sounds like kind of an odd choice considering we had terrible fight choreography in Dorne, entire websites quitting the show over the rape of Sansa Stark, plus an entire segment in King’s Landing where Show Watchers literally didn’t get why what was happening happened with the Faith Militant. As one TV blogger is famous for saying, “If you have to explain why this is happening using the books, you’ve failed in your job as a TV show.”
And I understand that removing the endless marriage proposals being thrown at Dany was a decision born of simplification, to cut down on the extra Martells and the random hopefuls from far-off lands, and focus on her inability to manage Meereen. But for me, that ever-growing wave of people coming from all over to see The Mother of Dragons and propose marriage, or deals, or sales, or treaties, or whatever random else filled Dany’s court every day, was an important part of what distracted her from ruling the city. And, just as important: once these people come and see her, NONE OF THEM EVER LEAVE, because none of them thought through how to get home, or that their request might be denied, or put on infinite hold, because they were so focused on just getting to her in the first place.
The daily chaos of Dany’s court was, when I read those scenes, a visual representation of Dany’s inability to control the city. And so to see her on the dais, in a silent tomb of a courtroom, up high and alone, was a jarring juxtaposition every time the episode roulette wheel landed in Meereen. I’m not saying we needed the Life and Times of Quentyn Martell, but we needed something to show how overwhelmed with people demanding things of her every waking minute Dany is supposed to be. Without it, her plotline felt slighted and not as weighty, and her celebrity not nearly as insane as it should. And that, for the arc of the show, was a major loss.
Next: Season 6 spoilers: Lannister are camping out by Riverrun