'Game of Thrones' season finale recap: 'Mother's Mercy'

Spoiler alert! The following contains spoilers from the Game of Thrones season 5 finale.

The fifth season of Game of Thrones saw many of our characters — some our favorites, some less so — rise higher than they have in the whole five seasons. Jon, after struggling with his bastard name, became Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. Cersei, now without Robert, Tywin, Tyrion, Jaime or any man controlling her life, finally had total control over King’s Landing and her own destiny. Arya escaped her old identity entirely, becoming a servant of the death she wished so desperately to deploy. Dany ruled Meereen with even the possibility of turning her sights on the Seven Kingdoms soon. Stannis had his army, his family, Melisandre, and the North behind him as he prepared to take his first real victory, and potentially Westeros.

But by the end of “Mother’s Mercy,” all of these characters have been brought to their utmost lowest points, and many may not recover in season six (and some may not even be alive for it at all). It’s simply the way of the world in this show, where bad things happen to all people, good or bad. Ruthlessness has often been rewarded, but even the ruthless can make poor decisions. You have to be smart to play the game of thrones, and after five years of playing, some people are getting sloppy. The Westeros that returns in season six will be a whole new world, as changed as it was after Ned Stark’s death. Finally, truly, winter is coming. And I don’t think they’re ready.

‘For the Watch’

OK. Listen, guys. Listen. Jon Snow can’t be dead. He just can’t be. Because like, no that’s not OK. Even in Westeros, the land where bad things happen to people with good intentions, where the Red Wedding happened and Ned was killed and Joffrey became king, even in Westeros everybody knows that Jon is the best character, the only guy with a good head on his shoulders, and everybody is straight-up doomed without him. Right? Right? I’m wrong, of course. Because as I said before, no one is safe. In the same way we should have known that something bad was about to happen last episode when Stannis sent Davos away, Jon letting Sam and Gilly leave Castle Black was a terrible idea, leaving him without any true allies and no line of defense when he is, by his own words, the most hated man there. The outrage over Jon’s decision to let the Wildings on this side of the Wall has been brewing all season, and it was bound to boil over at some point, although I’m not entirely convinced that it had reached the point of mutiny and murder quite yet (didn’t these guys listen to the other survivors who made it back from Hardhome? Aren’t they scared of the White Walkers at all?). In the end it was not a Wildling or a White Walker or even a broken heart that did Jon Snow in, it was the brothers he dedicated his life to serving and protecting. But that’s what you get in Westeros.

Jon’s assassination — that’s the right word for it, as political as it was — was one of the most heartbreaking scenes the show has ever shot. Beginning and ending the assault with Ollie, the young boy whom Jon had saved, whose life has been defined by violence, only made it that more tragic. The final shot of Jon staring up at the sky, lying in the snow he was named for as his blood turned it scarlet, was truly haunting. Now maybe there’s the slight possibility that he’s not really dead (or some other theory, click at your own risk), but if he is really gone, it’s a huge loss for the show, as he was one of the last truly moral characters left. We’ll miss you, Jon. You were always the best of the Starks, even if you couldn’t have their name.

A very long walk

 

Was anyone brought lower this season, without actually dying, than Cersei Lannister? This woman — who despises the common people, who has been always been more proud than anything else, who guarded her sexuality so closely, and who was finally was able to stop having herself and her body used in the game of thrones — was forced to walk naked, her hair shorn, in the streets of King’s Landing as the people yelled and cursed and threw food and excrement at her, and a nun walked behind her intoning “shame, shame, shame.” That she ends up at the end of her walk in front of the men she is still fighting — her uncle Kevan, Grand Maester Pycelle — only serves to bring her lower. The High Sparrow wanted her to do her atonement the way she came into the world, and by the end of it that’s exactly how she is: The shriveled, crying mess that Qyburn wraps in that red sheet (as The Rains of Castemere plays in the background, no less) has basically been reduced to an infant.

But, as terrible as things are for Cersei at this moment, there is one very, very tall ray of sunshine in her life. Qyburn introduces her to Ser Robert Strong, the newest member of the King’s Guard. Robert is, well, very big, very strong and very silent. And, um, there’s something wrong with his eyes. Look I’m just going to say what everyone else is thinking: This guy is the zombified or Frankenstein-ified remains of Gregor Clegane, aka the Mountain. Stranger things have happened on this show. And the fact that he exists and seems to be doing whatever Qyburn wants is pretty freaking terrifying. So maybe things are looking up for Cersei in season six.

I’m Arya Stark

 

I feel like all season I’ve been writing the same thing over and over again, because this show never learns. Instead it chooses again and again to show violence and sexual violence against women without a reason. In this episode the audience is treated to the pedophile Meryn Trant torturing children. Yes, it was necessary for the plot that Arya kills him, but the show actively decided to include him whipping three young girls in order to do so. Was it not enough shock and body horror to see Trant’s eyes gouged out? Did we need to see the pedophile at his work as well? If I have one hope for season six of this show it is that the showrunners think and really choose what kind of violence they are going to portray, and really, really think before they portray any sexual violence. Because it is not always necessary, and it is not something to include lightly. I’m begging you here, guys. But anyways, back to Arya. After she dispatched with Trant rather violently, displaying her new ability to wear another face, she returns to the House of Black and White to find Jaquen and the waif waiting for her. They’re none-too-pleased that she took a face in order to kill the wrong person. They grab her and for a moment it looks like they’re going to kill her, but instead it’s Jaquen who swallows the poisoned water. He falls to the ground and Arya runs over to him crying, but suddenly the waif turns into Jaquen. They are truly no one, he says, but Arya is still Arya, and was not ready to wear another’s face. The crying Arya pulls face after face after face off the dead body, only to eventually see her own, before not seeing anything at all. Whether or not she’s still a part of the Faceless Men is unclear, but this is not the confident killer Arya was back with Trant. This is a scared, blind teenager. Maybe she’ll be no one soon.

