Rewriting Game of Thrones Season 5 (Part 2)
Part 1 of my Game of Thrones Season 5 rewrite is here.
Part 2: Sansa and Winterfell
Now, we come to the parts that need serious help: Sansa/Winterfell and Jaime/Dorne. Oofta.
Before I go into what went wrong with these storylines, I want to say that I think the instinct to send Sansa to Winterfell and Jaime to Dorne was a good one. Sansa otherwise would have had to pull the same disappearing act that Bran did this season, because her story ran out of plot points. Also, I think that having someone we know and care about in Jeyne Poole’s place gives more weight to the true horror of the Winterfell storyline than the books’ version.
The same goes for Jaime. His trip through the Riverlands in the books wasn’t interesting enough to include in the show, and unless he got transplanted to another storyline, he wouldn’t have had anything to do this season. Having him in Dorne rather than Arys Oakheart (whom I referred to as “Jaime Lannister Lite” while reading the books) made sense.
The main problem with both storylines as written in the show was that the writers forgot to continue each character’s arc when they moved them to these new storylines. That requires changing the storylines a bit, and in different ways than what they ended up with, but it wasn’t an insurmountable task.
Winterfell (Sansa, Littlefinger and Boltons)
The adjustments start on the road to Winterfell with Littlefinger. The Winterfell plotline needs to feel like an extension of Sansa’s growth in her ability to manipulate people. Littlefinger, priding himself as her teacher, should be (somewhat pompously) instructing her at every opportunity, including when they are in the carriage.
My idea is that as they ride, Littlefinger pontificates on some lesson in scheming-doesn’t much matter what-and Sansa is rolling her eyes a bit. She just watched one of Littlefinger’s schemes almost backfire on him. Sansa brings up something to the effect of, “If you’re such a master manipulator, why did I have to pull your ass out of the fire when you were up against my crazy Aunt Lysa?”
That gives Littlefinger the opportunity to respond with something to the effect of, “There are limits to manipulating crazy people, because they don’t play by the rules you’re twisting. Sometimes the best you can do is cut your losses and run/murder.” (This will be important later on.)
I know it’s way too convenient for Brienne and Pod to run into Sansa and Littlefinger at the inn, but I’m going to let that coincidence go unchanged. In general, the Brienne and Pod bits work well enough that I’m not going to monkey with them, except that the candle won’t coincidentally appear in the tower window the moment Brienne runs off to kill Stannis. (More on that later.)
The next adjustment comes in Sansa and Littlefinger’s conversation on the hill on their way back to the North, when Sansa realizes they’re headed to Winterfell to use her to broker a marriage alliance. The only reason I don’t like Littlefinger’s speech on revenge being the reason for Sansa to go back is because it seems like an odd way to start.
I would have Littlefinger try to convince Sansa to go along with his plan by starting with more traditional reasons, playing to her Stark honor. “A Stark has always held Winterfell. You owe it to the people of the North, your people, to see that they are governed justly and wisely,” etc., etc. When that doesn’t convince Sansa, then Littlefinger brings out the talk of revenge, perhaps even implying that once they have Ramsay firmly on their side, they might be able to off Roose Bolton.
I’d leave the rest of the Winterfell scenes while Littlefinger is still there alone. I buy that Littlefinger knows very little about Ramsay (I buy that the world knows very little about Ramsay, by Roose’s design). While he might have still tried the marriage gambit if he knew Ramsay was a sadistic madman, I don’t believe Littlefinger would have left Sansa alone if he’d known exactly what she was up against.
While initially I really liked it, the scene in which Roose, Walda, Sansa and Ramsay eat together and Ramsay makes Reek apologize for murdering Bran and Rickon needs to change to make Sansa’s arc work. In the scene as-written, Sansa shows that she’s definitely grown bolder, but her barbs are really stupid if her goal is to win Ramsay over enough to exert influence on him.
Sansa should be able to read the tension in the room and skillfully use her haughtiness to remind Roose and Walda of the power she wields as a Stark, and to bail Ramsay out of looking coarse and brash. When Walda and Roose talk about Walda’s pregnancy, Sansa comments on how wonderful it will be for Sansa and Ramsay’s children to have playmates the same age at Winterfell, and how lonely it can be for a child of Stark blood, growing up with all the pressure of knowing they are the heir to Winterfell and ruling the North, thus reminding everyone in the room why she’s here and what power the Stark name gives her.
