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We like the samurai influence on Jon’s armor.

If you have not finished watching season 5 of Game of Thrones, step away from this page right now.

Another season, another stack of obituaries from the TV series that delights in putting its audience through the emotional wringer. In reviewing each season, the question that should be asked is: Was it worth the pain of watching (name the late character you’d grown fond of) die and (other characters you root for) suffer? The answer is always No, but for some reason we keep on watching.

Our review of Season 5 appears on Friday at BusinessWorld.

Distraught? Need to talk? See you in Comments.

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Our Season 5 Awards:

Worst Performances

Indira Varma as Ellaria Sand: Full-on Bella Flores.

Rosabell Laurenti Sellers as Tyene Sand: It didn’t help that she had to recite the single worst line in the entire series.

The kid who plays Olly: Every single time he appeared, he had a look of “Papatayin kita!” Yeah, we got it the first ten times.

Iwan Rheon as Ramsay Bolton: A one-note monster, uses the same wide-eyed tricks on Vicious.

Best Performances

Lena Headey as Cersei: Actually made us feel bad for Cersei. At her lowest, was most queenly.

Stephen Dillane as Stannis Baratheon: Actually made us feel bad for Stannis, even when he allowed that horror.

Drogon says the Best Actor of Season 5 is Drogon.

Best Musical Performance

Jerome Flynn as Bronn: Relieved the tedium of the Dorne scenes.

Runner-up: Roger Ashton-Griffiths as Mace Tyrell, bursting into song in Braavos.

Worst Writing

All the scenes in Dorne

The recap in the Throne Room in Meereen

Varys reappears – But we’re glad to see him, so we’ll let that pass.

Hommages

The assassination in Julius Caesar

The death of Richard III

Almost forgot: The Wire (Omar).

Chinatown. “You’re my uncle. And my father. And my uncle. And my father.” Nosebleed. End.

Punishment that should be instituted in the Philippines

Have corrupt politicians walk naked and barefoot from Congress to the Senate with a septa following them, ringing a bell and crying, “Shame! Shame!”

Your nominees in Comments.

Since there’s no release date for The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in A Song of Ice and Fire, we expect that everyone will reread A Dance With Dragons and even the previous books very closely for clues.

So the series has moved past the books, but continues to sell the earlier books. GRRM wins.

The series created by Michelle and Robert King begins with a premise grabbed from the headlines. Alicia, who had been a full-time mom for 13 years, is forced to return to legal practice in order to support her family after her husband, Chicago State’s Attorney Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), is jailed on charges of corruption and having sex with prostitutes. Sex is the downfall of American politicians: they can get away with inventing reasons to declare war on foreign countries, but if they figure in a sex scandal it’s goodbye, career. After all, America was settled by Puritans who fled England because it was too licentious.

I’m more shocked by the fact that after six years, there hasn’t been a Filipino version of The Good Wife. Babaeng pinagtaksilan ng asawa, babangon at dudurugin ang mga kaaway (A woman betrayed by her husband, will rise up and crush her enemies.). Of course in a local version, the wife would not only return to the law but she would defend her husband herself, and it would turn out that the husband never touched another woman. Or if he did, he would get run over by a bus and she would find a better guy.

Read our TV column The Binge at BusinessWorld.

Regulars may have noted that we have not been posting articles daily. This is because the last week of May always tries to kill us, so we took time off from writing columns and blogging. Also our ancient Mac and slow internet connection were sucking all the joy out of going online. The allergy (to prickly heat powder) is gone, the Mac is new, and the connection is fast, so we are back.

This is how we spent our “vacation”.

1. Defrosted the fridge. Why we do not do this regularly is a mystery, since all it entails is pushing a button. Maybe because we think of it as housework and we hate housework. We only remember to defrost the refrigerator when the icebox is sealed shut. When the ice has melted after a day or so, we expect to find The Thing in the freezer.

2. Thought of writing fake family history to claim relationship to the late billionaire Edmond Safra. There’s so much unsubstantiated information online, just posting a claim gives it traction. The only thing stopping us is the sheer weirdness of Edmond Safra’s story.

3. Read The Love Object by Edna O’Brien.

4. Shopped for feline overlords. We have found a regular source of Fancy Feast, which of course we will not reveal.

Sidebar: We’ve mentioned the cat epidemic in February which killed three of our outdoor ampon. We did not mention that Meriadoc disappeared on the day the outdoor cats started falling ill, because we could not accept the possibility that he had gotten infected.

Meriadoc

Yesterday the guard reported that Meriadoc has been turning up very late at night, wearing a collar. He has found other humans. Traitor! Deserter! Then we realized that he did the smartest thing in order to avoid the epidemic. Humans get sentimental about cats; cats are not sentimental. They survive.

5. Watched 6 seasons of The Good Wife, which we had avoided seeing because everyone told us to. The full review in our column on Friday. We enjoyed the show, but cannot rein in our indignation: What is the point of casting Matthew Goode, possessor of the most adorable overbite on the screen, and then not giving him anything to do?

