Review 349: Game of Thrones: A Feast for Crows

Game of Thrones enters even darker territory in its fifth season as it enjoys a newfound liberation from its novel counterparts resulting in whole new batch of unexpected twists and surprises.

Based on the fourth & fifth books in A Song of Ice and Fire, A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin. The War of the Five Kings, once thought to be at a close, is instead entering a new and more chaotic phase. Westeros is on the brink of collapse and many are seizing what they can while the realm implodes, like a corpse make a feast for crows.

At Castle Black, Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) struggles to balance the demands of the Night's Watch with those of the newly arrived Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane), who styles himself the rightful king of Westeros.
Meanwhile Cersei Lannister (Lena Heady) scrambles to hold on to power in King's Landing amidst the Tyrells and the rise of the Faith Militant, a religious group led by the enigmatic High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce), while Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Bronn (Jerome Flynn) embark on a secret mission to Dorne.
Across the Narrow Sea, Arya (Maisie Williams) seeks out an old friend, while a fugitive Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) finds a new cause. And as danger amounts in Meereen, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) finds that her tenuous hold on the city requires some hard sacrifices.

Season 5 features more changes from the books than previous seasons. These deviations are in part attributable to the way the show has covered most of the books published material as well as the directors opinions on the actors abilities.  

More so than previous seasons, Game of Thrones starts to show some chinks in its armour. There's a storyline where Jaime & Bronn go to Dorne to rescue Jaime & Cercei's daughter Myrcella (Nell Tiger Free) and it's pretty underwhelming. While the location itself is undeniably stunning, the pacing is jarring, storytelling lacklustre, character moments & development scarce and while none of the actors were especially bad per say, their Dornish individual characters ranged from regular to painfully unlikeable.

The majority of changes that showrunners David Benioff & D. B. Weiss made to the Dorne storyline just make it overly simplistic and lacking in coherence. 
Some vital POV characters like Hotah (DeObia Oparei) are watered down whilst other vital characters such as Arianne & Quentyn Martel are bizarrely absent from the storyline.
Which is a real shame as they would have added some real dimension to the show.
Not helping matters is the fact that Jaime only takes one man to help him on his quest: Bronn.
This is just lazy, unpolished writing.

The storyline reaches a major low in Ep. 6: Unbowed, Unbent & Unbroken in one of the worst fight scenes the show has produced thus far pitting Jamie and Bronn against the Sand Snakes, Obyren's bastard daughters. The sequence is just silly and undermined by sloppy choreography, choppy editing and an overall lack of tension and could easily have been avoided if the characters didn't act like complete dumb dumbs.
Normally the action scenes on Game of Thrones are excellent and awesome but this one is a jaring, rushed mess.
  
Ultimately, the Dorne storyline can be best described as being like a French film, it looks fabulous but narratively it's pretty slack and uninteresting. We also learn very little about their culture and see very little of it beside the Water Gardens (which were shot in the prestigious and lush Alcázar of Seville in Spain). 

We see the return of Ellaria Sand (Indira Varma). In a bizarre contrast to her book counterpart where she was the only sane person trying to convince Arianne and the Sand Snakes to let go of their feud with the Lannisters. In the show, she's been reduced to two-dimensional, vindictive, psychopathic character who plans to kill Myrcella in order to start a war between the Lannisters and the Starks just to get revenge for the death of her lover - a plan which makes zilch sense whatsoever considering he was killed in Trial by Combat of all things and Myrcella had nothing to do with Obyren's death.
Part of the problem is giving her too much focus and yet so little to do at the same time. 
David Benioff and D. B. Weiss reportedly expanded her role because they liked India Varma’s performance yet fail to give her anything substantial to do.
Thus giving her more focus at the expense of Doran Martell, Hotah and even the Sand Snakes who are merely her dumb muscle than anything else. Yet despite this, she's given very little backstabbing or anything else to do beside blatantly attempt to kill Myrcella. How is it possible for her to steal the spotlight from more potentially interesting characters and yet give her so little to do?

