Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken

As I have often said this year, the fifth season of Game of Thrones has been incredibly reckless as an adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire.  For the most part this has paid off - the writing has been tighter and more focused this year; some of these characters have never been more compelling and the show appears to be building to some gripping climaxes (which for the most part will pivot back to the end of A Dance with Dragons).  But "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken" represented all the pitfalls of such an approach.  While much of the content in the episode was praiseworthy and moved the story along neatly, two scenes in particular were just so botched - and in very different ways - that the episode stands unceremoniously as perhaps the all-time worst hour of Game of Thrones.

These two terrible scenes occur in Winterfell and Dorne.  Beginning with the rape of Sansa in Winterfell, I want to make one thing clear from the outset.  The rape itself does not bother me.  What did everybody think was going to happen when Littlefinger gave his big reveal in "High Sparrow"?  This is Ramsay Bolton.  We know him well.  This is absolutely in character for him.  Last week Roose told Ramsay to be a man by telling the story of Roose's rape of Ramsay's mother.  These are rapey people.  We all knew Sansa's wedding night was going to be traumatizing.

From a readers's perspective, the scene shouldn't be nearly so bothersome.  In A Dance with Dragons the Boltons marry Ramsay to an imposter-Arya, who is actually Sansa's old friend Jeyne Poole.  Without going into details, suffice it to say that the wedding-night rape of Jeyne Poole is infinitely worse.  Rape is rape - the logic of being more offended by it because it's happening to Sansa rather than some nameless common girl is poor.

Rather, what is bothersome about the scene - and the episode, and the entire season at Winterfell, more broadly - is how the show itself reduces Sansa to a victim.  Sansa has been given little or no agency this year, rather than a couple of choice one-liners at dinner with the Boltons.  In this episode, like all the other episodes, she is talked to, intimidated by or maneuvered by another character.  At least in this episode, the intimidation factor came from Myranda, but in her complacency at the White Wedding (which, I have to admit, was one of the most gorgeously shot sequences in the show's recent memory) and in her victimization during the awful rape scene, Sansa continues to play the victim.  This season promised something more than that for Sansa, who has been playing the victim since Season 1.  But Thrones has gone out of its way to show that she has grown up a lot, that she's smarter than that.  It's not playing out that way in Winterfell, and that disturbs me.

Perhaps the bedding scene had to happen, at some point or another, and perhaps Sansa will grow and change from this experience, but another choice just shows how callously the show has treated Sansa this year.  Why did this have to be the climax?  This is the show sacrificing decency for their own shock-value, always needing to one-up itself (this has been astutely pointed out over at the AV Club as well).  Why couldn't Arya entering the Hall of Faces work just as well?  How about Margaery's incarceration?  Even the massive fuck-up at Dorne would have been less offensive.

Let's talk Dorne.  Dorne has been seriously problematic.  From the awful introduction of the Sand Snakes to the total lack of character development in the leadership department, Dorne has felt awkwardly shunted in from the very beginning.  To the show's credit, Jamie and Bronn have had a nice, interesting, funny road trip together, and the fight with the Dornish patrolmen was quality.  But this episode brought all of these elements to an utterly botched head, and oddly enough, it was in plausibility, choreography and scale - production aspects that Thrones usually excels at - that made this scene so empty.

First of all, that Jamie and Bronn would sneak into the Water Gardens at the same instant that the Sand Snakes attack stretches plausibility to the extreme.  The sneaking itself looked silly - is it really this easy to break into the capital of Dorne?  If Dornish might is to be so feared, breaking into the Water Gardens (please, Thrones, just say Sunspear or the Water Gardens instead of Dorne) shouldn't be as easy as gate-crashing a 10-year-old's birthday party.

The Sand Snakes didn't acquit themselves any better in this fight than in their wretched introductory scene.  This was the rarest of things - an appallingly choreographed Thrones fight.  It was impossible to tell what was going on or who was fighting who.  Jamie shouldn't have survived the fight.  He barely defeated the Dornish patrolmen two episodes ago, and was very lucky to do so.  If the Sand Snakes are all that and a bag of chips, as they are supposed to be, then Jamie should have died immediately.  Thank God for Bronn.  When the Sand Snakes entered and he muttered "oh, for fuck's sake," the whole Thrones viewership was thinking the same thing.

When Thrones screws up, especially from a production standpoint, it has the effect of coloring the entire episode badly, which would not be entirely fair to "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken".  One of the best sequences involved the arrest of Margaery - that seemingly inconsequential scene when she walked in on Loras getting it on with Olyvar came back to bite her in the ass in the interrogation with the High Septon (Jonathan Pryce continues to kill it).  This was some especially clever plotting on D+D's part.

Meanwhile, we see Tyrion in his element, talking his way out of death.  Tyrion has gradually been growing more and more fun to watch this year, and in this respect the show has nicely mirrored his arc in A Dance with Dragons.  And in perhaps the finest sequence, Arya gives the gift of the Faceless Men to a sick, dying girl herself, and she does it with adult tact and composure.  Then, she is finally allowed into the magnificent Hall of Faces, a set that I've been hoping to see all year and which the Thrones production team absolutely crushed.

Unfortunately, all of this fine work overshadowed by monumental fuck-ups in Dorne and Winterfell.  This wasn't the conclusion of either story, and I'll give both arcs the benefit of the doubt until the end of the season (to be honest, I am very hopeful for the Winterfell arc, which up until this episode I have absolutely loved - less so for Dorne).  Unlike Democratic senator Claire McCaskill, I'm not going to give up on Thrones, but I also haven't been this concerned about the future of the show in a while.

C

Bits 

- I think having three girls fighting with a whip, double knives and a spear is cool to imagine in the books but logistically difficult to make convincing in the show.

- Nice to see Mr. Eko from Lost show up as Tyrion and Jorah's slaver.

- I am still hoping for a major Dorne reveal from Alexander Siddig, who hasn't done much but certainly feels like Doran Martell to me.  Also from this episode, perhaps my fears of an Arys Oakheart stand-in were unfounded.

- Welcome back, Diana Rigg, still some of the best casting the show has ever done.

- Littlefinger has a meeting with Cersei that does absolutely nothing to make his intentions clearer.

Book Bits

- Nothing major here, other than what I mentioned about Winterfell.