Greetings, citizens. On the one year anniversary of the oh-let’s-call-it-divisive finale of GAME OF THRONES, I found myself embroiled in some fresh internet squabbles about the final season(s) of the show. I find myself in a rather lonely position in such debates, in that I agree with the general consensus that it lost its footing to a degree once it moved past the established source material of published books, and the final two seasons were easily the weakest, but lack the deep sense of betrayal that so many seem to have taken from those final years. Much less the personalized animosity toward showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss, which feels flat out ludicrous to me. They definitely made missteps, which could be all the more aggravating to me because they seemed so amateurish and wholly avoidable after years of pulling off harder, more complicated stuff so well, But that didn’t “expose” them as total hacks or frauds who never should have been handed the keys to this kingdom in the first place, as the refrain I have heard so frequently over the last year has maintained. Rather, they seem like artists who took on a monumental task, knocked some of it out of the parts, stumbled in other places, and struggled the most with the hardest part of any Epic Fantasy Saga, which is bringing it all to a satisfying close. I don’t especially hold this against them for two reasons, the first being that the difficulty of bringing this especially knotty and sprawling beast of an Epic Saga in for a landing had not just proved too much for them, but the mastermind himself whose work they were cribbing from in the “good” seasons. If there were a plethora of easy and elegant way to go from where they started to the points they were mandated to end, GRR Martin himself would not be still struggling to push out a sixth and seventh book to close the series almost two decades after the last volume was published.
The other, probably bigger reason that I don’t hate on Benioff & Weiss so much for fumbling the ending is that I have been a total mark for Epic Sagas since I was a kid. So I came to GAME OF THRONES as a veteran of multiple STAR WARS trilogies, THE MATRIX sequels, THE DARK TOWER and various other epic tomes from Stephen King, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, LOST, MASS EFFECT, the HYPERION CANTOS, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, the DARK KNIGHT, the SPIDER-MAN and multiple X-MEN trilogies, the ALIEN and TERMINATOR series… Some of these performed markedly better than others in the home stretch, but in aggregate they had trained me to just expect that the ending was not going to be my favorite part of the story.
| It ain't perfect, but it's....better than the end of THE STAND. |
Anyway, in the course of the latest argument, someone made an offhand mention that their preferred ending would have been much more apocalyptic, with
the White Walkers conquering much of Westeros before finally being defeated and
leaving the survivors to decide if they want to continue to their political
squabbles amongst the ashes. I had a
knee-jerk dismissal to this particular suggestion, as it completely upturns the entire
thematic basis of the story’s ending; it’s exactly what people mean when they
talk about criticizing a work for what it is not, rather than what it
is. But it got me thinking about my own
gripes about the ending, which are almost entirely logistical/mechanical
instead of conceptual (i.e. I think Dany turning evil is brilliant, but hate
how she has to become an oblivious idiot to lose a dragon to Euron). This got me idly pondering about what sort of
tweaks I could make to “fix” the show and make it closer to my platonic ideal of itself. This turned into a rabbit
hole I couldn’t stop tumbling down, as it became an elaborate sort of
Jenga game where, if you move that plotline from S6 up to S5, then you have to
look for something in S5 that can be removed or excised to make room for it,
and then does that effect how things in another plotline develop? Is it acceptable to move Cersei’s Walk Of
Shame or the Battle Of The Bastards to the beginning of the following season,
or do their significance require them to remain finales? And so forth.
As a message board post ballooned into blog post, and then over the course of weeks, to several, I think I finally did land on a remixed version of the
back half of the show that would flow better and provides better justification for
some crucial character decisions, while still getting everything and everyone to essentially the same places. I'll detail it here, but wanted to state up front that to the
extent there is any point to doing this, it is not to shame or “expose” the actual
writers or showrunners for their supposed incompetence. Because if there’s one type of
criticism I can’t abide, it’s the sort of hectoring indignation that so, so
many youtubers and such adopt to exhaustively rail against the horrendous awfulness of the people who made the thing they fell intensely in
love with (before that thing hurt their feelings).
