T w e n t y S i d e d

A visual medium – like television – has certain advantages over the printed word. For example, an actor who makes savvy performance choices can convey more about a character with their poise and their voice than entire paragraphs of text can. The way actors move within the frame, the choices of the cinematographer, the director, the costumers, the set designers… all of these are ways to communicate meaning to the audience.

It also faces certain disadvantages. It’s trickier to deliver exposition in a natural-seeming way, for instance. However, for my money, the single biggest challenge in adapting a book to a TV show is length.

In practical terms, books are way longer than shows – and that’s just normal books. GRRM’s works are your classic twenty-stone fantasy doorstoppers. To give you an idea, A Storm of Swords, which is the longest of the series, is 424,000 words. The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy? 481,000.These word counts vary according to the counting method. But the point is, GRRM’s books are very long. If you were to attempt a completely faithful, scene-by-scene, line-by-line reproduction of the books, you’d have to have fifty episodes a season.

The practical limitations of the form make that impossible, so the act of adapting A Song of Ice and Fire into a TV show is an act of severe abridgment. Every scene has to be pared down to the bone, entire storylines have to be cut, multiple characters have to be merged together into one, and so forth.

It’s why I always check myself whenever I get grumpy that one of my favorite things from the books isn’t in the show. I have to remind myself that they really just don’t have time to include everything. I try to be as understanding as possible.

Sometimes, though, the writers get an opportunity to show us what they do have time for, and that’s Arya getting hit with a stick over and over again.

Arya gets hit with a stick over and over again

While I was rewatching season six, I wondered if maybe my treacherous memory wasn’t exaggerating the amount of time Arya spends getting hit with a stick. If anything, it was downplaying it. Four of the first five episodes have their own separate “Arya gets hit with a stick” montage, some of them so long they border on comical.

As a category of scene, the training montage has sharply diminishing returns. Even the Rocky franchaise limited itself to one per movie.With the possible exception of Rocky III. Scholars are divided on whether the sequence preceding the first Clubber Lang fight constitutes a true montage. It gets worse when you wonder what all of this training is for. At no point either before or after these sequences will we ever see a Faceless man or woman dispatch a target with their stickfighting skills. Generally, they favor some combination of trickery, poison, and good old fashioned stabbing. But you’d never guess it from their training methods.

This is frustrating because we’ve seen that the show can do the whole “assassin training” thing in an interesting way. In the books – and at times in season five of the show – Arya and her various mentors play something called “the lying game.” Basically, one character tells another a story – or anything, really – in which some details are true and some are false. The other tries to sort out the truth from the lies.

Maybe this is just my inner fanboy showing, but that’s a fantastic dialogue hook, isn’t it? If I were an actor, I’d be chomping at the bit to play a scene like that. If I were an (actual) writer I’d be chomping at the bit to write it. In fact, the lying game produces what I consider to be Arya’s best character moments of the last two seasons, where she tries to figure out – for herself as well as the audience – what exactly she thinks of the Hound.

But in season six, it’s just stickfighting, stickfighting, and more stickfighting, interspersed with short bits of dialogue that don’t move anything in particular forward. One of GRRM’s gifts is his ability to take hoary old fantasy cliches – like the mysterious guild of assassins – and give them an interesting twist that makes them seem new again. One of the show’s gifts is to reverse this process, with almost surgical precision.

Maybe Arya is Jaqen, or maybe the Waif is Arya, or something

I’m gonna hit fast-forward for a second here and just run you through the events of the season. After her interminable stickfighting lessons, Arya is assigned a new target: an actress named Lady Crane. Arya plans on poisoning her rum, but has second thoughts at the last minute and warns her that a rival actress wants to kill her instead.

Now, her name is mud with the Church of the Many-Faced God, and so the Waif (who viscerally hates Arya for some reason that’s never quite explained) is dispatched to kill her. Disguising herself as an old woman, she catches Arya off-guard and stabs her in the gut before Arya jumps into the river and swims off.

Right now I want to talk less about what actually happened and more about how the audience responded to it. The modern media consumer often follows a pattern: consume the media, and then go straight to the internet to argue about what’s going to happen next. From the show’s point of view, this pattern is good – it generates buzz, and keeps viewers invested. But it can backfire in a certain specific way.

Remember the Lindeloffian method? Have something happen that makes no sense, hint at a promised explanation later, and then never deliver? Using this method trains your audience to look for the twist. It’s only natural: they want to be the one that figures it out before anyone else. There’s no better feeling than that of knowing who the killer is before Poirot explains everything.That new Murder on the Orient Express movie gets Poirot’s mustauche all wrong, by the way. And nothing against Sir Kenneth Branagh, but David Suchet is the only Poirot as far as I’m concerned.

A big chunk of the audience that watched Arya’s season six storyline was (apparently) expecting a twist. They noticed, for example, the inconsistency in Arya’s behavior – at the end of one episode, she’s huddled up against a wall with her trusty sword needle, alone and afraid. In the next, she’s strolling around Braavos like she owns the place, tossing bags of coins at strangers and generally acting like there isn’t a secretive cult of assassins trying to kill her.

Then, she’s attacked, in what seems like an inept, amateurish way, and escapes into a river. Her attacker doesn’t bother to follow, despite the fact that “make sure they’re actually dead” must be the first thing they teach you at any reputable assassin school.

Seeing all this, many viewers looked for an explanation. The Faceless men/women have the ability to disguise themselves as other people, Mission Impossible-style, so could it be that the person we thought was Arya wasn’t actually Arya? Or the person we thought was the Waif wasn’t actually the Waif? The internet was abuzz with theories, each crazier than the last. The audience goodwill that the show still retains was palpable, as everyone tried to come up with an explanation for how what seemed like sloppy direction was actually a cleverly designed twist.

And then came the inevitable disappointment as everyone gradually realized that what seemed like sloppy direction was actually just sloppy direction. Arya was Arya. Jaqen was Jaqen. The Waif was the Waif. Everything was exactly as dumb as it seemed to be.

Things don’t improve from there. Arya returns to the House of Black and White to inform Jaqen that not only did she not kill the person she was supposed to kill, she also killed the person he sent to kill her for not killing the person she was supposed to kill. And of course, since Jaqen’s job is to say confusing things and smile mysteriously, he says “finally a girl is no one,” and then smiles mysteriously when Arya basically tells him she’s blowing this popsicle stand and never coming back.

Different people interpret that mysterious smile differently. Some on the internet now think that Jaqen planned all this, or at least approves of it, because the people Arya wants to kill are people he wants dead for some reason anyway, or something, and that this is all part of his plan. Look: I get it. You want to think that this show is better than it is. But for your own sake, just stop. What have we learned this season? That everything is exactly as dumb as it seems to be.

That brings us nearly to the end of Arya’s season six storyline, but there’s one more thing to cover – something that’s unexpectedly important (to me at least). Lady Crane. A character who serves as a window into the soul of this show.

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.