‘Game of Thrones’ season 5: Debating the storyline that may never happen
“Game of Thrones” is likely going to remain a talking point until the moment it ends on HBO, but we may be right now experiencing some of the most controversy we’ve ever seen regarding whether or not the show includes something from the books or not. There have been omissions that have troubled fans before (some of Tyrion’s past, characters in the north), but this seems to be the one that has created the biggest uproar just because we know the face and the name so well.
Obviously, there are some major book spoilers ahead, so do not read on unless you want to discuss them.
This will probably be one of the last times that we write about Lady Stoneheart for a while, since there does not seem to be that much more that can be said about a character who is looking doubtful to ever appear on the show. We do not actually find the omission in itself of this story to be problematic, at least in that they could transfer over many of her stories to some other characters if they really wanted to just to keep the end results relatively the same. The part that we worry about is more the way that the show presented the story of the Brotherhood Without Banners, and so much of the purpose of them (beyond their inclusion in Arya’s story for a time) is to be the army-of-sorts for Stoneheart after she is brought to life.
The way in which Michelle Fairley is answering questions about Stoneheart now is also interesting. She is doing a ton of interviews right now over her departure from “24: Live Another Day,” and in a particular chat with Entertainment Weekly, she shifted her thinking slightly from another interview where she expressed a greater ambiguity regarding if she would return to the HBO series:
“Yeah, the character’s dead. She’s dead … You respect the writers’ decision. I knew the arc, and that was it. They can’t stick to the books 100 percent. It’s impossible—they only have 10 hours per season. They have got to keep it dramatic and exciting, and extraneous stuff along the way gets lost in order to maintain the quality of [the] brilliant show.”
Obviously, we feel like Stoneheart would make things “dramatic and exciting,” but it certainly does not sound like Fairley is going to be heading back. This could all be playful misdirection, given that she has not discussed her next project extensively that would prohibit her from doing the show, but it feels like that would be her going out of her way to mislead you when she really didn’t have to.
We’re going to try to give the show the benefit of the doubt that they know what they are doing, given that it has been so brilliant so far and the only significant thing that we feel like they botched was that Jaime / Cersei scene in front of Joffrey’s dead body earlier this season. So we’ll cease talking about Stoneheart unless there is further news, and put our trust more in the writers.
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Photo: HBO