Lady Stoneheart!

We can debate plot condensing, dwindling screen time, actor availability or any other rationale until the cows come home. My gut feeling is that they lack the nerve and confidence to have successfully pulled it off.

Dragons aside (who from their birthing to the present have been brilliantly handled) the supernatural aspects of the show are usually handled … well, badly.

Either they cutaway completely due to budget, (fist of the first men?) give us about 60 seconds of white walkers per season or else they fail to stick the landing (shadow baby, for example, was well set up with the Melisandre birthing scene then horribly executed entering Renly's tent with all the subtlety of the smoke monster from Lost. Not hard to see how, with greater subtlety, that scene could've been deeply unsettling, ie: Renly's shadow suddenly moving incongruously to his own movements on the wall.)

Ditto, the practically non-existent direwolwes – another casualty of the Stoneheart excision in Arya's case since at no point have they established her psychic connection to Nymeria: something they could've done quite easily via nightmares of her mother being thrown into the river before switching the pov to Nymeria dragging out a body for the brotherhood to find.

It's as if, because of all its acting strengths elsewhere & overarching emphasis on King's Landing, we're not supposed to notice the conspicuous weakness of the show as supernatural/fantasy at all. But when you go back through and watch it from the top, the mystical & supernatural aspects of the show have been the weak link from the start and certainly since Pyatt Pree and The House of The Undying, which surgically removed almost every interesting nuance. Okay sure, you pass up the spoiler/prophetic R/W imagery of the guy with the wolf's head sitting on the throne, but the five rat midgets in a dark room feasting on the woman symbolising Westeros being ravaged by the war of the five kings? How do you pass up incredible visual symbolism ripe for adaptation to a visual medium like that if you know what you're doing?

While I hold D& D in huge regard and respect for all that they've achieved in bringing GOT to the screen in terms of knowing what they're doing , repeatedly the handling of the supernatural aspects works against that better feeling and convinces me they sometimes don't.

Of course, things have to be cut and slimmed down for any adaptation from book to screen to work. I get that argument totally, and am sick of hearing it as an excuse. When you witness the umpteenth superfluous brothel scene, crappy CG skeletons that feel completely out of place, or downright weaker material like The Mountain's resurrection making the cut at the same time as the stronger supernatural content with powerful emotional resonance is going AWOL, it becomes an exercise in frustration as much as anything.

Ultimately, Lady Stoneheart appears to be gone and my feeling if she is, is that once this thing is done & dusted, they'll regret it as the great missed opportunity they let slip through their fingers. Certainly from a horror perspective, where only the (often rather cheesy) White Walkers are ever really given that role.

The better news is if she HAD made the cut, there's every chance it wouldn't have been Michelle Fairley in top drawer prosthetics (ie: crème-de-la-crème of Walking Dead effects crew involvement) which is what the plotline deserved. Based on past experience of almost every supernatural moment (up to and including Bloodraven) I'd been looking forward to seeing realised on screen, there's every chance they would have fudged it somehow: glowing eyes that made non readers think she'd been white-walkered, an OTT Harvey Dent-style look (half woman, half CG skeletal terminator!) or even worse: 100% CGI like those awful Harryhausen-homage skeletons in The Children. Something to mess it up or cheapen it somehow would have slipped into the mix when it's pretty clear the ONLY way to go with Stoneheart to have her make the “holy shit!” emotional as well as horror gut-punch, visually, is a recognisable Fairley in restrained, believable prosthetics.

You only have to look at some of the great fan art/photoshopping out there to realise this route could've made it the most haunting plotline of the show: th01.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2014/232/d/e/lady_stoneheart_by_slothmaker-d7vzl29.png

That road would have floored a lot of people, but is it the road they would've taken with the clock ticking and their budget against the wall? I doubt it.

So don't entirely mourn its loss.

Someone once made the point on here it's better to never see a character adapted that you loved than to see them on screen done badly, and I'd agree with that.

I'll still watch the show, still support it, and still cheer on the many things it gets right. But this, along with dropping the Riverlands plotlines with Jaime, Brienne & Edmure was a clusterfuck, imo, and if the emphasis now is simply on racing to the finish line, then I guess you start to see the casualties of that more clearly.

The sad thing is that done right (ie: tragic monster not zombie schlock) I think Stoneheart genuinely could've been one of the bravest, boldest moments in the show's entire run as opposed to the jumping-the-shark moment they secretly probably feared.

We'll never know for sure of course – creative cold feet or expediency? – but did they chicken out?

Quite probably.