Firstly, among our new Dornish characters, we're introduced to Prince Doran Martell (Alexander Siddig).
Doran is the cleverest of the Martell family, He lies silently in the grass, not stirring allowing his enemies to grow cocky and arrogant. Then, when they get too close, thinking they're invincible, he strikes. The Lannisters killed his sister, niece, nephew and brother and he's about to forgive and forget their horrendous actions. But he's patient and he know that the War of the Five Kings will weaken his neighbours. Soon the Lannisters and the Tyrells will claw at each others and that’s when he will act. The problem is we don’t get when he plans to act or what he’ll do when he acts and he's criminally underused appearing in only four episodes. Too few to make a proper impression.
He also unfortunately comes across as an incredibly passive character, constantly observing what’s happening and not getting involved in the scheming. We as an audience, never get to see what’s going on inside his mind. What long term plan he’s concocting or what he is or isn’t going to do about the death of his brother.

We're also introduced to Doran's personal bodyguard Areo Hotah (DeObia Oparei).
As stated above, Hotah was a POV character in the books, here he's reduced to a one note heavy - which is nice.
From what little we do see of Hotah this season he does effectively come across stoic, steadfast and loyal Captain of the guard and a man of few words but that's about the extent of his character.

We also see the introduction of Doran's youngest son Trystane (Toby Sebastian) and his appearance feels so inconsequential, he barely makes an impression. Did I miss something with him, I mean - what was the point of this character? He's so underdeveloped that I don't see why he couldn't be swapped out for Arianne Martell. 

We're also reintroduced to Jaime & Cercei's daughter Myrcella (Nell Tiger Free). Myrcella is very much a pawn in the Game. She's just a young girl who's in love and there's nothing cynical about it there's nothing beyond that. She wasn't happy with going to Dorne at first but she found her life there and she totally fell in love with Trystane Martell. Pitty that she too is under-utilised
Unfortunately the fact that she’s made Dorne her home confounded by the fact that the Sand Snakes want to kill her raises more questions: How deep does her relationship with House Martell? What was her relationship with the Sand Snakes like prior to the events of Season 5? Those questions are never addressed or answered over the course of the season. 

The Dornish storyline also introduces the Sand Snakes, the Bastard daughters of Oberyn Martell. Whereas in the books there were eight, in this season it's been whittled down to three: Obara Sand (Keisha Castle-Hughes), Nymeria Sand (Jessica Henwick) and Tyene Sand (Rosabell Laurenti Sellers). They had the right foundation. Wanting revenge for the death of Oberyn Martell, but the writers never worked to develop them beyond the initial set up. The only  and they are just the most despicable characters the show has introduced thus far, they're not even characters that you love to hate like Ramsey Bolton and Joffrey, they're hateful full stop.
Their methods for executing said revenge are completely nonsensical as the entire crux is to murder an innocent girl who had nothing to do with their fathers death as well as no other defining characteristic outside of their weapon of choice.
Clearly, the Sand Snakes are attempts to recapture the exoticism, danger and passion of Oberyn Martell from the previous season. The problem is Hughes, Henwick & Sellers have none of the charm, intelligence or fighting ability of Pedro Pascal. The

Castle-Hughes (an Oscar nominated actress), in particular, looks like a deadly snake but acts more as though she belongs doing comedy stints with infamous comedian Pauly Shore and Laurenti Sellers as Tyene, the youngest of the Snakes, apart from being incredibly photogenic and being a master poisoner comes across as merely a petulant twat. 

Of course showrunners, David Benioff & D. B. Weiss were always going to be at a disadvantage when adapting the Dorne storyline as the characters are not as well rounded as the other characters and a lot of what happens takes place inside the characters heads. This is one area where you can tell Benioff & Weiss really and truly struggled. They, reportedly, deliberately simplified the storyline for this season and it shows. The creatively liberties they took with the source material were just so ill-conceived
There was also no sense of intrigue, the set ups where either pointless or a lead up to something that was either underwhelming or silly. 

