The Small Council: What stood out most to you about the Season 5 trailer?

Welcome back to The Small Council, where our staff and contributors give quick answers to the pressing questions about Game of Thrones! This week, we welcome new staff member David Harris as well as Scott Andrews of our Words are Wind feature to the Council. The question this week: After our questions for Unsullied and readers, what was the most striking thing about the Season 5 trailer to you?

Scott Andrews: Littlefinger telling Sansa to “avenge them.” Even book readers can’t say what’s in store for Sansa this season. I always hoped that Baelish would turn Sansa into a master of the Game of Thrones so she could take down the Freys, the Boltons, and maybe even the Lannisters. The show gave us hints that the storyline was heading that way, and these two words are strong evidence of that.

Littlefinger clearly covets the throne–and every king needs a queen. What better queen than the daughter of the woman he loved, trained by him to be as devious and cold-blooded as himself? Backed by the armies of the Vale and Sansa’s last name, they could rally families against the corrupt capital. It’s a solid plan, but somehow I doubt their plotting will be so straightforward. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for those two, especially since I imagine Sansa will eventually break away from him and forge her own path. But we just don’t know — and for a book reader that is very exciting!

We also look at the exotic lands outside the capital, Margaery’s dresses, and a major theory apparently dissolved by the trailer…read on!

Rowan Kaiser: Moving past the plot information, or lack thereof, the thing that jumps out at me about the Season 5 trailer is how exotic it all seems. The first four seasons almost always took place in a Western European mileu–even Dany, constantly on the move, was more tourist than resident of Essos. But now she’s settled into Meereen, Tyrion and Arya are in the Free Cities, Jaime, Bronn and Ellaria are headed to Dorne (an amalgamation of Spain, North Africa, and the Levant), and even Jon is shown dealing with the Viking-like Wildlings instead of the more conventional hiearchies of the Night’s Watch or Stannis’ royal court.

So the trailer is filled with symbols signifying exotic opposition to the “Christendom” of the Seven Kingdoms we’ve spent most of our time in. The masks of the Sons of the Harpy call to mind the Persian Immortals from 300, the most recent depiction of the original “clash of civilizations,” while there are also Saracen-looking riders shown in a quick other scene. Snakes, often used to symbolize the Orient, are all over–Varys and Tyrion dodge one, Cersei receives on, a young woman with double brains sways sinuously, a Sand Snake uses a whip (hardly a conventional weapon!) to pull up a barrel .

This may be Game of Thrones‘ best chance since the pilot to correct perception that it stereotypes non-Western civilizations, but it’s a difficult process. We’ll see if they can pull it off.

Ani Bundel: As I obsessively worked my way through the trailer, pausing every quarter second to catch a screen grab of the next image, I hit Margaery and Tommen’s wedding. Oh look, I said, Margaery’s getting married again. She keeps *doing* that. Is Margaery wearing….gold? Lannister gold?

When it comes to dressing characters in their house colors, the Game of Thrones costume team isn’t always so faithful. Though the Lannister siblings have a tendency towards the red and gold colors of their House and the Starks (with the exception of Sansa) all live in a world of wolfish tones in brown grey and black, the Tyrells aren’t all green and gold like their House. They wear blue. Greenish blue, but blue all the same. Even Mace, when he finally showed up only to be twice as useless as promised, wore blue. I thought it very telling that despite pledging herself to Joffrey at the top of last season, at the fateful Purple Wedding, Margaery didn’t change her colors, marrying her evil prince resplendent in a very light blue, worked with Tyrell roses (and thorns.) She might be marrying the Lannister, err, Baratheon clan, but she was planning to remain herself despite it.

Which is why seeing her in head-to-toe gold for Tommen’s wedding is so striking. Said color palette change was only confirmed by the promotional pictures that followed, as Margaery was once again wearing solid gold, more even than Cersei. Margaery thus far has shown herself to be a skillful game player. This choice to square herself directly with her new husband can only be deliberate, and suggests that we’ve only just begun to see just how skilled an opponent Cersei will be finding herself playing against inside the walls of The Red Keep.

By the way Scott, take a second look at Sansa in the trailer. They’re making her up to resemble Catelyn big time. I don’t think that’s an accident.