According to reports he won’t be back for the 7th season as he is joining the cast of Downton Abbey. So we’ll start watching Downton again, but not the two seasons we missed since Cousin Matthew died in the Xmas special. Here’s Matthew Goode in Stoker, which we missed for some reason or other but have to look up because it’s inspired by Hitchcock’s Shadow of A Doubt, which we love. Stoker was directed by Park Chan Wook (Old Boy) and written by Wentworth Miller (Prison Break).

6. Started listening to Basic Russian audiofiles. It’s supposed to be easier to learn Russian than Hungarian. It occurred to us while pronouncing common Russian names (Boris is “Ba-REES”) that world leaders have gotten Putin wrong. If you want anything from him, you challenge him to single combat.

There’s been a lot of controversy over “Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken”, the 6th episode of the 5th season of Game of Thrones. Many viewers were upset because something horrible happened to one of the major characters that reminded them over previous instances when this horror occurred on the show. Can’t the writers think of something besides that, they demanded. The previous times, the horror unfolded pretty much as it had happened in the books. This time, since the series has started to differ from the books in a big way, the horror is a development cooked up by the showrunners. (Differing from the books is a good decision, because if you’ve read Book 5, it’s a slog. Too many minor characters who are not real characters but expository devices; too much of Daenerys moping over Daario. That book makes you wonder if GRRM made a mistake in killing off all the really interesting characters.)

Game of Thrones is a show that delights in upsetting its audience and throwing them for a loop. However, those unpleasant events served not just to upset the viewers, but to move the story along. In this case the story was going there anyway, did they have to throw in that horror?

Our problem with episode 5.6 is not just that horror, which is not a big surprise because the current season has been building up to it. Our problem is that the episode was strangely flat and badly-paced. Momentous things happened, but the way they occurred seemed too casual and throwaway. Example: Jorah Mormont learns that his father the Old Bear is dead, but then the moment is forgotten. Game of Thrones has been consistently first-rate, so it’s almost shocking to see lazy filmmaking.

Ramsay Snow-Bolton has been built up as a cut-rate Joffrey Baratheon, but he’s not nearly as compelling. If you just wanted another Joffrey, you should’ve kept the original Joffrey.

The encounter between Jaime Lannister and Bronn and the Sand Snakes, which had promised to be one of the (non-book-based) highlights of the season, was a particular non-event. They’re all supposed to be terrific fighters, even if one of them is missing a hand, but the action scenes were a snore. Someone in that fight may have gotten a lethal dose of poison, but the significance is lost on non-readers (So that person better not die of the poison).

The horror that transpires at the end of that episode had better be for a reason. (We mean storytelling-wise, not “But these things always happen in Westeros”-wise.) Theon Greyjoy had better wake up from his Reek stupor and flay Ramsay Bolton alive since that’s the Bolton sigil anyway. Sansa had better stab Roose Bolton in the heart, take Walda back to her father and kill all the Freys. The people of the North had better rise up and overthrow the Boltons. Stannis Baratheon’s army had better show up and name Sansa Queen in the North. And when Littlefinger returns with an army from King’s Landing and the Vale, Winterfell had better crush them and Sansa cut off Littlefinger’s head.

These things will probably not happen, but all storytelling decisions have consequences and this is the payment for the horror.

On the day of execution, the prisoner is led out of the tower to a small stage in front of an eager crowd. The prisoner, a woman who once had the King of England under her thumb, looks pale and child-like. As she approaches the stage, trailed by her ladies-in-waiting, she opens her wallet and hands out coins to random spectators. She keeps glancing up at the tower, as if she expects some last-minute reprieve. In the audience is the king’s secretary Thomas Cromwell, who had engineered her rise to power then at the king’s behest, engineered her fall.

That is the penultimate scene of the BBC miniseries Wolf Hall, and this is not a spoiler—for nearly 500 years, people have known the outcome of that royal drama. What is admirable about Peter Straughan’s adaptation of the novels by Hilary Mantel is that we know exactly what’s going to happen, but we still lean forward and stare at the screen, drawn in by the almost-unbearable tension and the bleak beauty of the scene. Wolf Hall is so good, it is spoiler-proof.

Read our TV column The Binge at BusinessWorld.

A dismembered body is discovered in Galveston, Texas, wrapped in trash bags. It is missing a head. The dead person is identified as Morris Black, resident of a run-down boarding house. Police find clues in the trash bags and blood in the house. They arrest Black’s neighbor, a middle-aged mute woman named Dorothy Ciner. Who, it turns out, is neither mute nor a woman.

Why was Robert Durst, scion of a New York real estate empire, living in a crummy boarding house pretending to be a mute woman? It was not the first time he was in such close proximity to a corpse. Twenty years earlier his young wife Kathie, a medical student, disappeared and was never seen again. Ten years earlier his best friend Susan Berman was shot dead in her house in Beverly Hills. In both cases Durst had not been treated as a suspect.

Read our TV column The Binge at BusinessWorld.