Even with Sansa’s artful dodge, the tension between Roose and Ramsay continues to build, and Ramsay still tries to do something stupid with Theon to unsettle everyone at the table. However, Sansa cuts this off by redirecting towards wedding preparations, dropping names of all of the powerful families in the North who should be invited and how she’s personally known them since she was a child. Again, she wants to remind everyone of the reason she’s there in the first place and the cards she holds that the Bolton clan needs.
I’d also add a short scene between Sansa and Ramsay directly after the meal, in which Sansa straightforwardly sets out why Ramsay needs her. “Your father may have won the North with blood and treachery, but you won’t hold it that way. Even if he keeps you as his heir, you’ll need my blood and my name to convince the other Northern houses of the legitimacy of your rule. I hope that when we marry, we will be friends; but at the very least, we must be allies.” Ramsay appears surprised at Sansa, though we’re not quite sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s enough to at least give the viewer hope that Sansa has found a way to win Ramsay over.
Now, we get to the hard part: the wedding night.
Here’s where I’m at: I hate rape as a plot device. There’s a heck of a lot of it on the show already, and to see it happen to Sansa after all she’d been through with Joffrey was awful and felt like too much. On the other hand, in this particular instance, there’s an inevitability to it as soon as you put Sansa-or anyone, really-on the path of marrying Ramsay Bolton. I don’t know how to conceptualize a wedding night between Ramsay Bolton and any sane person that doesn’t involve rape and sadism.
I think the only way rape and abuse isn’t inflicted on a person affiliated with Ramsay is if that person gets off on torture and murder as much as Ramsay does-essentially, taking the Myranda route. The only way I could think of where Sansa actually goes through with the wedding and Ramsay doesn’t rape her is if Sansa asks for the opportunity to torture and flay Theon as a wedding gift. I think that and that alone would have gotten Ramsay sufficiently attracted to and-respectful of? something like that-Sansa to either allow Sansa some agency on their wedding night or to excite Ramsay enough that he’d just sit in the corner jacking off to the display. While I like the idea of dark!Sansa, I don’t know that I really want to make her that pitch-black.
Once you get to the point of married to Ramsay equals raped by Ramsay, what you really come down to is, do you have Stannis get to Winterfell before the wedding? Some shows might do that, but I think it wouldn’t be in keeping with the Game of Thrones ethos to get Sansa out of peril as she’s walking down the aisle, so to speak. I think once you get Sansa to Winterfell, you have to go through with it, as ugly as that path is.
That being said, I think the show took it further than necessary. In particular, the timespan of Sansa’s rape, abuse and imprisonment was longer than it needed to be. I think it would have been just as effective and less gratuitous to trim it down to three sequences after the wedding night itself (which I wouldn’t change much-maybe just tweak some of Sansa’s dialogue so she’s playing off her prior conversation about her value rather than her relatively weak, “Tyrion was really nice. Aren’t you going to be nice, too?”):
(1) The morning after the wedding night, Sansa begs Theon to light the candle in the tower for her. She reprises Littlefinger’s advice about the limitations of manipulating crazy people-she’s in over her head with Ramsay, and she knows it’s time to cut and run. As in the show, Theon reports to Ramsay and Ramsay flays the nice old woman. As a result of Sansa’s escape attempt, Ramsay says he’s going to lock Sansa up. Sansa grabs the screw-thingie.
(It always bothered me that Ramsay just locked Sansa up as soon as they were married as a matter of course, and apparently no one objected to it. Roose is a cold, cruel man, but he’s not an idiot. Holding a Stark captive isn’t going to win the Boltons the brownie points Roose is so desperate to collect with this marriage. I can believe he’d see locking her up after an escape attempt as a pragmatic move, though.)
(2) Short scene in Sansa’s room/prison. Make it clear that very little time has passed-a couple of days, tops-but Ramsay has been back. Maybe Myranda visits Sansa and taunts her, rather than Sansa interacting with Theon again, and maybe mention that Ramsay didn’t come last night (he was out causing chaos in Stannis’s camp, making this the day before Stannis attacks Winterfell). Sansa is careful about hiding the screw-thingie.