Cameron White: I’m always interested in how the Thrones season trailers come off as standalone pieces in their own right: what aspects of the show were deemed so important that the trailer deliberately pulled dialogue quotes and striking images together just to show us ahead of time what was coming? So for this Small Council bit, I went back and rewatched (or watched, in the case of S1’s “Fear and Blood” trailer) the other primary season trailers for the show. There are two things that stick out to me about Season 5’s trailer: one thing that hasn’t really changed since the beginning, and one thing that has.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the use of heavy-sounding quotes. These most often come from Varys–his “three great men and a sellsword” riddle forms the backbone of S2’s trailer themes, and here in Season 5 he is more openly declaring his intentions, with Tyrion in tow. They also typically come from Dany, who was voted Most Likely To Make A Chilling Statement And/Or Sweeping Ultimatum at her high school. Here, she makes the claim that she’s going to “break the wheel”, which follows logically from her “old world/new world” dichotomy in the Season 4 trailer. But this may in fact be a bridge too far, as the final shot of the Harpy statue falling from the Pyramid of Meereen symbolizes (perhaps a bit too bluntly). Littlefinger’s presence is increasing, too, and given the question marks surrounding Sansa/Littlefinger’s storyline this year, it’s interesting to see the trailer continue to play up the mentor/student relationship that was seeded during Season 4.

What has changed is the trailer’s efforts to radiate away from the politics of King’s Landing. Cersei is almost always there in the trailer to provide a scathing rebuke of some sort (“Price of Our Sins” notwithstanding), and Tyrion is usually a part of the King’s Landing proceedings as well. But with Tyrion on the run and Cersei openly defying her father (albeit before his untimely death), the story in Westeros’s capitol is a bit fractured. And indeed, the Season 5 trailer is somewhat lacking in any notable exterior shots that show off the grandeur of King’s Landing. In fact, the primary focus is on Essos, the North, and Dorne–three areas where the story is about to get very complicated, politically speaking. It’s not to say that Cersei or Margaery won’t be getting good stuff this year (hell, it was a nice surprise to see Olenna in the trailer even); rather, the trailer seems purposefully set on emphasizing the elements of the upcoming season that will be new and fresh, rather than continuing to shine a light on what we already know will be a twisted Shakespearean drama.

David Harris: Breaking down the trailer in GIFs really allowed me to dissect each scene, and the one that sent chills up and down my spine was the dragon flame. When last we saw Dany and her dragons, Rhaegal and Viserion, she was leading them into the vault, because she feared she could no longer control them. I still can’t forget the screams of the two dragons as they realized they were being locked in the dark, abandoned by their mother…it actually made me sad.

That scene of Dany, peering into the dark, with a dragon starring back and then breathing fire, makes me wonder at what context we will be seeing Daenerys’ children, this season. Will we see Rhaegal and Viserion escape and claim homes in the pyramids of Meereen? How large will they be in Season 5? What role will the missing Drogon play?

Yi Li: When the trailer rolled past the title card, I could practically hear the hearts of hundreds of Tumblr and Reddit theorists dropping dropping. With a single comment from Varys, Game of Thrones all but ensured that yet another character would not be appearing on the show—and this one was, if we were to believe the hints of the book so far, slated to have a critical role in the story’s endgame.

Not so.

Game of Thrones is by now known for frustrating, disappointing, and tantalizing book readers on the ways it deviates from the books almost as much as it’s known for destroying the dreams of the Unsullied. I mean, yes, some book readers may still be heartbroken over one particular omission late last season or the replacement of a certain Martell.  But this may have been the very first time Game of Thrones gave us something of a major spoiler for the books.

And it won’t be the last. Even if I’m wrong this time, in a few months, the show will have casually rolled through at least a few climaxes still left hanging at the end of A Dance for Dragons. The show is entering an entirely new phase and if the confident way they handled this particular reveal is any indication, David and Dan aren’t the least bit trepidatious.

Personally, I relish the prospect. The show has made it clear that even if we end up at roughly the same place we do in the books, the road there is going to be totally different. If GRRM and D&D are always accused of being too eager to do away with the characters we love, here is a chance to see them live twice. Bring on the revelations.

• Published on 02/06/2015 at 12:00 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:06 PM CDT