Spoiler: Will ‘Lady Stoneheart’ be in Game of Thrones?

Those who have read A Feast For Crows / A Dance With Dragons, probably have fond memories of Cold Hands and Lady Stoneheart. If so, as the last episode of season 10 drew to a close, you were likely left scratching your head wondering where on Earth our favourite walking dead were.

For those who need a reminder, or those watching the TV series who don’t mind a serious book spoiler, here are some quotes:

“The Freys slashed her throat from ear to ear. When we found her by the river she was three days dead. Harwin begged me to give her the kiss of life, but it had been too long. I would not do it, so Lord Beric put his lips to hers instead, and the flame of life passed from him to her. And… she rose. May the Lord of Light protect us. She rose.”

“Her cloak and collar hid the gash [the Freys’s] blade had made, but her face was even worse than he remembered. The flesh had gone pudding soft in the water and turned the color of curdled milk. Half her hair was gone and the rest had turned as white and brittle as a crone’s. Beneath her ravaged scalp, her face was shredded skin and black blood where she had raked herself with her nails. But her eyes were the most terrible thing. Her eyes saw him, and they hated.”

Yes, Lady Stoneheart is the post-death Lady Catelyn. After having her throat slit at the “Red Wedding”, Catelyn spent a long time submerged in water. After Arya’s Direwolf drags her from a river, she is more zombie than human. It isn’t just an inability to talk and rotten appearance she has been left with though, Death has changed her personality too. She burns with a desire for for vengeance on anyone she thinks betrayed her and her son, Robb and ruthlessly kills any Freys, Boltons, or Lannisters she manages to track down – even if they they had nothing to do with the “Red Wedding”. Indeed, she seems out of control.

Those trusting that such a major character wouldn’t be left out of the books may end up disappointed. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Michelle Fairley confirmed that:

“Yeah, the character’s dead. She’s dead.” Adding that “You respect the writers’ decision … I knew the arc, and that was it. They can’t stick to the books 100 percent. It’s impossible-they only have 10 hours per season. They have got to keep it dramatic and exciting, and extraneous stuff along the way gets lost in order to maintain the quality of brilliant show.”

The director of “Game of Thrones”, Alex Graves, had a far more brutal opinion on why it didn’t make sense to bring the character back as a cold-hearted killer: “to bring back Michelle Fairley, one of the greatest actresses around, to be a zombie for a little while – and just kill people? It is really sort of, what are we doing with that? How does it play into the whole story in a way that we’re really going to like? It just didn’t end up being a part of what was going to happen this season.”

Of course, Alex Graves’s opinion that the character has no significant role could just be because he hasn’t read book 6 yet… A big issue with the progression of Game of Thrones is that we are heading into territory now that the importance of certain events and characters may be harder to see.

It should be noted, before we get too disappointed, that there is a very good chance that Alex Graves and Michelle Fairley are messing with us. “The Character is dead” is ambiguous – she hasn’t said “I will not be returning to A Game of Thrones”. Equally, there is a good chance that writers Dan Weiss and David Benioff are purposely keeping details from the cast/director and may still find space for the character in season 5 (indeed, Graves admitted this later on in the same interview).

I guess if she isn’t going to appear though, it makes sense that Cold Hands won’t either. When reading book 4/5 you got the feeling that there was some kind of link between the two – perhaps one existing to explain the other.

What do you guys think, can you understand the omission?

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