Board Thread:TV Show Discussion/@comment-1600847-20150615133347/@comment-5106672-20150617020656

Personally I feel this season finale fell flat on its face. This season the show was so invested in exploiting the shock value that the truly shocking turning points got lost in the process, so the episode felt totally anticlimatic. I enjoy both the books and the series on two different levels because they're two different media, and I welcome changes when they're functional to the tv narrative, but this time they really messed up.

We've had an especially violent, gruesome, deadly season, so the deaths of Stannis and Jon (?) were just another in a long line of gruesome deaths. Just another ordinary day in Westeros.

We've had so much gratuitous violence against women that Cersei's walk of penance turned into yet another mistreated woman – what else is new. I was especially looking forward to that scene both to see a character I love to hate getting her comeuppance and to secretly feel for her and see her as a human being behind the monster: I just saw another in a long line of cruelly and pointlessly humiliated women.

While speeding up all the Essos storylines was an effective choice, the changes made to Dorne and Winterfell were pointless and annoying. The whole Dorne storyline merely served to deliver a dead Myrcella: they could have kept the much more intriguing Dornish attempt to put her on the Iron Throne and take her injury scene a step further, instead of the boring rescue mission plot. Sansa contributed nothing to the Winterfell storyline and the storyline contributed nothing for the character's growth: what's the point? After that strong independent woman™ build up in S4 what we got was a whole fifth season as the victim, and her final "big moment" was unlocking a door with a corkscrew. What a win.

So yeah, the show got me so used to shock I wasn't shocked at anything, it felt as if I shouldn't care about whatever horrible stuff is happening because what comes next is just more ordinary horror. It's not like the past seasons were all Disney fanfiction, but they spent their shock budget in a much more clever way so that the last episodes actually meant something and left me hanging from a cliff. For now, it's more of a "who's dying or getting beaten next" thing.