(Book Spoilers) The Show will lose Unsullied viewers over Jon's stabbing

[Mr Smith]

I went into our final episode of the season with a heavy heart. This season has been on a downhill spiral, and for me Episode 9 had confirmed everything I had feared about the direction the show was taking. Tonight however, they managed to hit a new low, and one that will have ramifications far beyond disollusioning book readers (who were their core audience to begin with, but that's another gripe altogether).

The reason, to put it simply, is that they completely ruined Jon's stabbing. To everyone watching (and I watched with a large group of Unsullied) tonight's episode ended with Jon's death. Not his stabbing, where we're left with a cliffhanger, unsure whether or not he will survive, but clearly and emphatically with his death. Now I know D&D are pulling a bit of mis-direction here, and waiting until next season to throw shade on Jon's supposed demise, but that doesn't help if they don't give the viewers a reason to come back and watch the next season.

To understand why this is such a big risk, you have to look at the episode as a whole. What really happened to get you excited? A battle between two characters you've been made to hate (Ramsay and Stannis), the apparent death of a character who's had his best and most important season yet (Jon), another pit-stop for Dany with no proper meaning conveyed, making her arrival at Westeros less and less likely all the time, Tyrion ruling a city everyone is sick of, and Arya going blind. Now there's a lot more going on within each of those events, but D&D's inability to capture those means that ultimately, the show just feels like its going nowhere. It was hardly an uplifting finale. And when you've got an episode like that, then you need to provide something that makes the audience thirsty for more. Which brings us back to Jon.

You can only play the same trick so many times. Ned dying, that was brilliant, unexpected, and unprecedented for TV. It framed Game of Thrones as as edgy and different. The Red Wedding further emphasised that, and reminded us that no good deed goes unpunished in the show. But now we've reached Season 5, and you can't do the same thing a third time. Jon's stabbing while as shocking as the Red Wedding, also needed to be different. It needed to be quick and chaotic, without giving the viewer time to process what's really going on, and then, at the last moment, giving them some indication that this time, its a little more ambiguous. They did none of those things, and instead, dragged it out as long as possible, with the sad Stark music as a backdrop seemingly confirming that this is in fact Jon's farewell. Once is shocking and edgy. Twice is devastating. Three times isn't clever anymore, and is simply the show resting on its laurels. It makes it look like they're out of ideas. For an Unsullied, its not exciting anymore. It's not rewarding. It's just discouraging.