10 ways Game of Thrones improved on A Song of Ice and Fire

9. Tyrion and Daenerys meeting earlier

Sticking with the infamous “Meereenese Knot,” there’s one other place where the show made a very bold decision that paid off in spades: having Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister meet much more swiftly than in the novels. Because in the novels…they haven’t even met yet!

It’s hard to recall those early days almost a decade ago when A Dance with Dragons was still new, but one particular plot point that I remember bugging me was the fact that, by the end of the 1,000 page novel, Tyrion and Dany still hadn’t crossed paths. That meeting was foreshadowed right from Tyrion’s very first chapter in the book, with Ilyrio Mopatis offering him “fire and blood” and sending him off on a trip to Meereen.

But it isn’t any easy voyage. And while Tyrion does have a lot of adventures throughout Dance, the book ends with him outside Meereen’s gates and Dany back with the Dothraki. I’m not saying George R.R. Martin won’t eventually do the meeting better when he gets there…but it was still a bit of a let down that the book ended without it happening. Think of it as a promise to the reader that went unfulfilled. It would have been fine if it felt intentional, but to me it always felt more like the author ran out of room and just didn’t quite get to the meeting. (Which has been pretty much confirmed.)

The show went a different route, having Tyrion and Daenerys meet as a turning point to kick season 5’s climax into gear. Tyrion’s journey and Daenerys’ struggles to rule Meereen are both shorter and missing elements from Martin’s novels that lent them depth…but in exchange, the show gave us more time with the characters and a more focused story. The moments Daenerys and Tyrion spend together before the coup at Daznak’s Pit are among the best of the season, in part because they deliver on one of the show’s long-held promises: that its disparate plotlines would eventually collide, and it would be awesome. Tyrion and Dany meeting is arguably one of the biggest turning points of the series, and the show delivered it in a way that blindsided even the most diehard fans.

It will go down differently in Martin’s books, to be sure. With all the differences in the situation — Victarion, Barristan Selmy still being alive, Tyrion among the sellswords, Dany not even being in Meereen — we can pretty much rest assured that it will be its own amazing story, a “How many children does Scarlett O’Hara have?” moment, if ever there was one.

But the show gave us this meeting in a fantastic way. Season 5 was where many of the larger deviations from Martin’s source material began, and while there were some places Thrones stumbled, the meeting between Daenerys and Tyrion was not one of them.