Board Thread:TV Show Discussion/@comment-5014364-20150619201444

io9's Charlie Jane Anders is their weekly reviewer for each episode of Season 5.

I agree with Anders's assessment: while reluctant to outright hate it, Season 5 was easily the weakest season of the TV series (surpassing Season 2), and MANY problems were introduced by condensing two full books into one season.

http://io9.com/how-to-fix-what-s-wrong-with-game-of-thrones-1712355749

Basically, Anders's points were:

1 - Cramming so much material in left no time to process the dramatic impact of character deaths. We barely had time to grieve for Ser Barristan before another major disaster comes up, etc. - Jaime, Tyrion, and Cersei don't really mention Tywin that much again after the first few episodes, when in the novels his death hangs like a cloud over their actions. The season finale was the pinnacle of this; you cram in so many deaths at once you didn't leave time for the viewer to process it all; even the Red Wedding had people reacting to it throughout Season 4.

2 - This is a show about politics, the "setup" of wars, but cramming in so much material removed much of that setup. The wrangling of how to get money and armies to finance wars, wrangling over making political alliances -- this was great in past seasons. Now to their credit, Anders points out that they DID keep in the debt crisis with the Iron Bank of Braavos...but it's crammed in and a bit rushed. Still prominent, but just "rushed" without as much behind the scenes setup. Also consider just how fast the Faith Militant were reestablished and the High Sparrow made High Septon (he's introduced in episode 3, and is High Septon with a new army by the end of episode 4).

All of this is logical, though, and based on "you seriously thought you could condense two books into one TV season" -- we had less time for emotional reaction to each traumatic event, and the "setup" for many actions was often rushed - on a show where the "setup" of wheeling and dealing is half the fun.

3 - Some characters were so drastically condensed - again, due to combining two novels - that their character arcs seemed aimless.

Anders specifically cites Sansa: seeing her marital-raped by Ramsay isn't "good drama traumatic"; it was awful to watch because it was like a massive bait and switch, reversing her character arc -- remember how strong Dark Sansa seemed in the Season 4 finale?

Stannis was another one. And this happens to a few other characters but not to as great degrees - i.e. Daenerys seemed to be moving through her plot points a bit fast (I didn't mind that much, but...)

4 - They're relying on gratuitous sexual violence as a replacement for emotional buildup they didn't have the time to develop. Again, due to rushing the material.

Their knee-jerk defense is "this was in the books, they're violent books"

Well first, no, many of these were INVENTED scenes: in the novels Gilly just has sex with Sam after Aemon dies because they're grieving, a bit drunk, and it's a life-affirming action. They...invented a near-rape assault, for cheap dramatic tension. This ties into Point 1 - they didn't have enough time to develop long-term emotional reactions to traumatic events, so they thought "increase the number of traumatic events" would make up for that. "If we don't have enough time to spend three episodes grieving for Barristan, try to make up for that emotional angst by throwing in a rape scene or three" --- it doesn't work like that!

But even scenes that DID happen in the novels such as Cersei's Walk of Atonement felt over-wraught.

I mean...they know they're using a body-double. Any SANE person would try to AVOID lingering full body shots, to hide as best as possible that they are using a body double with Lena's face digitally added onto it. Instead, they wanted to play up the "shocking sexual violence" of it as much as possible by showing as many full nude shots as they could.....thinking this was more important than A) the fact that this means people can seen it's a body double (I mean the audacity of not caring about how obvious that was), and B) as Anders says, you need to handle sexual violence scenes deftly.

They haven't been handling such scenes deftly. And they're blind to it, insisting that "it's just violence source material" (even when they change things)

The fact that Gregor Clegane's men rape villages in the novels doesn't mean I expect a 15 minute long montage of his men raping women, showing full frontal nudity in graphic detail while it happens.

They're using it as a cheap substitute for drama. What TVtropes calls "Woman in the Fridge".

I mean this was last year but...they felt they needed a filler arc at Craster's Keep, showing an actual, long montage of the mutineers raping Craster's wives? TO WHAT PURPOSE?

There's a difference in....think of "Horror movies" as a genre. Hitchcock was a master of horror without actually showing blood and nudity. "Psycho" has a woman murdered in a shower -- you never actually see her fully nude or the knife stabbing into her. This is "subtlety". Showing the murderer stabbing her in graphic detail and then raping the new holes he's made in her body, in a 10 minute long montage sequence? This is NOT "subtlety".

