Metro Column: “Mother’s Mercy” brings the bleakness, but doesn’t feel overstuffed
And WiC’s adventure in legitimate journalism comes to an end. Check out our final column in Metro for the year, where we break down “Mother’s Mercy,” the Game of Thrones Season 5 finale.
If you saw the episode, you may feel a little exhausted. It was an intense, relentless hour of TV that killed more named characters than any other episode of the show. Whether it was too much is an argument for another day, but writers David Benioff and Dan Weiss pulled off a quiet miracle by keeping it from feeling overstuffed.
After all, the two of them had a lot of material to get through. Before the episode aired, I wondered how they were going to string together what was essentially a series of climaxes—the battle between Team Stannis and Team Bolton, Sansa’s escape from Winterfell, Arya’s revenge, Cersei’s walk, and of course, the death of Jon Snow. In “The Dance of Dragons,” last week’s episode, the burning of Shireen was a devastating moment that stole some of the fire from the scene that followed it: Daenerys flying Drogon out of Daznak’s Pit. In “Mother’s Mercy,” Benioff and Wiess kept any of the big moments from stepping on each other by keep their priorities straight.
The longest extended scene, for example, was Cersei’s walk, which lingered on the queen’s embarrassment and shame for an uncomfortably long amount of time. It was the penultimate scene of the episode (not counting the brief scene between Jon, Davos, and Melisandre at the Wall), the same spot occupied by Shireen’s death in “The Dance of Dragons.” However, Cersei’s walk didn’t crush us in quite the way the Shireen scene did, in part because watching Cersei get humiliated is less affecting than watching a child get ritually sacrificed, but also because the producers included a moment of respite at the end, when Qyburn introduced us to Frankengregor. This bit of breathing space helped us relax and regroup before the real shocker of the episode: the assassination of Jon Snow. It was smart pacing in a season that has sometimes struggled with that.
The other climaxes also unfolded smoothly, or at least as smoothly as they could without being given episodes of their own. Arya’s big moment was easy to fit into the episode. It was all about her outburst of rage, so it made sense that her scene with Meryn Trant was brutish and short. The one plotline that was shortchanged was Stannis’. His men, his wife, and Melisandre all left him in incredibly quick succession, and there wasn’t really time for the deterioration to sink in before he marched to his death. At times like this, I wish the seasons could be 11 episodes long—one more hour could have given Stannis’ fall the gravity it deserved, but at least his last words were perfect. “Go on, do your duty.” Ah, Stannis, a stickler for protocol ’til the end.
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