As we head into the finale of the fourth season of “Game of Thrones” tonight, unanswered questions abound: What will become of Jon Snow, out beyond the Wall without his sword? Will Tyrion find a way out of his death sentence, or will he be this season’s Ned Stark? Will Arya ever reach Sansa inside the Eyrie — and will Sansa escape (or embrace) the increasingly creepy grasp of Littlefinger? What’ll Dany do after banishing her right-hand man?
HBO’s got plenty of time beyond tonight to answer all those questions, though: As of last week, the show officially tipped over into being the network’s most-watched series of all time, with an average of 18.4 million viewers — which exceeds the 18.2 garnered by “The Sopranos” in its heyday. The series has been renewed for a fifth and sixth season, and if its popularity continues to soar, it will likely continue further than that. (Though the show’s creators have said they don’t want to go beyond seven seasons.)
This could be a problem for the plot, as the show has now caught up with the first three enormous books in George R. R. Martin’s sprawling series. Coming up next is “A Feast for Crows,” the author’s fourth and least-popular installment, in which much of the action takes place in the relatively obscure locations of the Iron Islands and Dorne (home of the late, lamented Oberyn Martell), and which follows several lesser characters while completely ignoring the story lines of some of the most popular and engaging players in the series — including Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen, though both return for the fifth book, “A Dance with Dragons.”
To confuse matters, the plots of “Feast” and “Dragons” happen simultaneously, being set in different areas of the “Thrones” universe. So the show could potentially combine the two books into one gigantic plot — but this would run the risk of burning through their stories pretty quickly.
Meanwhile, there’s the additional and bigger problem of Martin eventually running out of material for the show, which up until now has more or less hewed to the plot lines of his novels. He’s said he expects it to be a seven-novel series, and is currently in the middle of writing the sixth, “The Winds of Winter.” He released “A Dance with Dragons” in 2011. But “Crows,” the book before that, came out in 2005. And HBO can’t afford to wait years and years in between books. (HBO had no comment on the matter.)
The author, under the gun thanks to his own popularity, has admitted he needs to pick up the pace, recently telling Mashable “I need to write faster. The last two books took a really long time, so I’m hoping this one will go a little faster. But I make no promises. I found out long ago that when you look at the overall task, the cathedral you have to build, it looks so daunting that you just give up and sit down and play a video game.”
The master procrastinator is also no longer making any promises about the Tolkien-esque series concluding at seven. Martin’s Random House editor, Anne Groell, recently let slip that although her and Martin’s motto had long been, “Seven books for seven kingdoms,” she’s recently started arguing for a loophole: “There are really technically eight kingdoms, all having to do with who has annexed what when Aegon the Conqueror landed in Westeros,” she told book news site Suvudu. “So maybe eight books for seven kingdoms would be OK.”
But Martin’s work-avoidance techniques and his loose-lipped agent aren’t his only problems. The show has already gotten ahead of itself and spoiled a plot point the author hasn’t reached yet; earlier in Season 4, HBO accidentally committed a major error by fleetingly revealing, on the network’s official episode synopsis, a White Walker with a spiky head as “the Night’s King,” despite the fact that this character has not yet been introduced — only hinted at — in Martin’s novels thus far. This King turned one of Craster’s babies into a Walker, a new and intriguing development that, one assumes, Martin was going to get to eventually (the character is referenced in a series of short extra videos accompanying the Blu-ray sets of Seasons 2 and 3 of the show).
Could this be the beginning of a trend in which the show speeds ahead of the books, taking more and more liberties with Martin’s material? The author seemed to give his blessing to that in a recent Vanity Fair interview, saying that “ultimately, it’ll be different. You have to recognize that there are going to be some differences. I’m very pleased with how faithful the show is to the books, but it’s never gonna be exactly the same.”
Given the obscurity of the characters we could see in the upcoming installment, viewers may certainly appreciate that.
The new guard
Can you learn to love these characters from the book ‘A Feast for Crows’?
Samwell Tarly
You know him as Jon Snow’s portly sidekick, but Samwell takes center stage in “A Feast For Crows,” which sees him being sent off by Jon — now taking command of the Night’s Watch after its ranks were decimated by wildlings — to find out more information about the Others and to train to become a Maester (like Aemon Targaryen, with whom he had a heart-to-heart talk shortly before the attack in the penultimate episode of Season 4).
Aeron “Damphair” Greyjoy
Not the most captivating nickname, and it suits this uncle of Theon “Reek” Greyjoy, a humorless man who has become a “priest of the Drowned God,” the religion of the Iron Islands. He calls a gathering, or “Kingsmoot,” to decide who will rule the Islands now that his brother, King Balon Greyjoy . . . can’t.
Areo Hotah Dornish
Captain of guards
This commander is charged by the Dornish king with imprisoning the eight bastard daughters of Oberyn Martell, following his death at the hands of the Mountain in Westeros, lest they try to get revenge for his murder.
Victarion Greyjoy
Theon’s other uncle
A bit more dynamic than his watery-haired younger brother, Victarion, who shows up for the Kingsmoot, is an armor-clad warrior type who’s known for his prowess as a commander and his resentment of his older brother, Euron, who had an affair with Victarion’s wife.
The Sand Snakes
The bastard daughters of Oberyn Martell are known by this moniker due to their father’s nickname, the Red Viper. The four oldest scheme to take revenge for his death.
Asha Greyjoy
Theon’s sister — the one he groped in Season 2 before he realized who she was, and while he was still Theon rather than the downtrodden Reek — becomes a point-of-view character in “A Feast for Crows,” making a bid for herself as the new ruler of the Iron Islands in spite of a custom forbidding women from the job. She is one of the few women in the series who are trained to fight, along with Brienne, Arya Stark and the late Ygritte.