So season six started last Sunday. I missed the first episode's initial showing, getting confused about the start date. I guess it's Banshee that starts next month.
Oh well.
I know everyone's been all fired up about this new season, especially with all the bitching and whining over Jon Snow's death last season. But I'm still a bit miffed that Martin isn't going to finish the books and instead is planning on finishing his grand epic via the television series. Color me old fashioned, but this just feels like a middle finger to the millions of hardy fans that slogged their way through his dense novels.
But we're off now, and since we're out of the fifth novel, we're in uncharted territory. Even though we do have Arya struggling as a blind person, as in the books, I doubt we'll find that she has the warg capabilities like her siblings that were so helpful in the novel.
Jon Snow is still dead and Sir Davos is hold up in Castle Black with a couple of Snow's loyal friends with the rest of the Night's Watch waiting outside to kill them. Will the Red Witch Melisandre be of help to them? Lot's of folks have theorized that she may raise Snow from the dead, but if you remember back to when she and Stannis Baratheon came upon Beric Dondarrion a few seasons ago, she said she did not have the ability to bring the dead back to life as Dondarrion was able to do. Did he teach her? I guess we'll see. And since there are no constraints now on which direction the series goes, I wouldn't be surprised to see Snow brought back simply for the ratings.
And by the way, did we really have to see an eighty year old naked woman on television (which is what Melisandre turned into when she took off the red jewel necklace). Eesh, it was like walking in and seeing my grandmother naked or something. Totally unnecessary cheap exploitation.
Sansa Stark's escape with Theon Greyjoy reunites her with Brienne of Tarth, who turned in a surprisingly inept battle against a few of Castle Bolton's soldiers. She was able to go toe to toe with the kindom's greatest swordsman, Jaime Lannister, but now seemed awkward and slow against some lowly soldiers. Odd. Sansa is no borne leader, so I'm not sure where that thread is headed. I guess they'll head to Castle Black and find Snow dead. And then . . . ?
After murdering the king and his son, I guess we're to assume Dorne will now be run by Ellaria and her Sand Snakes. The Dornish are the perfect 21 century television fantasy country -- the women are powerful, mostly lesbians who also take husbands who themselves sleep with men too. And on and on. Lot of unconstrained sex in the seven kingdoms.
Cersei seems broken by her time in the dungeons of church. And Jaime, who has eschewed leadership and the role of the Lannisters now seems ready to wreak vengeance on Westeros for the deaths of both his and Cersei's children.
Supposedly Daenerys will be locked away in some keep to age and die with the bodies of all the former Kal's of the Dothraki. Will the dragon come to save her? She doesn't seem to be able to control it at will. And yet Drogon seems to appear when she needs him most. This is where I'm wondering about an abandoned thread in the storylines from the novels.
By the end of book five -- A Dance with Dragons, Bran is left sitting in a throne of roots underground, beneath a weirwood tree. Bran is the most powerful warg in the world, able to reach into the mind of any creature or man. In the book, he is able to make the tree itself speak, if only barely, to Sansa.
Can Bran control the dragons? If so, with him on one side, and a trained assassin/face dancer in Arya on the other, perhaps Sansa could ascend the Iron Throne. Or would there be an alliance between the Stark children and Daenerys, another pureblood child of the original Westeros families?
It's all in play now, because there is no hard template to run the storylines from. Martin is an advisor to the series, but other people are actually writing the scripts. So they could be swayed by opinion or public sentiment or prevailing mood of the viewers.
We'll just have to see.
And because I have the pics, here's a few of the series' ladies for your viewing pleasure, some of whom won't be returning as their characters have been killed off:
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