Sullied on Unsullied: Did Daenerys make a huge mistake?

Just as the fifth season of Game of Thrones is now underway, our Game of Thrones aftershow, WiC Live, is fully up and running. Each week on WiC Live, cohosts Adam Rady (the one with the beard), Alison Haislip (the one with the hat), and Xavier Brinkman (the one with the accent) will break down the latest episode and give their opinions on what happened, what’s going to happen, what should’ve happened but didn’t, and so on.

In order to keep the show spoiler-free, neither Adam, Alison, nor Xavier have read the books. As a book-reader myself, it’s interesting to watch a group of Unsullied viewers talk about Game of Thrones from an unvarnished perspective, but it’s also stressful, because I know things they don’t, and I have to tell them. I need to weigh in, dammit! To that end, I’m going to address some of the questions they discussed during the show, starting with whether Daenerys made a huge mistake by executing Mossador.

CAUTION: THIS POST WILL CONTAIN BOOK SPOILERS (show spoilers too, depending on whether the show ends up following the books)

Xavier talks about Daenerys having difficulty walking the line between making people like her and enforcing the law. This is also her problem in the books, but the big piece of context the WiC Live team is missing is the fact that the whole Mossador kerfuffle never happened in the books. It was invented purely for the show. Daenerys has plenty of trouble managing the locals in A Dance with Dragons, but her problem is almost exclusively with the Meereenese upper class. She rarely gets on the bad side of the slaves she frees, at least not to the point where they’re rioting in defiance of her.

So, we have to ask ourselves why the show would have Dany run afoul of the freedmen. It’s possible that the producers are trying to set up a scenario where absolutely everyone in the city hates Daenerys, which would inspire her to set out for Westeros. I can’t get behind that idea. If the producers are trying to manufacture such an easy reason for Dany to leave, I don’t see why they bothered getting themselves tied up in the Meereenese knot in the first place. If they didn’t want to explore this story, better to just have Dany bypass Meereen entirely.

Plus, it seems clear that David Benioff and Dan Weiss are committed to telling the Meereen story. They’ve locked up the dragons and introduced characters like Hizdahr zo Loraq, so it seems like we’ll be here for a while. Instead, it seems to me like the show wants to turn the freedmen against Dany so she can try and win them back by opening the fighting pits and marrying Hizdahr zo Loraq. Either that, or the producers wanted to create a conflict that would eat up time until Dany’s plot picks up in earnest, and the freedmen’s anger will be forgotten in a couple of week’s time.

So did Dany make a huge mistake by executing Mossador? Knowing what I know about what’s (probably) to come, I don’t think it matters. Either way, I doubt it will affect the story of how Dany deals with local dissent.

Let me know what you guys think. Did Dany make a tactical error by executing Mossador? And if she did, will it matter in the end?

• Published on 04/22/2015 at 12:02 AM CDT
• Last updated on 04/22/2015 at 12:04 AM CDT