As
Game of Thrones, the television show, has drifted away from
A Song of Fire and Ice, the series of books, I've grown worried. Sometimes the departure from the books has been of the gentle, understandable, "we already have a cast of hundreds, surely we can do without this person who plays a relatively minor role" variety. Sometimes the departure has been more of a lurch toward "let's just do in this whole apparently quite important plot because ... reasons."
Neither really bothers me. What bothers me is that, especially in season five, those deviations from the books have been ... nice.
Come on in. Let's talk.
First there's Brienne and Pod. Book Brienne never caught a whiff of either Arya or Sansa, but TV Bree has had encounters with both. She also got a bonus sword fight with the Hound, a chance to deliver a touching background story, and a chase that's run the whole length of the North, leaving Brienne in a position to play into what could be major events to come. Even "Not a Real Squire" Pod had a chance to deliver some history and serve as the audience surrogate while Brienne reminded us of geography we hadn't covered since season one (where crossing the same territory that Brienne managed in a quick cut took a third of the season).
Then there were the scenes between Sansa and Littlefinger. While book Sansa has picked up a thing or two from "Uncle Petyr," she's still mostly a trophy bottled up in a high castle where she can serve as a more-than-a-little-creepy reminder of how her mother once spurned the Mockingbird. Having Sansa delivered into the torturing, murderous, traitorous, sadistic hands of the Boltons may not seem like Littlefinger is doing the girl a kindness ... and he's not. But TV Sansa is much more active, and increasingly more devious, than her literary counterpart. Add to that Littlefinger's parting speech in which he makes Sansa an insider to his plans, and the oldest surviving Stark seems much more poised for a big future than the book edition.
Jaime goes off to try and rescue his daughter from Dorne. Varys acts as a friendly travel companion to Tyrion (saving him from several humiliating book experiences). Even I-Invented-Stiff Stannis Baratheon gets a chance to be a doting dad to daughter Shireen.
Overall, it was just starting to seem as if the show runners were not simply diverging from the book, but toning all the nastiness—and nasty pointlessness—down several notches. A lot of it also starts to look like "fan service," that is, playing up the roles of favorites, allowing them to absorb acts done by less well-liked characters, and protecting them from the worst abuses.
Readers like to complain that there's a loss of focus in the last two released volumes of A Song of Fire and Ice. New characters take the stage, while fan favorites are quite literally doomed to wander in the wilderness. They sometimes wander right off the page. Compared to the narrative of earlier volumes, it's confused, looping, and seemingly without a center. And that's exactly the point. To coin a phrase ...
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
No, that's obviously not from Martin's work, but it is very much the
heart of the whole saga. What began when Robert's Rebellion took up arms against the Mad King has turned into a fray where there is no central authority. The center has not held. Instead we've plunged the whole of Westeros into roiling chaos, and taken a goodly amount of overseas territory in the spillover, thanks to Daenerys. People are dying, traditions are being discarded, history is not just being written, it's being re-written.
Whatever emerges from the blood to crawl up to the Iron Throne when this is at last "over" will not be just another royal ruler in a long line of the same. He / she / it will have to be fundamentally different. Because the world will be. It may be renewed. It may be ruined. It may be frozen and overrun by ice zombies. But it's certainly going to be different.
Which is why all those little buck-up moments in which you can practically hear Tevye humming "tradition" in the background had me so worried. The worst thing that can happen in Game of Thrones wouldn't be Tyrion dying, or Arya failing to get revenge, or Dany never moving out of the the world's most boring city. No. The worst thing that could happen would be bending the story to play by the rules. Any rules. Because the very moment you really start to comprehend where this is all leading... that's the moment it starts to die.
Which is why I was so pleased to see the body of Barristan Selmy.
It's not just that Selmy isn't dead in the books. It's that the murder of Selmy—an apparently wise, noble presence who has supposedly Jedi-like skills with the blade—wasn't just unexpected, it was dangerous. It requires a movement, not just away from the books, but forward. Barristan was nicknamed "the bold" and it was a bold stroke to take him down, and quite a relief to see that, unlike Grey Worm, he didn't crawl out of a sick bed in the next installment.
That one scene gives me hope. It gives me hope that Littlefinger is still playing Sansa (and that Littlefinger has an actual plan that makes a hell of a lot more sense than the one he's divulged to Lady Stark). It makes me hope that Theon is not going to recover himself in time to come to the rescue. It makes me hope that Arya will have setbacks, Daenerys will not learn How to Be a Great Ruler in One Easy Lesson, and that the world will stay tangled confusing, and anything but clean.
If there's a moment of this show where you pump your fist and scream "yes!" Be suspicious of that moment. Beware of any version of this "war is hell" story that starts to make it look like anything less than the eighth bolgia. If someone does emerge as a hero, it should be by their fingernails. Their bloody fingernails.
Oh yeah, Jon Snow reaches an uneasy arrangement with the wildlings, Stannis starts his march on Winterfell (taking Melisandre and Shireen with him, which could have some heavy meaning should some future book events come to pass), Sansa meets Theon Reek, the Boltons are impossibly evil—make that Evil—Dany feeds one Meereen leader to the dragons while deciding to marry another, and Tyrion drifts through Old Valyaria long enough to confuse television audiences about The Doom. Plus another dragon.
But really. Ser Generalissimo Barristan the Bold is still dead. That's what's important.