ON THE SAME PAGE
With George R.R. Martin’s source material exhausted, Game of Thrones regains its mystery
Those averse to spoilers have had much to fear watching Game of Thrones these last five seasons. It isn’t simply that the show’s every surprise, of which there are about 20 per episode, tends to be discussed across the Internet without discretion the very moment one of them airs. Nor is it just the mild agoraphobia that develops should you happen to fall a week behind — when every second in public is a risk, and you never know what you might overhear.
No, the real threat to the sanctity of the viewing experience is that cabal of literate clairvoyants who knew everything that was going to happen before it happened. They foresaw deaths and turnabouts. They prophesied inconceivable twists. Most de- plorable of all, anyone could join their ranks on a whim. The humble Game of Thrones fan had good reason to fear spoilers. George R. R. Martin wrote five whole books full of them.
Those books have been eagerly and exhaustively plundered. Apparently forgiving, quite charitably, their thickets of unreadable fantasy prose, fans of Martin’s novels have come to cherish them as gospel. They’ve been memorized and venerated, scrutinized and studied. Their readers are disciples. They look down on the television series and its benighted audience imperiously, all-knowingly, like time travellers from the future. Pity them who don’t know!
I remember my first encounter with one of these visionary book-readers, back in the unseasoned days of Season 1. The beheading of our hero, Ned Stark — ah, spoiler warning, I suppose — ought to have been the shocker of the millennium, defying as it did every convention of narrative drama. But someone who’d read ahead had already got to me. They didn’t reveal the barbarous decapitation to me outright, mind you. Rather they’d intimated, midway through the season, that a grisly death I’d never see coming was poised to take me by surprise. That proved hint enough. And it would be precisely the sort of hint that surfaced in the days and weeks before any unexpected turn of events was due.
Hence the hushed fervour that thrummed in the air before the socalled Red Wedding: the millions who’d years before hurled their Storm of Swords paperbacks across the room in disgust at the brutal set- piece could hardly resist warning fans of the show of the carnage coming. Even the most delicate book-readers could be found salivating over reactions and insisting that TV watchers “be sure to tune in live”: a guarantee that something monumental was poised to happen. It was like being introduced to a movie your friend has seen 100 times, warning you whenever a good bit is coming up and glancing over to see if the punchlines land. You can appreciate their excitement. But you’d almost certainly enjoy yourself more if they’d only leave you alone.
Game of Thrones returns to HBO for its sixth season this weekend. And it is set to arrive, for the first time, shrouded in near-total mystery. The series has at last outpaced its progenitor: the ever-glacial George R.R. Martin was unable to complete the sixth novel in the Song of Ice and Fire series in time for it to be used as the basis of this new season. And instead of waiting for him to finish — as contracts lapse, creatives move on, audiences lose interest — the showrunners have decided to finish the story on their own. Season 6 of Game of Thrones is set to tell a part of this story that hasn’t been told before. The book-readers have lost their longcherished clairvoyance.
They’ve also lost their immunity to spoilers. Martin did furnish his adapters with some direction, and much of what will transpire this season, it’s safe to assume, will find its way into Martin’s forthcoming Winds of Winter. New clues will emerge. Long- hidden truths will be unveiled. What happens on the page will be to some degree foretold by what happens onscreen. All of which is to say that — justice at last — bookreaders may now have Game of Thrones spoiled for them by TV.
Even if the stories diverge, a certain magic has been restored to the television experience. There’s only anticipation and speculation now, for the TV- watcher: nobody except Martin and the HBO writers’ room has an idea whether Jon Snow will live to see another day, whether Cersei Lannister will have her revenge against the High Sparrow, or whether Sandor and Gregor Clegane will duke it out in trial- by- combat ( though that one seems pretty likely). Every week will be a mystery. Each instalment promises a question mark, unspoilable in advance.
It’s about time. Martin’s novels have always precluded the kind of guessing game pleasure common to its prestigeTV contemporaries — the sense of the world enjoying something for the first time in unison, week after week, as in the global drip-feeds of Mad Men or Breaking Bad. ( The other major network drama with source material to draw upon, tellingly, is AMC’s The Walking Dead: another show whose most ludicrous surprises are anticipated months in advance.) The Golden Age of Television has been criticized, persuasively, for its overemphasis on plotting. But if indeed plotting is going to be the emphasis, it had at least better be a plot that’s weaved anew.