autarkh

Let me preface my comments by noting that I am not a purist about changes from the books in the TV series. I recognize that significant editing and reworking of the story is necessary to fit within the 10 episode constraint. In fact, except for Dorne and the final scene of the last episode, I had generally been enjoying Season 5 quite a bit. Unfortunately, the lows last night are so low that they tend to overshadow everything else. The Sand Snakes “Attack.” Others have already mentioned how the b-movie aesthetic of the Sand Snakes’ first appearance didn’t exactly inspire confidence in D&D’s ability to come up with a compelling abrogated Dorne plotline (see Exhibit A, Obara’s insipid rhetorical question—“You must choose: Doran’s way and peace, or my way and war?”). That said, I still had hopes for Dorne at least being passable. The scene where the four horseman find Bronn and Jaime was pretty good. I could overlook the Sand Snakes’ bad acting if they were chosen based on their ability to convincingly pull off the fight scenes of a more action-adventure-oriented story arc. What we got instead was rushed, cheesy, and utterly forgettable. There was no sense of urgency or investment in the fight. And the cinematography was just terrible. What were D&D thinking? Seriously. Why even bother with the Dorne story if telling it seems like a chore? Why not chop it out altogether and spend more time on the stuff that actually matters? Even the siege of Riverrun would have been a lot more engaging. The gratuitous Sansa rape scene. Look, I get that Sansa has been merged into Jeyne Poole’s character, and that much worse happens to Jeyne in the books. What purpose does it serve here though? If D&D were going to alter the story, why not alter it in a way that builds on Sansa’s erstwhile accrual of independence and self-sufficiency rather than planting hints of that transformation in the very same episode (the ”you don’t frighten me” scene) only to swat it down in the cruelest way imaginable. Everyone already knows what a psychopath Ramsey is and loathes him for it. The threat of what he might do would build just as much—if not more—suspense than seeing him actually do it (see the dinner scene in the last episode). I’m not saying that depicting a gruesome event can’t ever serve a legitimate narrative purpose. Even as a book reader, I was still shocked watching Talisa Stark get stabbed repeatedly in the womb (particularly given that my wife was pregnant), but I can't argue the Red Wedding didn't make the books and show better. I’m just pointing out that here, in this specific instance, it did nothing to advance the plot or show us any aspect of the characters we didn’t already know. So why do it at all? And if you're going to do it, why put the focus on Theon, thereby implicitly making this scene more about his vicarious trauma than Sansa’s horrific and very real direct trauma? I'm not going to stop watching the show because of this one episode. But the mere fact that even it crosses my mind reveals the extent of D&D’s loss of credibility with me last night.