The Small Council: A look back at the first half of Season 5

Believe it or not, Season 5 of Game of Thrones is halfway done. There’re only five short weeks left to enjoy the show before the nearly nine-month long hibernation process in advance of Season 6 begins. Reactions to the new season have varied wildly. In this special session of the Small Council, the WiC writers sound off on what we’ve liked, and what we’ve loathed, so far.

DAN: Season 5 has definitely been the most challenging of the series from a production standpoint. The first three books in the Song of Ice and Fire series, whatever their faults, are strongly plotted, with patterns of rising and falling action well-suited to a long-form TV show. The last two books are more fragmented, and it’s doubtful that adapting them in a straightforward way would have made for a smooth viewing experience. Instead, the show has gone with a piecemeal approach, adapting what it thinks will work, repurposing stories it thinks are worth salvaging, and discarding the rest. So far, I think this strategy has worked well, although it’s hard to tell just how well before seeing how these storylines pay off in the back half of the season.

Nowhere has the show’s fluid approach to adaptation been more successful than at Winterfell, which is quickly becoming the central location of the season, a role King’s Landing always played in the past. In the books, Sansa has been isolated in the Vale. On the show, she’s reuniting with old friends (or whatever she was to Theon) and making us all nervous about her new engagement.

Likewise, in the books, Brienne and Pod were wandering the countryside aimlessly, but now they’re poised to charge back into the thick of things. And all this attention has done wonders for Ramsay and Roose Bolton, both of whom have developed more character than they had in the books. To top it off, the threat of Stannis’ army hangs over the place like a storm cloud, which ratchets the tension up a few more notches. The snarl of plots around Winterfell is a great example of the producers looking at what they have and intelligently tweaking it to create great drama.

In contrast, some of the more direct adaptations have faltered. Case in point: Dorne hasn’t really proven itself that interesting thus far. I know that the Dornish plot has been changed substantially from the books, but the show’s choice to include it at all strikes me as an act of faith. Unfortunately, the show has had the same problem with Dorne that the books had—it seems too tangential to the main threads.

Season 5 has been deliberately paced, but I think that’s to be expected given the huge shake-ups in the status quo at the end of Season 4. The fact that the producers have taken it slowly, rather than trying to dazzle us with manufactured conflict, reassures me that they have the series’ best interests at heart, and have confidence in the story they’re trying to tell.

It’s certainly an interesting time to be a Game of Thrones fan. What are your guys’ takes on how Season 5 is going?

KATIE: I’ve actually enjoyed Season 5’s slow simmer just as much as any of the action-packed episodes of the past. There’s such a large supporting cast, and there’s always plenty for them to do even if nothing much is actively being done. Season 5 seems to have taken the opportunity to slow things down and concentrate on character development rather than on character death (although we’ve still seen plenty of that).

I think the most notable examples of this are Sansa, Jon, and Stannis. This year, they’ve all taken charge of themselves and their situations, and in doing so their stories have begun to intertwine. Stannis has become a father figure of sorts to Jon, and with Sansa at Winterfell, it’s likely that their worlds will soon collide. As someone who’s seldom cared much for Stannis (who I thought was just so blah) or Jon (the Wall and its inhabitants never held much interest to me), I’ve really enjoyed the exploration of their characters this season—I even look forward to their appearances now. As for my long-standing love affair with Sansa Stark, I’m thrilled to see more fans rooting for her. Her development throughout the series—this season especially—has become a special point of pride for me.

I certainly didn’t expect to come away from the first half of the season with this newfound appreciation for Stannis and Jon, just as I didn’t expect to be disappointed with Dorne. Now, we have five weeks to turn that around, but as of now I’m just feeling underwhelmed after all the Dornish promotion we saw over the past year. The most disappointing thing, I think, was the introduction of the Sand Snakes—we just didn’t learn anything about them. They looked bangin’ and their skills were rad, but it seems their importance to the story hinges on their relationship to Oberyn and nothing else. I get the feeling the Sand Snakes are less characters in their own right and more like plot instruments, as their journey seems dependent on avenging their father’s death. Many characters on the show are driven by revenge to some degree, but we also get a sense of who they are beyond that.

Here’s hoping that Sansa stabs someone, Arya avenges her dancing master (she’s got to run into Meryn Trant sometime, doesn’t she?), and that Dorne lives up to its hype in the back half of the season.

DAVID (RAZOR): I’m on the fence about this season. I feel like I’m on some sort of Westerosi roller coaster where the highs (Drogon appearing twice already, Viserion and Rhaegal tearing a dude in half), are really high, and the lows (Ser Barristan’s implausible death), are really low.  When Episode 1 first aired, I thought that this was going to be the best season in the series thus far, but then it seemed to slowly slide in quality.