Once and a while you get a movie that does argue that you need to show this violence so as to not hide the brutality of it -- I'm thinking of the 2002 French language film "Irreversible" starring Monica Bellucci, which infamously has a 9 minute long rape scene. What Benioff and Weiss are doing IS NOT like how that film worked, because it wasn't reveling in the brutality like a slasher B-movie (and because the rest of the movie actually focuses on the aftermath of that assault).

But this is all too long; the answer is short: with limited time to develop long story arcs, they've resorted to random sexual assaults as a cheap stunt for quick dramatic effect. It's lazy writing! THAT is the criticism, they can't wave that away. Compared to other depictions of rape in media, and to the source material, it is unnecessary.

'''All of this stems from one fundamental flaw: whose idea was it to adapt two books into a single TV season? Was it a decision *forced* on Benioff and Weiss by HBO due to fears about actor contracts being up? Or...did they inexplicably WANT to do that, no matter if HBO gave them more seasons? '''

Me personally, if this was FORCED on them by HBO, I sympathize; I actually think that they did the best of a bad situation, and the Tyrion, Daenerys, and Cersei arcs turned out quite well, better than I would hope for such drastic condensation.

Meanwhile, the "Dorne" and "North" storylines were so drastically condensed it hurt the show: Dorne was...not a bad idea for condensation (on paper) but horribly directed, with bad dialogue, and just plain too limited screentime relative to the hype they gave it going into the season (how little did Doran even appear?  Why not push this back to next season and do it well?).....the Boltons were okay (I'm thinking of the Roose/Ramsay conversations).....but Stannis? Stannis was great in the first half but as soon as he left Castle Black, and it was no longer "Stannis/Wall" but "Stannis/Boltons"...it just rushed away into nothing. I think they crammed in killing Shireen earlier than the books, in a different context from the books, just to cram in and end the whole Stannis storyline - why?

Also related to "the North" is the Sansa condensation which....at first, I was willing to hear them out on, as it were...we knew Sansa was off on her own in the novels, hard to adapt, the actress seemed enthusiastic about it.....but as it wore on, it was difficult to match her character arc (I was hoping for what we got at the dinner scene in episode 5, Sansa holding her own, the entire season; then in episode 6 onwards not so much). Had she just been kept as a ward of the Boltons but not married, that MAY have worked better). Yet once I saw how badly the Stannis and Dorne storylines ultimately were by the end of Season 5....if Sansa was the worst thing about Season 5, and nothing else, I'd have taken it as just an unfortunate limitation of real-life production but not fought against it.  If Sansa was the ONE thing they condensed so much, you see, I think we'd have forgiven combining two books into one season.

but IN COMBINATION: with Stannis's storyline anti-climactic, and Dorne badly written and barely even present....we're left to ask:  with not one but THREE drastic condensations like this, why didn't you just push more material to next season? If you had TWO seasons you might not have ever needed to condense Sansa like this!

I really, really hope it's because of the actor contracts and that even Benioff and Weiss were hesitant about condensing so much material. No sane person would attempt it.

Even those one or two of you who say the middle of the book was anti-climactic, if we stopped halfway well, if nothing else, Dorne was so set apart from the rest of the narrative that they could have at least pushed that back to Season 6 as they did with the Greyjoys. At least it would have given a few more minutes of time to other plotlines (just send Jaime to the Riverlands as he did in the novels; we'd revisit neglected past characters like the Tullys instead of trying to cram in new ones we don't have time to introduce).

Even if you combine both books....why try to cram in Dorne now? At the expense of other plotlines? The resulting Dorne plotline wasn't even good. Yeah counterintuitively "it was bad and you wanted more scenes of it?" -- what I mean is that if they had more screentime to focus on and round out these Dorne characters it wouldn't have been as so horribly rushed.

But in general, I like Anders's points about the fallout from this:


 * 1 - Not enough time for emotional reactions from characters to traumatic events
 * 2 - The plot mechanics and political setup are half the fun of the show, it's about politics, and while present these were a bit rushed (varying by storyline from reasonable (Cersei) to sloppy (Stannis)
 * 3 - Some character arcs weren't condensed well at all, damaging longrunning storyarcs, particularly Sansa, in a way that even the casual viewers thought was odd.
 * 4 - With so little time to develop these dramatic moments (as seen in the previous three points) they increasingly resorted to using sexual assault as a cheap shock gimmick, as if that could replace "Drama". They did this either by needlessly playing up scenes which did happen (Cersei) or just plain inventing them (Gilly). 