Now that our Game of Thrones Season 4 watch has ended (har har), I think it’s safe to say that it was a pretty good run of episodes, right? Major characters died, there were some gnarly fights, and we got to spend some time in bed with Oberyn Martell before his head got squished. There was also plenty of genuinely great writing and acting to savor this season, from Tyrion’s tearful prison-cell scenes to Sansa Stark’s dark coming-of-age. There was much to admire about Season 4. Well, I hope you all enjoyed this season as much as I did, because as the show moves forward, it’s headed into some seriously uncertain territory.
O.K., I’ll cop to having written basically the same thing last year, urging fans of the show who had not read the books the series is based on to keep calm as the show began to morph into something nearly unrecognizable, and not as good. As it turned out, I probably acted a bit too hastily.
This past season, which roughly mirrored the second half of the third book in the series, proved as compelling as any other season of Game of Thrones. Most importantly, the writers tidily and smartly elided and connected story lines so the show could move rather elegantly through what becomes, in the books, a compellingly knotty but frequently disorienting jumble of places, names, and histories. So we were granted a reprieve, it would seem, from the narrative frustrations that have plagued readers for two books now.
But, alas, I’m afraid that grace period is up. As Arya sails across the Narrow Sea and Tyrion is shipped away, the show is barreling toward what I worry is inevitable confusion and disappointment. Certain beloved characters will stay stuck and stagnant (anyone hoping that Daenerys will get out of the dang slave desert anytime soon should probably stop holding their breath), while a bunch of new characters are introduced who, as far as any of us have read anyway, really don’t have anything interesting to do. Will viewers be happy to meet more salty, stolid Iron Islanders? Will various antics involving other Dornish folk intrigue them as much as Oberyn’s plotline did? I’m just not sure they will.
The show, at least, has one advantage over the books. What has proven especially frustrating to readers making their way through the series is that Martin completely omits main characters from book four before returning to them in book five. Meaning, fans went years, or at least many pages, without updates on Bran, Tyrion, Daenerys, Jon Snow, and others. The show can’t just forget about crucial characters for an entire season, so presumably that problem is solved. But still there’s all this business of the new guys, of Victarion and Quentyn and Jon Connington and others, to be dealt with. It’s hard to see how the show can streamline all that narrative expansion (the books just keep growing, and growing, and growing) into something as propulsive and, for the most part, cohesive as the last four seasons have been.
As an ardent fan of the books, I am also concerned that, as happened once or twice this season, Weiss and Benioff’s privileged knowledge of the series’s ultimate trajectory will result in accidental spoilers about the next two books. But if too much of that starts happening, it might simply be a sign that it’s time to stop watching the show and wait, perhaps in vain, for Martin to finish his books.
The series needs to find its own way, as its own entity. Now that they’ve made their way through the best and most exciting book so far, it’s really time the show exerts its independence. It could be bumpy for a while—ever hear of a Kingsmoot? Because you’re about to hear a lot about a Kingsmoot—but this show has proven again and again, no more so than this past season, that it can confidently navigate its way through Martin’s wild world, judiciously honoring or ignoring the original text as need be. In some ways, this season was a little test to see how the show could handle some extratextual outings. I’d say they passed. But the next couple of seasons will be the real trial. And, unlike Tyrion, the show will have to be its own champion.
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