Where’s a Loyal Direwolf When You Need One?

Photo Credit: HBO

Where’s a Loyal Direwolf When You Need One?

Audiences still reeling over Game of Thrones finale deaths

In the wake of several depressing episodes leading up to last night’s season finale, Game of Thrones gave its audience one last, fatal blow with a Valyrian steel blade when it bumped off yet another fan favourite.

*SPOILER ALERT*

If you’re a fan of the show and/or the series of books, you know nothing is sacred and nobody is safe in the Seven Kingdoms. But even armed with that knowledge, fans were still knocked off their chairs yesterday. The body count got pretty high: Princess Myrcella Baratheon (Lannister), Ramsay Bolton’s consort Myranda, Stannis Baratheon (we think), his mouse of a wife, and – it’s even hard to write it down – our gorgeous, stalwart lad who truly knows nothing because he didn’t see it coming – Jon Snow.

When you think it can’t get worse – you’re wrong. If you thought it was bad when Sansa married Ramsay Bolton, it got worse. When it was unforgivable for Stannis to sacrifice his “kingsblood” (It’s certainly no picnic to be a princess in Westeros, is it?) to the God of Light, it gets much worse for him. When you think Cersei has been thoroughly humiliated by being left filthy and starving in a lonely cell, it only gets worse for her, too. The level of despair this show plunges both its characters and its audience into is seemingly bottomless. And perhaps some readers were prepared for the fate of poor Jon Snow, but to see it executed (so to speak) on the screen was pretty damn upsetting.

While the books and the show have deviated from each other significantly in the past, and especially this season, by the end of the episode both readers and viewers are pretty much on an even playing field. Nobody can entirely predict what might happen next. While the novels explore some life-after-death scenarios, the TV producers have yet to pick up on that story element and we may not see the return of either Catelyn Stark or Jon Snow in another form; even though it appears the Mountain has been resurrected as the silent knight, Ser Strong, who carried Cersei back to the Red Keep.

And as any good cliffhanger worth its name implies, we are left with more questions than answers, but the biggest one may be: How are fans going to cope waiting for the next season, especially without being able to rely on the novels anymore?

What are your feelings about the season finale?