Review Roundup: Season 5, Episode 10 “Mother’s Mercy”

Well, that was certainly a finale. Or maybe it wasn’t, what with all the cliffhangers involved. In any case, it’s time to take one last lap around the critiquing centers of the internet to see what people had to say about the last episode of Game of Thrones for the year, “Mother’s Mercy.”

On Dorne, “where story goes to die”:

Let’s just rip this bandage off right now: Dorne was a flat embarrassment for everyone. While some found value in the Jaime/Myrcella scene (at least before it turned tragic), most of what little conversation Dorne generated this week was mainly about just how terrible it was. Myles McNutt, the A.V. Club’s book-reader reviewer (possibly for the last year ever?), notes that the decision was rooted in having to choose one tangential storyline over another (the Iron Islands, which we’re apparently still getting next year):

But it felt at times like they regretted the choice almost immediately, having either misjudged the dynamics they wanted to explore or—more likely—struggling in the midst of breaking the season to give enough time and attention to make the Dorne story work when they knew in their heart of hearts that it was at the end of the day one of Martin’s substantive tangents that might not be worth diverting from the locations that resonate most in this story.

Tim Surette at TV.com was a bit more straightforward in describing his feelings, beginning with “I would rather watch Stannis fry up a bag of kittens than spend any more time with the Sand Snakes” and then promptly summarizing most peoples’ feelings about the whole Bronn/Tyene thing: “This didn’t work, Game of Thrones. In fact, it was pretty gross!”

Elsewhere, Myrcella’s death felt so rushed by so many that it didn’t manage to have a significant impact—an issue that affected most of the episode, due to the sheer number of cliffhangers.

On Sansa, Theon, and the most disappointing Chekhov’s corkscrew:

More than one person pointed out the similarities between Theon/Sansa’s leap of freedom and the one in Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. It may have been intentional and points to a positive, not-dead ending for both characters; it may have just been coincidence (lots of characters leap off of cliffs to save themselves from otherwise certain death; there’s even a movie out in theaters right now that does this). Regardless, I don’t think there will be any musical interludes in Sansa and Theon’s futures.

But there were concerns about Sansa’s agency from Vulture’s Nina Shen Rastogi and Nerdist’s Alicia Lutes. Here’s Nina:

I wanted her to do more than face death (in the shape of Myranda, bearing a bow and arrow) with a stoic, “If I’m going to die, let it happen while there’s still some of me left.” […] It’s not just that I think active Sansa is better than passive Sansa — though I do think that, in an episode that was all about characters dealing with consequences, it was unfortunate that Sansa didn’t even get that kind of agency — but that growth and change are more interesting than stasis and repetition.

Alicia is a bit more direct in her critique: “Though we will say this: the feminist killjoy in us really wishes it was Sansa who’d had more agency in this situation. Why must she always wait for the man to be the hero/one of action?” This also represents the underlying criticisms of how Sansa’s story has been handled this season; that’s a conversation that is sure to spill over into the coming weeks, as viewers wind down and process the season from the other side of the finale.

On Arya “The Bride” Stark, who must now learn to wiggle her big toe (sort of):

Quentyn Tarantino was certainly felt in the Meryn Trant scene, both explicitly (James Hibberd name-drops O-Ren Ishii) and implicitly (Hitfix’s Alan Sepinwall investigates the nature of justice and revenge in the episode; both are subjects of great interest to Tarantino and his films).

Nina Shen Rastogi also found an echo of Macbeth in Arya’s punishment, acknowledging that it was ultimately a logical conclusion:

It was hard to watch Arya, one of the most beloved characters on the show (and, yes, still a child), undergo such a terrifying transformation. But a brutality has been building in her for many seasons now, and this seemed like a fitting outcome of that.

But the buildup to Arya going blind left most people scratching their heads going “Uhh, what the heck just happened?” Or else they made comparisons to Arrested Development, like the A.V. Club’s Unsullied recapper Erik Adams and book-reader Julie Hammerle at ChicagoNow.

