Was this season particularly absorbing or was I just paying more attention than to previous ones? It seemed like all of the many narrative threads running through it were equally interesting, with many of them feeling like they got a pretty decent amount of time through individual episodes and across the season (especially Jon, Daenerys, Arya) - the show pretty much nailed its formula from the get go back in season 1, but it's finely honed by now, delivering its dramatic punches with verve (nearly every episode ends with something really bad happening to someone important).
One interesting aspect is the way that, as the show has departed in various ways for the books and, by the end of season 5, in some respects actually gone beyond what the books are up to, the two have increasingly intermingled into a whole that's intriguingly indeterminate - increasingly they seem like aspects of a single story or source, yet the clear inconsistencies between tv series and books make the melding imperfect, so that the 'actual story' has become a particularly fluid notion or entity.
Also, I think that this was the first time that the show has introduced a major-seeming character and killed them off in the same episode - played, it happens, by Birgitte Hjort Sørensen aka Katrine from Borgen.
One interesting aspect is the way that, as the show has departed in various ways for the books and, by the end of season 5, in some respects actually gone beyond what the books are up to, the two have increasingly intermingled into a whole that's intriguingly indeterminate - increasingly they seem like aspects of a single story or source, yet the clear inconsistencies between tv series and books make the melding imperfect, so that the 'actual story' has become a particularly fluid notion or entity.
Also, I think that this was the first time that the show has introduced a major-seeming character and killed them off in the same episode - played, it happens, by Birgitte Hjort Sørensen aka Katrine from Borgen.