If the version contemplated here would actually be an improvement over what aired, it
only proves the patently obvious point that this exercise is much, much easier than actually having to make the thing. In this space, I get not only the full benefit of hindsight and years more time to ruminate,
but complete freedom from concerns or uncertainty about budget overruns, cast
and location availability, or any other tangible limitations on an actual
production. The only restrictions on me
are my own determination to try to stick to all the major plot and character beats, and
same basic number and length of episodes, so that if I am adding large amounts
of material from a season, I have to figure out what to remove to make room for
it.
I'm starting with Season 5, as people are still pretty stoked on those first four years. For
each season, I will first enumerate what material I’d add or move up from later in the run, then list everything that could be cut or moved to make room for it, then try to assess what is gained and lost from the changes. I tried to keep the outright fan fiction to a
minimum, but there are a few points where certain dialogue, reactions and glances have to get pretty granular to properly convey things or set up later developments. But enough preamble, let’s get on with it.
1) The Greyjoys. The Greyjoy material from Season 6 is moved up to this one, to defray the feeling that their entire war effort is something the show and characters just kind of forget about for years on end. It also gives some more time to develop Euron as a figure more befitting the insane warlock of the books rather than someone hastily added to gatecrash the endgame once the show had burnt through too many villains. He overthrows Balon and defeats Yara at the kingsmoot while Theon is still at Winterfell with Ramsay and Sansa, and starts building up the Iron Fleet earlier, to lend its sudden appearance and dominance in the latter seasons slightly more plausibility. We also introduce the other Greyjoy brothers from the books, Aeron and Victarion. Aeron technically appears in the show as the unnamed priest of the Drowned God that presides over all the ritualistic bits of their religion, and he really doesn’t need to do all that much more than that for now. But in this version, he is a religious fanatic that views Euron as messianic/antichrist figure that will usher in the apocalyptic Second Coming of their Drowned God. Victarion is just a hulking enforcer for Euron, a formidable henchman who could even be a total mute if you want to make him part of the crew of the Silence, who all had their tongues removed by Euron per the book lore. Both can be established as such in the course of a single scene, if time is tight. It could even all be folded into just the Kingsmoot scene.
2) The Brotherhood. The Hound’s reappearance also comes a season earlier. To cut down on how much additional time needs to be cleared out, scrap everything with Septon Swearengen and just have the Brotherhood stumbling upon him somewhere in the back half of the season be his introduction. His fire vision at the ruined farm from S7 happens much earlier, convinces him to head north to the Wall with him on a mysterious, holy mission for the Lord Of Light. They arrive at Castle Black while Jon is away at Hardhome, and you can have Sam get a little moment of assertiveness where he challenges Thorne publicly to convince him to let them pass through to Beyond The Wall.
3) Bran. Bran’s material in the cave in the first half of S6 is spread throughout this season, with the events of “The Door” coming in the season finale. Also, establish that his time-travel and seer abilities are tied to weirwood trees and he can only access them when in direct contact with them. This is something else the books make more clear, but putting some limitations on his ability to see all and know all helps keep things interesting, since omniscience is boring as hell. It also helps tamp down all the questions that naturally arise about why a person who can know anything doesn’t warn everyone about every plot twist or setback coming their way before they happen. If he has to actually has to go to a godswood like it’s the library and manually flip through microfiche, then it allows you to have the limited flashbacks the story actually needs, while still having it require some work, and to know what you are looking for.
4) Sam. In the real version, Sam leaves Castle Black with Gilly in 5.09 and doesn’t arrive in Oldtown until 6.10. We are just having them arrive at the Citadel in 5.10, skipping the entire visit with his family for now.
5) Winterfell. Brienne and Pod’s rescue of Sansa from the Bolton hunting party in 6.01 is moved up to be part of the finale. We are going to need them moving faster next year.
HOW TO MAKE ROOM:
1) The Lannisters. The main way we are freeing up space is by cutting
out the last 1/3 of the King’s Landing and Dorne plotlines. This shifts it from a Lannister-heavy season to a somewhat light one, to accommodate all the material
for Bran, the Hound, and Greyjoys. The
season ends with both twins getting imprisoned, Cersei in Kings Landing when
the High Sparrow turns on her and Jaime in Dorne when his attempt to “liberate”
Myrcella is thwarted.
2) Tyrion. Get him to Meereen faster. For starters, combine his and Varys’s first
two scenes, so that he comes out of the box in Volantys and promptly insists on
going to the brothel where he is nabbed by Jorah.