On Cersei’s Walk of Atonement Shame

The sympathy meter went off the charts this week as one of the book’s most famous scenes finally made its way to HBO.

Matt Fowler at IGN appreciated the emotion Lena Headey brought to her performance and also found a meta-textual element to her walk:

Watching her try to remain strong at first, thinking she can make it through the ordeal with her pride mostly intact and then watching her melt down into tears and blood. It’s also quite apropos that this season of Game of Thrones ended with a huge scene featuring outrage and public shaming considering how many times it’s come under fire this year on social media.

Alyssa Rosenberg at the Washington Post also noted the meta elements of the scene:

This is nakedness as violence towards a character we know, if not love, rather than lovingly photographed nudity, presented for the consumption of both corrupted characters like the former High Septon (Paul Bentley) and those of us watching at home.

That leads us perfectly into the question of gender and misogyny, which is what’s really at the heart of this scene. Rolling Stone’s Sean T. Collins:

The gendered epithets hurled at her along rotten vegetables and buckets of shit demonstrate that as a woman, her fate was guaranteed to be worse than if she were a man. You certainly didn’t see her cousin Lancel, with whom she committed the crime, subjected to the same fate. Game showed us the screeching, leering face of patriarchy in all its ugliness and wouldn’t let us look away.

And here’s Laura Hudson at Wired, who highlights the scene as a snapshot of misogyny in practice:

In a certain sense, Cersei’s punishment is the female experience writ large: the cruelty and indignity of being a woman surrounded by people who feel entitled to control, judge and demean you on the basis of your body. I haven’t always loved Cersei, but real talk: I hope she heads back to the Great Sept with an army and burns it to the ground.

Lena Headey’s performance alone won a lot of people over to Cersei’s side for the excruciating ten-minute (!) walk, which means this is a really great time for me to convince even more people to watch Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles.

And Jon Snow?

If you ask the people who make the show, he’s dead. If you ask the people who write about the show, he ain’t dead. Certainly the latter is a widely-held book-reader theory, but… well, look. We’re going to be talking about this for another year, and book-readers have been discussing it since 2011, and this scene, the one that was allegedly supposed to “break the internet,” didn’t generate nearly as much conversation as anything else in the finale, in part because of how rushed everything felt. So here’s a parting gift as we venture into the land of thinkpieces: the most sympathetic view of Olly (a character who now has a subreddit devoted exclusively to hating him, an achievement not even Angel‘s Connor can claim) from TIME’s James Poniwozik:

To us, of course, Jon is among the closest to a legitimate hero Game of Thrones has, self-sacrificing, principled, able to risk body and soul for a larger good. But to Olly? He’s the man who took in the very people who butchered his parents before his eyes–a loss no better to him, after all, than the sacrifice of Shireen was to us. Think how badly you wanted payback against Stannis: then make yourself an orphan boy, with your new Night’s Watch brothers echoing that Jon is a traitor–and put a knife in your hand.

Try telling that to these folk, James. (But really please don’t.)

Other Quotes of Note:

“It is perhaps worth noting here that a remarkable proportion of the characters that Benioff and Weiss have invented or expanded for the show are sadists (Ramsay, Locke, Myranda, Meryn Trant) or female victims of horrific violence (Ros, Talisa). Seriously, guys. Enough.” —Christopher Orr, The Atlantic

“The Dothraki warriors ride around in swirling circles. Dany is on foot, and the men who have discovered her are mounted on horses. The effect is that of a whirlpool, and Dany, a failed mother three times over, appears to be sinking into it.” —Alyssa Rosenberg, WashPo, highlighting this scene as an inversion of the ending of Season 3’s “Mhysa.”

“Honestly, if the next season of the show is just a Meereenese version of The West Wing starring these two champs, I would not be upset.” —Laura Hudson, Wired, summarizing everyone’s feelings on Tyrion and Varys being together again.

• Published on 06/18/2015 at 9:30 AM CDT
• Last updated on 06/18/2015 at 9:30 AM CDT