Thankfully, we don't spend too much time in Dorne and ultimately Season 5 continues Game of Thrones' winning streak with plenty of violence, sex, battles and political intrigue.
The downside to that is that not enough time in this season that is dedicated to developing the world and its (potentially) colourful cast of characters from page to screen and making us as an audience grow to case and like them which is a bummer.

A real highlight of the new characters in the Season is the High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce).
The Faith of the Seven has become very corrupt and is having a reformation movement by the time Season 5 comes along. The High Sparrow is the Game of Thrones equavilent of the Pope.
Cersei and the lords of King's Landing find they have a person who wants to serve the poor who’s cleaning out the corruption. In order to get what she wants, she makes him the newly elected Pope of the Faith Militant - It doesn’t really go her way during the latter half of season as it’s shown that while Cercei thinks she can manipulate him and get him on her side and he plays with that for a while, but he shows that that's not going to happen as he later reveals his intentions are pure and make sure these “evildoers” are punished including the ones standing right in front of him.
From his point of view Cersei is a symbol of everything that's gone wrong in King's Landing. Someone who's taken power with complete cynicism, who doesn't have any faith, who's not only been an adulterous but an incestuous adulteress and what makes matters worse for her is that she brought him into power unwittingly, not realising that his power could be turned against her.      

He’s a character driven solely by faith and has (as he sees it) very honest and honourable intentions in everything he does which makes the other characters trust him even less because they can’t actually believe that anyone would actually be honest, everyone’s playing some sort of secret game.

One of the primary themes this season is Hope in desperate situations: Sansa (Sophie Turner) goes from one bad situation to another this season, being married by Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen) off to Ramsey Bolton (Iwan Rheon). Convincing her to enter a dangerous situation so that she might take control of her destiny lead us as audience to believe we're going to see her grow into a more cunning character. 

Instead, for all the training that Littlefinger has given her, Sansa finds herself into a situation that's out of her control and learnt in the most brutal way possible that all the strength she drew from being back in her old home of Winterfell was nothing in the face of Ramsey's cruelty.

It was inevitable right from the moment, Sansa agreed to Littlefinger's plan and he took her back to Winterfell that evening was coming. She's now fully aware  Sex in Westeros, much like in Medivel times, is all about blurred lines. On the one hand, Sansa is Ramsey's wife and there is an understanding that wives cannot deny their husbands sex; On the other hand, she does end up imprisoned in a tower and expects her to serve his needs on a nightly basis regardless of her own desires and wether she wants to or not. Marital rape is still rape, but it comes without the same criminal status, and without the clear stigma within the world of the show.

To be fair, Sansa must have realised Ramsay was too insane to ever seduce to her will, so she more than likely decided to just play along until the time was right to strike.
To say that this season was an endurance test for Sansa would be an understatement.

Over in Meereen, things have slowed down for Daenerys. There always seemed to be this sense of manifest destiny with Dany and that she was going to take what was hers with Fire and Blood and for the past couple of seasons she has but as she’s slowly beginning to learn there’s a major difference between taking and keeping and that there’s also a difference between conquering and ruling and she’s starting to find out that the latter is much more complicated.
It’s impossible to rule over a city as large as Mareen without infuriating certain people and she’s trying her best to do the right thing and be a good ruler and sometimes within the context of this world being a good ruler means having to make tough decisions which she does a great many of during the course of the season.
When Jorah comes back into her life with Tyrion Lannister of all people, she's very conflicted, his betrayal at the end of Season 4 runs so deep and has affected her on such a level.
He’s the one person who has been with her since the beginning, he’s guided her from being this vulnerable girl to the conquering queen she is now. For their entire relationship to have been built on a lie is the point where we really see the fire in her as well as her steely determination. 

