Board Thread:TV Show Discussion/@comment-5014364-20150610224125/@comment-15030876-20150610232703

The Dragon Demands wrote: In general, I agree with the ranking that as an adaptation, Season 1 remains the best season - though that's unfair given that the first novel was relatively easy to adapt. Subsequent seasons spread out a big and the writers had trouble handling it - though they then recovered. By their own admission, they were hesitant in Season 2 to simply give Robb or Arya or Tyrion an episode "off" then come back to them, resulting in bad filler scenes (and for those who remember "but what about that great Arya/Tywin scene? - yeah, one good scene, but also two or three bad filler scenes with them - how soon we forget). But the writers themselves said they learned from that, and by Season 3 were willing to give them an episode off, not insert a 3 minute filler scene, but then when they do show up give them a 10 minute chunk of an episode (many subplots don't space evenly into all 10 episodes).

The result is that Season 2 is generally held to be the weakest season - individual moments were highs, but also much stumbling -- pretty much the entire Robb/Talisa/Catelyn storyline was awful. Qarth was also awful but they had weak source material so hindsight.

Season 3 was between Season 1 and 2 in terms of quality of adaptation, and Season 4 was slightly lower than 3 (slightly).

I'd put Season 5 between 3 and 4, though it's a rough match.

Basically my ranking is Season 1 was head and shoulders above the rest as a good adaptation, Season 2 easily the worst at adaptation (the writers even admitted a learning curve, I don't blame them for such difficulty given that they learned from it). Seasons 3, 4, and 5 were kind of close in quality, though I'd rank it as 3 above 5, and 5 above 4.

Season 4 suffered from around episode 4 to episode 5 with a lot of filler material (the return to Craster's Keep stuff was not well done and kind of offensive).

Overall, like many seasons before, Season 5 doesn't have "weak episodes" but one or two "weak subplots"; it's not like normal TV were it's episode by episode, this isn't a Star Trek episode, but separate subplots of varying quality.

You can tell some subplots were prioritized over others.

'''I also think it was a mistake to combine two books into one season, due to actor contracts being up. Maybe their hand was forced, I don't know.'''

There might not have been enough for 20 episodes, but there certainly was enough for 13 - I think they should have split the season into two halves and aired it a year apart as functional seasons, to get around actor contracts.

Here's generally how I rank the season by storyline:

Great:


 * Jon Snow and the Wall
 * Stannis & Co.
 * Daenerys in Meereen
 * Arya in Braavos

Good: --Cersei and Tyrion's storylines were *drastically* condensed...but condensed very well. If we had two seasons a lot of good Cersei storyline stuff that was cut could have been put back in. Tyrion...look even I don't think there was time for Young Griff, I discount that. But *on their own*, to a viewing audience that didn't read the novels, yes the Cersei and Tyrion storylines hold up - a bit condensed, short at times, but *on the whole* good stuff, succinctly getting the main points across, and great acting always helps.
 * Cersei, Margaery, King's Landing, the debt crisis, and the Faith Militant
 * Tyrion in Essos

Good, with caveat:
 * Merging Sansa's Vale storyline with the Bolton storyline: from a production perspective, they put a lot of effort into merging these, it was not done lightly. In terms of writing quality, cinematography (which takes longer to think up in terms of pacing and emotion than you would think), clearly effort went into this. They were planning to merge them since the early writing phases of Season 2. Basically my views are those of Elio and Linda from Westeros.org: if you were going to condense these two storylines, there was no better way to condense them, and the characters ARE basically "in character" (Sansa acts like how Sansa would in that situation, not Jeyne Poole, while Ramsay is restraining himself with a valuable person like Sansa more than he ever did with Jeyne - even Ramsay's not stupid enough to invoke his father's wrath by mistreating her as much as he did Jeyne, i.e. outright torture).

So I have a sort of "wait and see" attitude about merging the Vale and Bolton storylines, but it's not enough to make me outright revolt against the writers (I'm more angry about Tysha).

The not so good:


 * The Sand Snakes. Not Dorne overall, but specifically the Sand Snakes. We were promised to be "shown Dorne" this season - they only had limited screentime, we learned almost nothing about their culture or characterization or "information", just a lot of shots of showing off the Alcazar of Seville. Doran was great. Areo great. I even think sending Jaime and Bronn to Dorne was a good idea (need viewpoint characters) and executed well.