(3) Day of the battle, Sansa hears the commotion, breaks out of her room with the screw-thingie and goes to the tower with her candle. It’s in the tower itself that she runs into Theon and Myranda. As in the show, Myranda taunts her-though this time it’s clear she’s in the tower because she figured Sansa would be back. Sansa still has her line about better to die now than when there’s nothing left of her, and Reek has his freak-out/semi-heroic moment, shoving Myranda against the stone wall when she nocks her arrow. Either Myranda hits her head and dies from that shove, or Theon (or maybe Sansa herself?) deals her a death blow once she’s down.
At this point, Sansa looks down at her candle, then at all the soldiers visible from the tower window. Sansa says the Martin-esque equivalent of “Fuck this waiting to be rescued shit” and uses her candle to set the motherfucking tower on fire. (Seeing this from afar would lead Brienne, either at the end of this season or the beginning of next season, to have a serious “Oh shit, I failed a vow again” moment.)
Depending on how much time we have for this sequence, maybe Sansa even switches clothes with Myranda’s corpse, in the hope that when the body is found everyone will think it’s her. Regardless, she sets the fire to distract the soldiers while she escapes, again by jumping from the ramparts, bringing Theon along. We could save until next season to learn whether she took him because she was grateful he killed Myranda, or if she just didn’t want to kill him and had no other way of escaping without leaving an eye witness behind.
This revised version of the Winterfell storyline gives Sansa more agency, along with what I hope would be an iconic visual moment with the burning tower. Her shrewd scheming is consistent with her narrative arc, and Ramsay just turns out to be such a psychopath that her abilities don’t work on him. Even then, she finds a way to save herself, instead of waiting for someone to save her (or having Theon half-stumble into saving her).
As for the practicalities, my changes to the Winterfell storyline don’t involve any additional cast and should actually take less screen time than the original. (I would give that saved time to Dorne, which is probably going to need more than what I’m taking from here.) The only added FX expense is the burning tower. If I needed to trim my FX budget elsewhere for this, I’d cut seeing any actual fire in Stannis’s camp and just have Davos report on the activities of Ramsay’s raiding party.
That's all for Sansa and Winterfell. Part 3, Jaime and Dorne, coming soon...
Part 2: Sansa and Winterfell
Now, we come to the parts that need serious help: Sansa/Winterfell and Jaime/Dorne. Oofta.
Before I go into what went wrong with these storylines, I want to say that I think the instinct to send Sansa to Winterfell and Jaime to Dorne was a good one. Sansa otherwise would have had to pull the same disappearing act that Bran did this season, because her story ran out of plot points. Also, I think that having someone we know and care about in Jeyne Poole’s place gives more weight to the true horror of the Winterfell storyline than the books’ version.
The same goes for Jaime. His trip through the Riverlands in the books wasn’t interesting enough to include in the show, and unless he got transplanted to another storyline, he wouldn’t have had anything to do this season. Having him in Dorne rather than Arys Oakheart (whom I referred to as “Jaime Lannister Lite” while reading the books) made sense.
The main problem with both storylines as written in the show was that the writers forgot to continue each character’s arc when they moved them to these new storylines. That requires changing the storylines a bit, and in different ways than what they ended up with, but it wasn’t an insurmountable task.
Winterfell (Sansa, Littlefinger and Boltons)
The adjustments start on the road to Winterfell with Littlefinger. The Winterfell plotline needs to feel like an extension of Sansa’s growth in her ability to manipulate people. Littlefinger, priding himself as her teacher, should be (somewhat pompously) instructing her at every opportunity, including when they are in the carriage.
My idea is that as they ride, Littlefinger pontificates on some lesson in scheming-doesn’t much matter what-and Sansa is rolling her eyes a bit. She just watched one of Littlefinger’s schemes almost backfire on him. Sansa brings up something to the effect of, “If you’re such a master manipulator, why did I have to pull your ass out of the fire when you were up against my crazy Aunt Lysa?”
That gives Littlefinger the opportunity to respond with something to the effect of, “There are limits to manipulating crazy people, because they don’t play by the rules you’re twisting. Sometimes the best you can do is cut your losses and run/murder.” (This will be important later on.)
