Should Game of Thrones have cut Lady Stoneheart?

George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels tell famously complex stories with thousands of characters and obsessive attention to detail. Unsurprisingly, HBO couldn’t fit in everything when it adapted the books as Game of Thrones. It was inevitable that some stuff would be cut.

But was it the right stuff? There are things the show cut that fans would rather be left in, including one Lady Stoneheart. In this article, I’d like to look at why this character was cut and whether it was a good idea.

Who is Lady Stoneheart?

Everyone reading this probably knows who Lady Stoneheart is, but just for the sake of completeness, let’s have a brief recap. Catelyn Stark (played by Michelle Fairley on the show) is killed at the Red Wedding, in the back half of A Storm of Swords. That’s where the TV show leaves her. But in the books, her story continues. Her body, flung into a river by the Freys, is eventually dragged on shore by Nymeria, Arya’s direwolf. That’s where it’s found by the Brotherhood Without Banners. Their leader, Beric Dondarrion, bends over the body and kisses it back to life, whereupon Catelyn rises as Lady Stoneheart, a frightful wraith consumed with the desire to punish those who wronged her family. She takes over the Brotherhood and begins to cut a bloody swath across the Riverlands, hanging Freys by the wagonload.

Sounds pretty metal, right? So why was this character cut from Game of Thrones? We’ve yet to hear a complete explanation from anyone working on the show (or at least, not one that strikes me as the whole truth), although fans have certainly asked. The closest we’ve come is what “The Children” director Alex Graves told Entertainment Weekly back in 2014, after season 4 had wrapped:

"But to bring back Michelle Fairley, one of the greatest actresses around, to be a zombie for a little while — and just kill people? It is really sort of, what are we doing with that? How does it play into the whole story in a way that we’re really going to like? It just didn’t end up being a part of what was going to happen this season."

I think that’s a little dismissive of the Lady Stoneheart character. We don’t have many scenes with Stoneheart in the books (so far), but the ones we do have are pregnant with dread. If the show cared to include this plot, I’m sure the team could have done it in a respectable way that comes off as terrifying rather than tired.

But clearly, they didn’t want to do it. Why not? I doubt there’s any one reason, but let’s start with the proposition that showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss seemed less comfortable with traditional fantasy elements than George R.R. Martin. Sure, these elements are included on Game of Thrones – dragons have literally fought zombies on this show, for heaven’s sake — but where Martin likes to include fantasy touches even at the margins of his story, Benioff and Weiss prefer to keep things a little more grounded.

This means that when it came time to cut things, the fantastical stuff was often the first to go. In the novels, most of the Stark children are able to possess and control — or “warg” into — their direwolves, whether consciously or otherwise. Onscreen, only Bran Stark has this ability. The role of Quaithe, the mysterious shadowbinder who appears to Daenerys is visions, is drastically reduced. Tyrion’s hallucinogenic river journey to Meereen is cut short, the Red Priest Moquorro doesn’t appear, and so on. Lady Stoneheart may be another casualty of this storytelling instinct.

Lady Stoneheart in A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons

Things might be different if Stoneheart were crucial to the story. After all, Benioff and Weiss resurrected Jon Snow after his death, but how could they not? Jon had a lot more to do after he died, so they couldn’t very well leave him a corpse.

Stoneheart is different. Although things may change in Martin’s final two books — The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Springs — as they stand now, Stoneheart just…hasn’t done much. We’re told many stories in A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, from Jon Snow assuming command of the Night’s Watch to Cersei botching her rule of King’s Landing to Daenerys struggling to maintain control of Meereen to Tyrion journeying across Essos. These plotlines and many others besides are pretty far removed from the Riverlands, where Stoneheart is killing characters we don’t know or particularly care about. She’s appeared only twice, once at the end of Storm and again in Feast, where she presents Brienne with the horrible choice of killing Jaime Lannister or dying. It’s a strong moment, but not one on which this tale turns.

Game of Thrones was telling a sprawling story and, unlike Martin, was working on a clock – it couldn’t slow down too much lest it risk the younger actors aging out of their roles, the crew getting other jobs, or audiences losing interest. Benioff and Weiss may have looked at the Lady Stoneheart story and wondered if it was worth the trouble of including when there was no guarantee of payoff and they had so much else to get to. “[T]hey only have 10 hours per season,” Fairley told EW way back when. “They have got to keep it dramatic and exciting, and extraneous stuff along the way gets lost in order to maintain the quality of brilliant show.”

It was for the best that Game of Thrones cut Lady Stoneheart

And although I know many fans feel otherwise, I think they were right. Even as written in the books, I don’t think Stoneheart adds enough to the narrative to justify the price Martin pays to have her in the mix. A Song of Ice and Fire has a lot of ground to cover, and for me, the Stoneheart sections don’t feel weighty or consequential enough. (I could talk here about the problem of bloat in both Feast and Dance, but that’s a topic for another article.) Although we can’t be sure, I suspect that the opening scene of Game of Thrones season 7, where Arya wipes out the Freys, is the show’s nod to Stoneheart’s arc, and while I think Benioff and Weiss could have taken a bit more time with that, I appreciate its efficiency and power.

I also think Stoneheart devalues the idea of resurrection. A Song of Ice and Fire is famous for its willingness to kill characters, but it pulls its punches in a couple instances, most notably with Beric Dondarrion, Lady Stoneheart and — if the show can be believed, and I think it can — Jon Snow. In a narrative where anyone can be resurrected, death loses its power to create tension; comic books have had this problem for a long time, with characters being killed and brought back so often that death ceases to mean anything. To be clear, A Song of Ice and Fire doesn’t have nearly that big of an issue — resurrections is still rare and death has plenty of sting — but if Martin can bring Catelyn Stark back only to strand her on the sidelines, you start thinking it could happen to anyone, and that I don’t like.

Taking all this together — Benioff and Weiss wanting to keep the story grounded, keeping resurrections to a minimum, Stoneheart not having a huge part in the narrative, and the show having to prioritize what they can fit in one season of television — we start to see why the producers chose to cut this fan-favorite character. Personally, I think it was the right call. But what about you?

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