This season also sees the return of Tom Wlaschiha as Jaqen H’ghar and he's even more enigmatic than ever as he puts Arya to great tests and challenges her psychologically in her attempts to become a Faceless Man. Once you never know what he's up to and what he wants Arya to do so she can become a Faceless Man. Once agin

Maisie Williams, once again, is amazing as Arya. In this season, Arya journeys to Braavos to seek out the House of Black and White, the temple of the Faceless Men to learn to become a master assassin and exact vengeance on the people who have
However, Arya has a very strong sense of self. So if you're trying to practise self-abnegation and deny the self and deny your identity and ultimately become a Faceless Man you have to get rid of who you are.
Over the past few seasons, Arya's has become very good at letting go. She's been forced to let go of everything that means anything to her and initially she does a great job at getting rid of her material possessions but she can't bring herself to let go of Needle.
She sees herself as an instrument of revenge in a lot of ways and Needle is the way she's going to exact revenge on the people who killed her family and the fact that she just bring herself to let go of Needle shows that she's not ready to be No One.
Over and over again she's challenged and tested by Jaqen H’ghar to lie and detach herself from who she is and over time she becomes very impatient and more desperate for revenge. She's desperate to become a Faceless Man and kill the people on her list and that desperation and impatience has dire consequences for her by the end of the season.
The scenes of her washing corpses, sweeping the floors of the House of Black and White and being challenges by playing the "Game of Faces" are haunting and gruelling

This season is a big one for Cersei and Lena Heady sinks her teeth deep into her character.
Cersei is very use to manipulating the people around her and she's been very adept at manipulating everyone and the start of the season she's really starting to feel the absence of Tywin.
Now as she sees it all these vultures are now flying into Kings Landing to peck at the corpse and take over.
She's very wary of anyone who's going to push her into the corner and dismiss her as the Queen Mother and she's determined not to let that happen.
Given that she is the Queen Mother, she has no official position, she's been sidelined by Margery and Tommen and she sees someone whose swooping in to dig her claws into her son who means the world to her and to arrest him away from her and that kills Cersei and she would do anything to stop that from happening.
Cersei's fundamental flaw is that she doesn't consider real threats, real threats. She lives in a state of denial. She's kind of in control of things and this season kind of deconstructs her character to her absolute lowest.
She's never known what means to be truly down and out and by the end of the season she's really and truly broken down, at her lowest and that diminishes her power. It's this woman that you've been scared of your entire life and suddenly she's humanised in ways we as an audience never thought possible.

Whilst their characters are saddled with a less than compelling storyline, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Jerome Flynn do their best with the material their given, their comradely and banter is very entertaining and almost makes the Dorne storyline tolerable and they work superbly well off of each other.

It's also a BIG season for Jon Snow and Kit Harrington nails it as this season sees him become Lord Commander of the Night's Watch and because of his newfound position, he starts to take on bigger responsibilities of protecting the Seven Kingdoms. He's aware of the growing threat posed by the White Walkers so he decides to make a alliance with the Wildlings to combat this threat which is something that many members of the Watch are naturally disagree with as the Wildlings have been their enemies for thousands of years. As a result he's extremely conflicted about what he knows he needs to do because he knows the making an alliance with the Wildlings is going to make him very unpopular with the Watch. Eventually, Jon learns to trust himself and when you've determined that something is the right course of action then go for it. Even if all your advisors tell you otherwise, you trust your intuition and your instincts.
It's a very dangerous thing that he's doing because the Wildlings have been the traditional enemies of the Night's Watch and they've been killing each other for years and Jon Snow is asking them to not only save their lives but also risk the lives the members of the Night's Watch in order to save them.
Ultimately, Jon is his father's son, he's a person who's honourable to a fault and does the right thing even when the right thing is extremely dangerous to him personally.
He knows that there's a great war coming between the living and the dead and it's going to take all the strength he can muster from potential allies to have any chance even from people who've been fighting and killing each other for generations. So Jon is convinced that there is no other way and his opponents are equally convinced that this is a betrayal of the Night's Watch.
Whilst the other characters in Westeros fight for power, revenge etc, Jon Snow sees beyond the power plays at hand and perceives the "Long Night" that's brewing on the horizon.

