I feel compelled to write about Game of Thrones, again, because it has gone from being the best thing on TV to disheartening in less than one season. Those of us who have sat through the first six episodes deserve something good for our struggles, and it had better involve dragons, all three of them, and lots of fire.
As has become the norm, there weren't any really dramatic scenes this week, or maybe I am just getting jaded. One thing we have learned about Game of Thrones by now is that, even when something dramatic happens, it doesn't necessarily change the main narrative, because there is no main narrative, and one story just gets replaced by another and another, and Daenerys still isn't going anywhere with those dragons. Watch a daytime soap opera for a few months; after a while, nothing seems like that big of a deal anymore. So yeah, maybe I'm jaded.
Let's see if I can recap this week. I didn't take notes, so I may get some things wrong. I don't think anyone cares.
Arya sees dead people. Not imaginary or ghostly ones -- actual bodies. She seems like she wants to retain her identity rather than become no one. I think it's because some people on her list are still alive.
Tyrion and Jorah Mormont get a lift from some slavers, and we learn that dwarf penis is a delicacy, or a cool trophy, or something. I don't remember that from the books -- it seems to me that dwarfs everywhere would get the Theon treatment pretty quick if that were the case. It's silly, but if it gets our men to Daenerys faster, I'm all for it.
Jamie and Bronn want to go grab Princess Myrcella, so they just...wander into the garden where she is spending time with her fiance. And at just the same time, right at just the exact same time, the Sand Snakes show up, also to take Myrcella, or maybe kill her, I'm not sure. There is a choreographed-looking fight, where I think no one is killed or severely wounded, at which point the palace guards show up and stop the fighting. They do this by shouting at them to stop, and since they greatly outnumber Jamie and Bronn and the Sand Snakes, everyone stops and is arrested. The head of the Dornish guards shows how scary he is by making a nice little pirouette with his axe, after everyone is already standing still, which is funny in a way that serious drama is not supposed to be funny. It's a terrible scene.
Cersei conspires with the High Sparrow by telling him about gay Loras Tyrell. The High Sparrow then holds a cartoonishly simple "inquest" which features precisely one accusing witness, and both Loras and Queen Margery are imprisoned (she for lying about her brother), just like Cersei planned. It's a departure from the book, and a bad one that we can only hope will be corrected. One constant in Game of Thrones is that Cersei is a super-villainess, simply because everyone in the books is apparently pre-programmed to go along with every evil plot she hatches, no matter how unlikely. That the mother of three of her brother's children and murderer of her husband the king dares to accuse someone else of depravity, this we can understand, because it's Cersei, and she always gets away with shit.
In the books though, Cersei's interaction with the High Sparrow is actually one time when things don't go quite as planned for her. It's an interesting twist to Cersei's story when we finally find someone who has the sense to check up on her BS, and then calls her on it. But in the show, we get the same old super-villainess plot line that started back in episode two or so when she decided to have a direwolf killed for no reason. Another lousy scene.
And finally, in the show's climactic scene, so to speak, Sansa gets married and finally loses her virginity. But since her husband is Ramsay the Unfailingly Cruel, there has to be some cruelty. Only Ramsay seems to have gotten confused about what cruelty is, so he makes Theon watch while he takes his husbandly due whether Sansa wants it or not. It feels more creepy than really cruel, and we're left a bit disgusted. The whole story line is not in the books, so you can't blame George RR Martin for this one.
We're left to hope that maybe next week Sansa and Theon will step up, gut Ramsay like a fish, watch him bleed to death, and then take over Winterfell. Except that would actually resolve a story line. That's not likely.
It's always nice to find someone who agrees with me: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/game-of-thrones-roundtable-season-5-episode-six-unbowed-unbent-unbroken/393503/