Queen of nothing

There are a lot of long faces in Meereen after last week’s big dragon extravaganza. Dany and Drogon are still nowhere to be found and so it’s time for Team Mother of Dragons to make a plan. Daario Naharis — who has spent much of the season being a very beautiful, but very useless, bit of arm candy — actually has quite a good one. He suggest that he and Jorah go after Dany, while Tyrion, Missendei and Grey Worm stay to rule Meereen (or, er, what’s left of it). Tyrion is a little pouty about being left behind, but lo and behold who should show up to cheer him but Varys, who has finally made it to Meereen (if Tyrion was able to beat him by so much time after being kidnapped, attacked by Stone Men and then kidnapped again, I’d say Varys took the really, really scenic route). The good old Master of Whisperers has birds in the East as well as in the West, it seems, and he’s ready to give Tyrion his services once again. King’s Landing was never in better shape then when these two guys were at the helm in season two, so I’d say things are starting to look up for Meereen, finally.

Meanwhile Dany is a long way away from the city she’s currently calling “home.” Dragon has flown her somewhere with a lot of grass and a rocky, mountainous terrain, so it seems like we’re definitely not in sandy Slaver’s Bay anymore. That suspicion is confirmed when Dany wanders away from the sleeping dragon (who is being such a teenager in this episode, by the way, basically scoffing at his mom when she wants him to stop goofing around and go home) only to run into a full Dothraki Khalasar, which immediately surrounds the bedraggled and unarmed queen. Without her knights, without her dragons and her titles and her Unsullied and all the rest of it, Dany is in exactly the same place she was at the beginning of the show: She’s just a lonely girl with a famous name and no home, trying to make it amongst the Dothraki. I don’t think she’s going to end up as the Khaleesi this time around.

An army of one

After all that build up, all those battle plans, after burning a child at the stake, this is what we get for the battle of Winterfell: Almost nothing. Half of Stannis’s army deserted after Shireen’s murder (good for them), taking the horses with them, and Ramsay’s cavalry tore what was left to shreds (despite the anticlimactic battle, the music during this sequence was really quite something). And, oh yeah, Melisandre flew the coop, too. I’d feel bad for Stannis — whose wife just killed herself and — except, wait no, he’s fighting Ramsay for the Worst Person in Westeros award, and child-murderers get no sympathy. When the would-be king is wounded, the last one standing after his army is decimated, who should find him but Brienne of Tarth, Kingsguard to the late Renly Baratheon. Brienne has waited a long time for her vengeance (and if she’d waited a little bit longer she might have been able to save Sansa too, but more on that below), and unlike Arya, she’s not one to take pleasure in a slow death. Like the honorable soldier she is, she sentences Stannis to death with all the words and titles you’re supposed to use, and then gives him his last words before killing him in one clean stroke. Like Jon’s attack, it is left mildly ambiguous as to whether or not Stannis is actually dead, but let’s just say he is so that we can be done with him forever and Brienne can go do some better things. OK? Cool.

Escape from Winterfell

Sansa Stark, who had been forced by the show to return to being a victim for much of this season, is finally taking her life back into her own hands, which is a most welcome plotline. Taking advantage of Stannis’s advance, she leaves her quarters with a candle and heads up to the tower to light it and signal help, which we discover has been Brienne this whole time. Unfortunately Brienne is busy on a personal quest at that particular moment (irony sucks, guys) and so Sansa’s all alone when Miranda and Reek meet her on the Winterfell wall with a bow and arrow trained at her chest. Sansa tells Miranda to go ahead and kill her and get it over with but, being a cartoon villain and all, Miranda goes on a big rant about all the horrible things she and Ramsay are going to do with her. Thankfully Reek finally remembers he’s a person and pushes Miranda over the ledge (good riddance), and he and Sansa jump off the other side of the wall, into fate unknown. My one complaint is that Sansa is still at the whim of someone else’s agency, but hopefully as she and Theon (I think we can maybe go back to calling hime that now) go into season six (presuming they both survived that jump), she’ll take control back again. Because Sansa Stark is not your victim. Sansa Stark is so much more than that.

Dornish kissing

Oh right, Jaime, Bronn and Myrcella were in this episode, too. I guess we should talk about them, right? Although, to be honest, the whole Dorne storyline has kind of been a huge let-down this season, circling around itself without ever really justifying its existence. There was a lot of build up for what was essentially a return to the status quo. And I guess it will become more relevant as the poison Ellaria kissed onto Myrcella takes effect, but really it just seemed like a lot of time spent spinning the show’s wheels in yet another location, with a whole slew of new characters to keep track of to boot. The one thing I’ll say is that Myrcella finally stopped being an annoying teenager, when she accepted Jaime as her father, which is more than he would get from simple Tommen and certainly more than he would have gotten from Joffrey. Myrcella is the first person outside of the twisted relationship to simply say that Jaime’s love for his sister is OK, and that’s huge for the man who’s been kind of self-loathing all season. Although it’s too bad his new loving daughter had to collapse, bleeding in his arms. Yet another fate we’ll have to find out when the show returns next year. Game of Thrones really does like to keep us guessing. Well, friends, that’s it for season five. Thanks for joining me on this wild ride. I’ll be spending the summer thinking of 1,000 ways that Jon could still be alive. One of them is bound to be right.