Then we don’t need to fuck about with them getting
captured by slavers and entering the first fighting pit. Its redundant to have Jorah surprise khaleesi
by showing up unexpectedly in two different fighting pits on two different occasions anyway, so just have Jorah present Tyrion
to her directly, get re-exiled, and then appear at the main event before the
Harpy attack. It’s more impactful that
way, and getting Tyrion to Meereen an episode or two earlier gives he and Dany more time to get to know each other
before she flies off and he is abruptly shoved into ruling the entire city. In the real version, Tyrion and Varys spend
6.01 idly strolling the streets until they find Dany’s fleet burning at
anchor. Make that revelation happen in
5.10, as something that Tyrion has to deal with immediately while the soldiers
are like “good luck with that dwarf, we have to go find khaleesi.”
3) Dany. Less of Meereen, its politics and insurgency. The Sons Of The
Harpy still need to be a thing, but we don’t need quite so much back-and-forth angst about the fighting
pits and so on. It can be something that
Dany chooses to do more quickly, as a sop to the nobles. She doesn’t need to get engaged to Hizdahr or
even know him all that well, since he gets promptly murdered anyway. In the Harpy attack, rather than Selmy dying to save an injured Grey Worm, make it so it is Jorah reappearing and saving both men. Selmy then stays alive, and leaves with
Varys, who also arrives a few episodes earlier in this version, on his secret mission just before the arena attack in 5.09.
4) Winterfell. We don’t need quite as much time with Ramsay
tormenting Sansa. I'm not even saying tone down the nastiness, just that we get
the idea pretty quick, without the drawn out fake out with the old lady and so
on. You could cut an entire scene or two
with Ramsay and his psycho girlfriend Miranda, but I also mentioned multiple times in my
contemporaneous recaps how Ramsay scenes in general seemed to just kind of
linger on at a languid pace that made them sort of tedious beyond the
stomach-churning sadism. They could
definitely be shaved down on the margins throughout S5 and S6.
5) Brienne. You could also cut the entire encounter with Brienne and Littlefinger/Sansa on the road, but only if you are really pressed. I like the interactions with those two gals, and the tension with the candle in the window signal works well, so I'd rather keep it if possible. But it’s not really essential to get them where they need to be to meet up after Sansa’s escape in the finale, so if the added material came out lengthier than my rough estimates, it could be dropped.
WHAT DO WE GAIN FROM THIS
- You get a lot smoother continuity with Bran, the Hound, and the Greyjoys, characters that otherwise sort of lurch awkwardly back into the picture after long absences in S6.
- You cut down on the wheel-spinning in Meereen, which is nobody’s favorite stuff, and means you don’t have to abruptly sweep Selmy off that board to goose that storyline and give it sense of urgency midseason.
- We get more time to develop Euron into a properly dastardly villain with his own supporting cast and agenda, rather than the preening jerk the show depicts.
- Getting Sam to the Citadel quicker clears the way for more material in Oldtown in the season to come.
- Leaving Jaime in Dorne longer will allow for that plotline to be developed into something with an actual ending and more connection to the goings-on in the wider plot.
WHAT DO WE LOSE
- Some development for Dany and detail to the realpolitik concerns of dealing with an insurrection in Meereen.
- The Sparrow and Dorne plotlines are moving a lot slower, and Cersei’s Walk would no longer be the centerpiece of a season finale, but “tossed off” early next season. The risk with threading in more subplots at the expense of some of the payoffs in the main storylines is that while it makes the entire series flow together better, it would also make this particular season feel less eventful. Between Stannis’s fall, Jon’s assassination and adding the events of “The Door”, I think the finale itself will fare just fine in terms of climactic-ness, but I don’t entirely like taking focus away from Cersei. On balance, though, I think the benefits gained are so multifaceted that they justify giving shorter shrift to one of my favorite characters and performances on the show.
- Sansas's plight with the Boltons is not depicted in the same harrowing detail, but I think we mostly get the point there even at 1/2 the length.
- Yara has to carry the kingsmoot on her own, without Theon, but there’s not terribly much of that stuff, even adding a scene or two more to establish the other Greyjoy brothers.
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