I know it’s way too convenient for Brienne and Pod to run into Sansa and Littlefinger at the inn, but I’m going to let that coincidence go unchanged. In general, the Brienne and Pod bits work well enough that I’m not going to monkey with them, except that the candle won’t coincidentally appear in the tower window the moment Brienne runs off to kill Stannis. (More on that later.)
The next adjustment comes in Sansa and Littlefinger’s conversation on the hill on their way back to the North, when Sansa realizes they’re headed to Winterfell to use her to broker a marriage alliance. The only reason I don’t like Littlefinger’s speech on revenge being the reason for Sansa to go back is because it seems like an odd way to start.
I would have Littlefinger try to convince Sansa to go along with his plan by starting with more traditional reasons, playing to her Stark honor. “A Stark has always held Winterfell. You owe it to the people of the North, your people, to see that they are governed justly and wisely,” etc., etc. When that doesn’t convince Sansa, then Littlefinger brings out the talk of revenge, perhaps even implying that once they have Ramsay firmly on their side, they might be able to off Roose Bolton.
I’d leave the rest of the Winterfell scenes while Littlefinger is still there alone. I buy that Littlefinger knows very little about Ramsay (I buy that the world knows very little about Ramsay, by Roose’s design). While he might have still tried the marriage gambit if he knew Ramsay was a sadistic madman, I don’t believe Littlefinger would have left Sansa alone if he’d known exactly what she was up against.
While initially I really liked it, the scene in which Roose, Walda, Sansa and Ramsay eat together and Ramsay makes Reek apologize for murdering Bran and Rickon needs to change to make Sansa’s arc work. In the scene as-written, Sansa shows that she’s definitely grown bolder, but her barbs are really stupid if her goal is to win Ramsay over enough to exert influence on him.
Sansa should be able to read the tension in the room and skillfully use her haughtiness to remind Roose and Walda of the power she wields as a Stark, and to bail Ramsay out of looking coarse and brash. When Walda and Roose talk about Walda’s pregnancy, Sansa comments on how wonderful it will be for Sansa and Ramsay’s children to have playmates the same age at Winterfell, and how lonely it can be for a child of Stark blood, growing up with all the pressure of knowing they are the heir to Winterfell and ruling the North, thus reminding everyone in the room why she’s here and what power the Stark name gives her.
Even with Sansa’s artful dodge, the tension between Roose and Ramsay continues to build, and Ramsay still tries to do something stupid with Theon to unsettle everyone at the table. However, Sansa cuts this off by redirecting towards wedding preparations, dropping names of all of the powerful families in the North who should be invited and how she’s personally known them since she was a child. Again, she wants to remind everyone of the reason she’s there in the first place and the cards she holds that the Bolton clan needs.
I’d also add a short scene between Sansa and Ramsay directly after the meal, in which Sansa straightforwardly sets out why Ramsay needs her. “Your father may have won the North with blood and treachery, but you won’t hold it that way. Even if he keeps you as his heir, you’ll need my blood and my name to convince the other Northern houses of the legitimacy of your rule. I hope that when we marry, we will be friends; but at the very least, we must be allies.” Ramsay appears surprised at Sansa, though we’re not quite sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s enough to at least give the viewer hope that Sansa has found a way to win Ramsay over.
Now, we get to the hard part: the wedding night.
Here’s where I’m at: I hate rape as a plot device. There’s a heck of a lot of it on the show already, and to see it happen to Sansa after all she’d been through with Joffrey was awful and felt like too much. On the other hand, in this particular instance, there’s an inevitability to it as soon as you put Sansa-or anyone, really-on the path of marrying Ramsay Bolton. I don’t know how to conceptualize a wedding night between Ramsay Bolton and any sane person that doesn’t involve rape and sadism.
I think the only way rape and abuse isn’t inflicted on a person affiliated with Ramsay is if that person gets off on torture and murder as much as Ramsay does-essentially, taking the Myranda route. The only way I could think of where Sansa actually goes through with the wedding and Ramsay doesn’t rape her is if Sansa asks for the opportunity to torture and flay Theon as a wedding gift. I think that and that alone would have gotten Ramsay sufficiently attracted to and-respectful of? something like that-Sansa to either allow Sansa some agency on their wedding night or to excite Ramsay enough that he’d just sit in the corner jacking off to the display. While I like the idea of dark!Sansa, I don’t know that I really want to make her that pitch-black.