I’m not a fan of Jaime and Bronn in Dorne. Want to know why? It’s because they’ve done nothing in five episodes except kill a snake, a horse, and four Dornishmen. Dark Sansa has not lived up to the hype, either. She left the clutches of one master manipulator (Littlefinger) for another (Ramsay Snow Bolton). Except with Ramsay, Sansa has the opportunity to get some serious revenge, and I feel like the show is slowly setting us up for just that, but we’ve had five episodes in a 10-episode season and NOTHING has happened.

I’m also really concerned about Shireen, Selyse, and Melisandre traveling to Winterfell with Stannis. It goes against everything that’s happened in the books, and honestly, I can’t even see the benefit of it all. On that subject, this season has deviated from the books moret han ever before. Don’t get me wrong: I completely understand the need for streamlining the over-abundance of material from A Dance With Dragons—even I can admit that that book was a few hundred pages too long—but there are some characters and plotlines that should have never been altered…NEVER.

Now, I am looking forward to the final five episodes, and I am sincerely hoping we get some answers and concrete plot movers. If Ser Barristan’s death was to get Dany moving with her ultimate goal in going to Westeros, then so be it…get her moving. If creepy Olly’s arc is to help set in motion Jon’s Caesar-moment, then okay, let’s get on with it. I want to see Stannis and Roose meet one on one and may the best man win. I want to see Sansa get devious and bake up some Walda Frey pies. I want Theon to become the Ghost in Winterfell. I want Lady Stoneheart to show up and make Brienne do something…okay sorry about that last part, I got overly excited. And for the Crone’s sake, I want to see some goddamn Others (White Walkers to you Unsullied). Have we just completely forgotten that they even exist? Maybe Hardhome will be the answer to my prayers…only time will tell.

ANI: We’re at the halfway point of Season 5, and all I hear from my friends is how slow it’s going.

And call me a fangirl who can’t see the bad, but every time they do, I’m puzzled. All I can think is that somehow they forgot about Seasons 1, 2 and 3. All they can think about is last season and how it Joffrey offed in the second episode. But last season was an outlier. All Game of Thrones seasons start slow. It’s why people used to compare them to Mad Men. It starts slow, it builds, it puts the pieces into place and just as you’re wondering if anything will actually happen, boom! Episode nine comes along like a 2×4 to the face. The only reason Season 4 didn’t have that rhythm is because it was really Season 3, part 2.

Nothing’s happened? Let’s try Jon’s already Lord Comander, and chopped a guy’s head off. Let’s try Barristan’s dead from Dany’s stupidity. Let’s try Loras is arrested as Cersei’s scheming wheel of fortune turns, and the only question is how long until the wheel runs her over in the process. Tyrion’s already been to Pentos, Volantis, and Valyria in a whirlwind tour of Essos. Compare that to the slow roll down the King’s Road in Season 1, and tell me “nothing” has happened.

The only place that hasn’t gone anywhere yet is Dorne, the reaction to which is alternately amusing and frustrating. Here I’ve spent the last…. how long since Feast For Crows came out? Ten years—TEN YEARS—I have complained and groaned about the Damn Dornish, who are boring and dumb and failures when it comes to plotting or keeping my interest. And now here they come along in the show, and the marketing department has done this big huge push for them, the “they’re dangerous, sexy, devious, and you’ll love them!” campaign. It was so convincing that *I* got excited for Dorne, eager to see how the producers solved the plotting problem. And now I see that reaction to the Sand Snakes’ first appearance was tepid at best and sneering at worst. All I have to say is that the Dornish better start paying dividends next week, or we’ll have to maybe stop and reconsider that perhaps the Dornish don’t work, no matter how you translate them from the page.

CAMERON: Given the pre-premiere buildup of Dorne (and the filming of it in Spain), I didn’t really expect the biggest talking point of the season to be the North, and yet here we are. Obviously, with what we know or can guess from the books up to this point, I knew that there would be much to say on the subject of Jon Snow and the Boltons and Reek and even Sansa, but the streamlining and combining of various storylines just to make the North feel like a place of real conflict is astounding. I think it’s probably my favorite part about the season, and since I spend a lot of time reading what everyone else has to say about the show, I know I’m not alone in this.

Meanwhile, Dorne hasn’t been given nearly as much screentime as I was expecting in the first half of the season. I didn’t expect it to be totally dominant as a location, but I also wasn’t expecting so sparse a commitment, either. I know Dorne is just one subplot among many in Feast and Dance (and I’m pretty sure the Iron Islands subplot, which is evidently cut from the TV show altogether, is more substantive than the Dornish subplot), but it’s a highly eventful one. I’m willing to chalk it up to the need to build up to the big events, given that Jaime and Bronn seem to be taking the place of Ser Aerys Oakheart, but there’s still that cognitive dissonance of having heard so much about filming in Spain versus exactly how much Spain we’re actually seeing on-screen.

It’s also sort of weird to see Stannis suddenly become endearing, but I’ll chalk that up as a positive of doing the story as a TV show. It only took one word and one heartfelt speech for people to join #TeamStannis in droves.

• Published on 05/16/2015 at 12:00 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:04 PM CDT