But the Sand Snakes....episode 6 was easily the worst choreographed fight scene the show has ever done. And when they're introduced in episode 4....this isn't something wrong the actors OR Writers did: why is Obara walking around giving a monologue to open air? They're the words of the book so the writers didn't screw that up. Who the heck was directing that scene? Who was the fight choreographer in episode 6?

The running theory is they only had a week to film in the Alcazar and limited mobility in it....when really, I'd rather have a set they have unlimited time and mobility in, than such limited filming conditions.

And it breaks my heart because you read the interviews and the three actresses REALLY put a lot of effort into thinking out their characterization - NONE of which really gets onto the screen that much.

Apparently, many more character-building dialogue scenes actually were filmed, we know this from promo pics and casting scripts, but they were later cut for screentime!

More time would have let them develop the Sand Snakes more, or refine their scenes.

Doran was great yet barely appeared in the entire season.

Are they unsalvageable? No, just give the Sand Snakes better writing next season and a really good fight scene to make up for this bad one.

I wouldn't call even the Sand Snakes outright "bad" - in their prison scenes when they just let them ACT. The Return to Craster's Keep in Season 4 was far worse.

Even so....my overall view is that of these storylines, you can tell that Dorne was bottom of the barrel, prioritized behind Arya or Tyrion (understandably).

No one plotline was bad from Season 5, but there were the *utterly absent plotlines*: House Greyjoy, and to a lesser extent the Tully/Frey situation at Riverrun (the Freys are besieging the small remaining Tully garrison for over a year now).

On the other hand....we hear casting reports indicating that the Greyjoy plotlines were simply moved back to Season 6 -- I don't know if they easily can because pre-imprisonment Cersei reacted to them and this was a major thing, as did Loras (who barely appears now).

This ties into the whole "our hands were tied in Season 5, we feared we'd only get 7 seasons due to actor contracts, so we over-condensed in "panic mode", but then worked the problem out, and HBO will give us more seasons" thing

So is Season 6 going to....what? Slow down and back up? We know the Greyjoy stuff got moved to Season 6 now, not omitted. How to merge it back in? I don't know, I do approach that with cautious optimism.

And it would also take maybe *ONE* episode to check up on Riverrun again.

As I said, we didn't need 20 episodes to tell books 4 and 5 but we kind of needed 11 to 13 episodes worth of screentime to get it all settled.

Thus there was no one major complaint in Season 5 so much as many small complaints due to limited screentime, of which the Sand Snakes suffered the most, and the Greyjoys even more because they didn't even appear. Agreed on most points. As for the Greyjoys, they're not back-tracking. We have no reason to think that they're doing that. They're adapting TWOW; presumably it will have lots of Euron, considering the setup in the previous books. And that's kind of the point —it has been nothing but setup until now. Euron isn't even a proper character yet —we heard stuff about him, and he had a big speech, but we haven't seen him... you know, be a person. Season six may back-track a bit by showing an equivalent to the Kingsmoot, inasmuch as Euron will present his grand plan to the Iron Islanders, if only because that's a pretty good way to introduce the character; but otherwise there's no reason to back-track.

Oh, and they didn't adapt the two books in one season because of contracts. They did it because the alternatives are either creatively misguided or plainly unsatisfying —That is, respectively: adapting AFFC in S5 and ADWD in S6; and adapting half of those two books in S5 and the other half in S6. The former would simply be a very bad idea both as a narrative (you don't want to have half of your characters shelved for a year) and as a business (the same reason, pretty much; you don't want to have half your characters, including probably the most famous ones, absent for a year); and the latter would give us an incredibly anti-climactic and uneventful season five. Pretty much no character would have a climax, unlike the ASOS partition between S3 and S4, which only made sense due to the Red Wedding —and even then, those storylines that weren't connected to that event even tangentially did suffer quite a bit. The point is: Both alternatives to what they did would've been bad decisions creatively and financially. They HAD to adapt AFFC and ADWD into a single season. Now, could this season have been 15 episodes long, if they were given more money and time? Of course. I would have liked that. This season felt a bit rushed in some places (though the opposite in others, to be fair.) So I would have loved that. But that's the issue here —a longer season for which we would have probably had to wait a bit longer, and probably we would notice the financial strain in the end-product; or what we got, which was a densely packed season... too much sometimes. The other alternatives? I don't even think they crossed their minds for more than a second —That's how far-fetched they are as real alternatives.