Once you get to the point of married to Ramsay equals raped by Ramsay, what you really come down to is, do you have Stannis get to Winterfell before the wedding? Some shows might do that, but I think it wouldn’t be in keeping with the Game of Thrones ethos to get Sansa out of peril as she’s walking down the aisle, so to speak. I think once you get Sansa to Winterfell, you have to go through with it, as ugly as that path is.
That being said, I think the show took it further than necessary. In particular, the timespan of Sansa’s rape, abuse and imprisonment was longer than it needed to be. I think it would have been just as effective and less gratuitous to trim it down to three sequences after the wedding night itself (which I wouldn’t change much-maybe just tweak some of Sansa’s dialogue so she’s playing off her prior conversation about her value rather than her relatively weak, “Tyrion was really nice. Aren’t you going to be nice, too?”):
(1) The morning after the wedding night, Sansa begs Theon to light the candle in the tower for her. She reprises Littlefinger’s advice about the limitations of manipulating crazy people-she’s in over her head with Ramsay, and she knows it’s time to cut and run. As in the show, Theon reports to Ramsay and Ramsay flays the nice old woman. As a result of Sansa’s escape attempt, Ramsay says he’s going to lock Sansa up. Sansa grabs the screw-thingie.
(It always bothered me that Ramsay just locked Sansa up as soon as they were married as a matter of course, and apparently no one objected to it. Roose is a cold, cruel man, but he’s not an idiot. Holding a Stark captive isn’t going to win the Boltons the brownie points Roose is so desperate to collect with this marriage. I can believe he’d see locking her up after an escape attempt as a pragmatic move, though.)
(2) Short scene in Sansa’s room/prison. Make it clear that very little time has passed-a couple of days, tops-but Ramsay has been back. Maybe Myranda visits Sansa and taunts her, rather than Sansa interacting with Theon again, and maybe mention that Ramsay didn’t come last night (he was out causing chaos in Stannis’s camp, making this the day before Stannis attacks Winterfell). Sansa is careful about hiding the screw-thingie.
(3) Day of the battle, Sansa hears the commotion, breaks out of her room with the screw-thingie and goes to the tower with her candle. It’s in the tower itself that she runs into Theon and Myranda. As in the show, Myranda taunts her-though this time it’s clear she’s in the tower because she figured Sansa would be back. Sansa still has her line about better to die now than when there’s nothing left of her, and Reek has his freak-out/semi-heroic moment, shoving Myranda against the stone wall when she nocks her arrow. Either Myranda hits her head and dies from that shove, or Theon (or maybe Sansa herself?) deals her a death blow once she’s down.
At this point, Sansa looks down at her candle, then at all the soldiers visible from the tower window. Sansa says the Martin-esque equivalent of “Fuck this waiting to be rescued shit” and uses her candle to set the motherfucking tower on fire. (Seeing this from afar would lead Brienne, either at the end of this season or the beginning of next season, to have a serious “Oh shit, I failed a vow again” moment.)
Depending on how much time we have for this sequence, maybe Sansa even switches clothes with Myranda’s corpse, in the hope that when the body is found everyone will think it’s her. Regardless, she sets the fire to distract the soldiers while she escapes, again by jumping from the ramparts, bringing Theon along. We could save until next season to learn whether she took him because she was grateful he killed Myranda, or if she just didn’t want to kill him and had no other way of escaping without leaving an eye witness behind.
This revised version of the Winterfell storyline gives Sansa more agency, along with what I hope would be an iconic visual moment with the burning tower. Her shrewd scheming is consistent with her narrative arc, and Ramsay just turns out to be such a psychopath that her abilities don’t work on him. Even then, she finds a way to save herself, instead of waiting for someone to save her (or having Theon half-stumble into saving her).
As for the practicalities, my changes to the Winterfell storyline don’t involve any additional cast and should actually take less screen time than the original. (I would give that saved time to Dorne, which is probably going to need more than what I’m taking from here.) The only added FX expense is the burning tower. If I needed to trim my FX budget elsewhere for this, I’d cut seeing any actual fire in Stannis’s camp and just have Davos report on the activities of Ramsay’s raiding party.
That's all for Sansa and Winterfell. Part 3, Jaime and Dorne, coming soon...