Another character with a strong arc this season was Tyrion (Peter Dinklage). At the start of the season, Tyrion is a broken man who's lost the will to live in light of what he did at the end of last season. Having done some pretty terrible things that he's clearly no proud of or taken any pleasure in doing, he's lost everything from his lordship to his wealth and is now more cynical and pessimistic than ever and is ready to throw in the towel and is content to just drink himself to death.
Tyrion has become convinced in the futility of everything, gaining a negative and rather fatalistic outlook on the past and the future to the point of suicidal and has gained a lower view for matters he dealt with high esteem and importance beforehand in the past, such as the Great Houses of Westeros or the bid for the Iron Throne.
As he put it "The future is sh*t, just like the past."

That is until Varys (Conleth Hill) presents him with an option and a possible different way to go besides drinking himself slowly to death. Luckily for him, Varys is a good friend to have and is the kind of person who's not afraid to tell him the truth and the kind of person more than

This season is also a big one for Ser Jorah Mormont and Iain Glen’s performance, once again, shines with loyalty, devotion, determination & honour. Jorah is lost without his central focus which has always been Daenerys following his betrayal at the end of Season 4.
She’s someone whom he’s always believed would be a great and benign ruler in a world where there aren’t that many good rulers.
His arc this season is very much him trying to get back to Dany, find forgiveness and hopefully earn his shot at redemption. It’s about putting his body on the line for her, he’s willing to show that he would die for her and that’s really his offering. Without her, Jorah is nothing. He doesn't care for a life without her.

For the majority of this season, Brienne (Gwendoline Christie) is a Ronin in Westeros: A Samurai without a master all a purpose. She offered her services to Arya and she rejected them so at the beginning of Season 5, she's lost  But what keeps her going is her unshakable loyalty to Catlyn Stark and the oath that she swore to her to protect Sansa and Arya.
Her relationship with Podrick "Pod" Payne (Daniel Portman) is also a highlight of the season. The two of them compliment each other superbly and Podrick proves to be such a great foil to Brienne's more seasoned warrior. That said it's slight disappointing and jarring that they get sidelined and disappear for the second half of the season only to pop back up during the finale.

One noteworthy guest star worth mentioning is Birgitte Hjiort Sorensen as Wildling leader Karsi who makes a strong impression despite only being present in a few scenes. 

Directors Michael Slovis, Mark Mylod, Jeremy Podeswa, Miguel Sapochnik & David Nutter’s direction is splendid throughout the season 
Sapochnik, in particular, shows a splendid level of scope and ambition in his direction of Ep. 8: Hardhome, crafting the simply spectacular non-stop titular Battle that is mentioned in the book but we never actually get to see it. In terms of scale, it isn’t so much a battle so much as it is a massacre: The Army of the Dead is coming and the wildlings are putting up a resistance for as long as humanly possible, so it’s less like a battle a more like a horror movie sequence.      
The cinematography is colourful, the locations are gorgeous, the production design is tremendous (in particular, Winterfell under the command of the Boltons has become a much grimmer & darker place, whilst the Starks ruled benevolently, the Boltons rule under the command of Roose Bolton (Michael McElhatton) is anything but so it's become almost like a castle of horrors).

The score by Ramin Djawadi is outstandingly pulse pounding, the scenery is breathtaking, the special effects are fantastic, the costumes are beautiful,

The season finale is spectacular as death, tragedy, murder, shame and a bunch of jaw dropping cliffhangers make it the shows most ambitious and dour season finale to date.
In particular Cersei's Walk of Atonement is breathtakingly heartbreaking. Beautifully and seamlessly using CGI, a body double and a bunch of extras to create a heart wrenching spectacle.
Cersei has done some pretty horrible things to lots of people who didn't deserve it and yet it's tough not feel for her because she's in the worst waking nightmare you could think of.

Despite setbacks, Game of Thrones remains Unbowed, Unbent & Unbroken as ever, 5/5.

The Anonymous Critic.