I’ll be honest – this can’t really be a review yet of Game of Thrones season 5. Because Holly and I still have two episodes to watch, and we just can’t quite bring ourselves to watch them.
As book readers, what we expected from the season was for books four and five – which split the characters in half, and followed the same timeline – to combine and tell the story all together. They had already split book three into two seasons, so we were also expecting them to at least take two seasons when they combined books four and five. Maybe three! Which could also have delayed things potentially until book six came out…
Instead, the news at first was that they were planning on powering forward, on diverging from the books and telling the story that they could, since they will finish before the books do. But that still didn’t prepare us for what we saw.
It was like watching chaos theory, the butterfly effect, in action. A few small changes, ripples in a pond, and an increasingly divergent story. Each change decision leading to more and more changes, to things that felt like bad decisions (such that The Mary Sue is no longer reviewing the show, for instance), or to just cutting off whole storylines.
And now, what should have taken at least two seasons suddenly plowed through and is finishing the timeline of both books (if not the original events of both books…) in one season. We took long enough to watch the show that we started catching rumors about the end, and about next season… who is coming back, who isn’t…
And by this point, I’m not sure it’s the story I signed up to watch anymore. I don’t know if it’s a show anymore that I care about. So I guess I’m turning to you, readers. What do you think about season 5? Would you recommend we watch the rest? Are you interested or excited in next season? Let us know in the comments below!
Comparative Geeks 