How Game of Thrones Season 5 Has Readied Us For Dorne

Over the last few weeks there has been an onslaught of Game of Thrones news, starting around the time the second trailer dropped during the surprise HBO Now announcement a few weeks ago. When you’re drinking from a fire hose like this, it’s hard to catch everything as it whizzes by your head, let alone think too deeply about the things people are saying about the show.

But one thing that came out during the big Entertainment Weekly deluge stuck with me. It’s something I haven’t been able to shake since I first read it: the news that showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss nearly cut Dorne completely from Season 5.

This news was tucked away in the middle of a wide-ranging interview with Benioff and Weiss, plus producer Bryan Cogman, in which they talked about where all the characters we knew and loved stood on the cusp of Season 5. I pulled it out at the time because it seemed like a crazy idea: “How could you cut Dorne?”

Except….

I remember when A Feast For Crows was released back in 2005. It had been five long years since we’d last left the world of Westeros (Though not that long since my last reread. Years of exposure to the Wheel of Time fandom had trained me to always marathon the previous novels just before the new one arrived.) Much had happened in my life since A Storm of Swords had come home with me in 2000, when I experienced the Red Wedding, Joffrey’s death, Tyrion’s revenge, and that second-to-last page reveal where Lysa desperately reminded Littlefinger that it was she who had written that letter to Catelyn all the way back in the first book AT HIS BEHEST. Since then, I’d gotten married, divorced, moved from major city to major city, and was deep into a career that had nothing to do with writing. In short, I was ready to find out what the next stage was for everyone—especially for Jon Snow, Dany, Tyrion, and Bran.

And then they weren’t there. There was no warning.

Instead, I was rudely shoved into a desert world, a hot and hazy place where the only relief was the Water Gardens, where naked children ran about in pools and an old man named Doran sat in a chair and did nothing. I found myself confusedly wandering about Sunspear, and put up with Doran’s oddly ditzy daughter Arienne’s plotting and planning, which anyone in their right mind could tell would end in disaster. Likewise, by the halfway point I began asking myself why was I reading about these Ironborn when it was clear this was a family that would never rule, and were basically dithering about while dragons grew and winter came. And while I certainly got a whole dose of Cersei—plus Jaime, Brienne, and Sam—the characters I had bought the book for were gone. My resentment of these two new worlds only grew when I reached the end of the book and realized that this was all there was.

If someone had told that Ani that Dorne was cut from the Game of Thrones TV show, she’d have said, “Thank the gods, old and new.” And she wasn’t alone. This may not be a view shared by the readers around here, but the book-reading friends I had back then were just as irritated as I was by these characters from another series who came in and squatted on chapters that should have belonged by rights to Tyrion, Dany, and the dragons. We referred to these interlopers as The Damn Dornishmen and The Idiot Ironborn, and we wanted them to leave. I’ll bet that Benioff and Weiss knew this. So it should come as no surprise that, when it came time for them to streamline Books 4 and 5, one of their first thoughts was to remove the Dornish and Ironborn plotlines altogether, and to stick to the characters we knew and loved.

Why and when they changed their mind concerning Dorne is something I would dearly love to learn in a future interview. (And why they didn’t on the Ironborn is another one.) Because although they included Oberyn in Season 4 (there was no way around that—he was too integral to the plot), there was a sense that they didn’t realize just what a popular character he would end up being. And although the show spotlighted the marquee fight between The Mountain and The Viper in episode 8, it didn’t actually take up that much of the episode’s time. This was not Joffrey’s wedding, where the full back half of the episode was dedicated to a single death. This was not the shocking deaths visited upon us in the ninth episodes of Seasons 1 and 3. This was more about Tyrion and his ill luck than it was about Oberyn.

Except, as it turned out, it wasn’t. Oberyn’s death didn’t just deliver Red Wedding-level shock and horror to the unspoiled fans; it eclipsed the big episode that followed at Castle Black, which was clearly supposed to be a “Blackwater”/Red Wedding-level event. By that time, it must have been obvious to the producers that there was no way to do Season 5 without Dorne.

And so we began to be groomed.

My calendar of events from last year starts the clock on May 23rd, 2014. That was when it was first leaked that producers were going to cast Dornish characters. From there it was All Dorne, All The Time until the San Diego Comic Con casting announcement. All the filming news seemed to be about the new Spanish locations being added for Dorne. And though the Alcazar of Seville, a Spanish palace, was easier to lock down as a filming location than Fort Knox, the show not only made sure to release pictures that showed Jaime in Dornish attire, but video as well. For a show that works hard to keep spoilers under wraps, this amounted to a deliberate stoking of fans’ interest in the new storyline. (Did you know anything about Hardhome before the A Day In The Life special? No, you did not.) The extra exposure to Dorne filled us book-readers in on a huge deviation from the books, and it prepared the Unsullied for a new location and an entirely new set of characters. It was a deliberate choice to keep us excited and interested, and it worked.

If only book readers had been given the same warning back in 2005.

• Published on 03/31/2015 at 2:00 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT