As you can guess easily enough, I did watch the S5 finale despite some reluctance to the very end. As everyone knows now, it was rather … eventful. So eventful, in fact, that I think the show perhaps could have saved itself at least some of its earlier pacing problems by spreading out a few of these events: for instance, like how the show killed Lysa Arryn/Baelish in Episode 7 last year instead of saving it for another finale death. The finale felt over-crowded at times, leading to some mild rushing. For instance, Stannis’ entire downfall was insanely quick, with the long-awaited “battle in the snow” entirely yadda yadda yadda’d over. After so much build-up, we see relatively little of Stannis actually having to come to terms with his failures. Then he gets killed off-screen, which felt bizarre and inconsistent for a show that revels so much in the goriness of long-awaited death scenes (see: Trant, Meryn). That inconsistency even led to a question of unlikely reprieve, though the showrunners have said he is, in fact, dead.

The choice to kill a leading man off-screen felt almost cowardly to me when compared with what the women go through in this episode. Trant abuses a couple more girls before meeting his grisly end. Myrcella gets killed for the sake of Jaime’s character development, yet another instance of the show unsubtly foreshadowing a death just by giving a character a sweet or tender moment. (Myrcella’s death was ridiculously unsubtle anyway, with the Kiss of Death being so blatant that it felt silly for no one to be immediately concerned. Needlessly cutting back to Ellaria and the Sand Snakes on the deck felt like the equivalent of announcing to the audience you’re going to become the Riddler.) And, of course, Cersei’s walk of shame, a powerful moment that went on far too long. The length was obviously intended to be uncomfortable, but it was overboard well before it finished; and like I said, I couldn’t help but notice how much more graphic Cersei’s downfall was than Stannis’. All sorts of writing issues pop up along the way, with coincidence playing a bigger and bigger role. Brienne looks away juuuuuust before she would have seen Sansa’s candle. Dany drops her ring in the grass so that Jorah and Daario will find it (then her) next season, which is absolutely ludicrous; they have no idea even a general area of where she went, but they’re obviously going to stumble across this hint of a ring in the midst of the great wide Dothraki grass sea. It hasn’t even happened yet and I’m already annoyed.

But of course, there were all the big moments that were still moving and/or effective. Cersei’s walk was excessive, but brilliantly acted. Sansa and Reek exit (hopefully permanently) the plotline from hell. Tyrion and Varys get to run a city again (thank all the gods). The show telegraphed things like Brienne/Stannis or Olly/Jon too heavily, leaving little real suspense for anyone paying close enough attention, but it could still nail that stuff when the time came. Even knowing that the “for the Watch” scene was coming for years, I still found it incredible.

And that’s where we end Season 5 for Game of Thrones: as a show that exists mostly for its big moments, and does most of them stunningly well. As a show that doesn’t treat male and female characters equally, sometimes in troubling ways. As a show with a growing amount of sloppy writing that is becoming bothersome and annoying. As a show that reaches higher highs than anything else on television, and because of those highs, is all the more frustrating when it spends so much time in its mounting low points.

1) They could have had Sansa prevent the assault on her own. (This is my favorite option, as someone who was getting really excited about the idea of Strong Sansa after all these years.) When she was fiddling with the sleeve of her dress right before the assault, I half expected her to pull out a knife, put it to Ramsey’s groin, and threaten to cut his balls off if he tried anything. Obviously Sansa can’t match Ramsey in a real fight, but Ramsey doesn’t strike me as someone willing to gamble with his genitalia. This of course would have resulted in her having to remain alert and wary of him the rest of the season, since he’d surely be wanting revenge for the insult of standing up to him, which good writers could have turned into new and interesting trials for a Strong Sansa — certainly more interesting than seeing her returned to having to cower in abuse and fear, something that’s already been done to her plenty.

2) They made the effort to put one of the kingdom’s best fighters, Brienne, in the same city as this girl whom she’s sworn to protect. That’s something that presumably will pay off in some way eventually, probably as early as this Sunday’s season finale (though whether she’ll act on Sansa’s behalf, or toward revenge against the attacking Stannis, I’m unsure). But they could have tripped that wire far earlier and avoided the torture. Perhaps even have Littlefinger accept Brienne into Sansa’s service at the beginning of the season, and make keeping Brienne on as a servant to Sansa a condition of the marriage contract with the Boltons. This would frankly make more sense than Baelish abandoning Sansa, in whom he’s invested much, into who knows what fate. It also would have made better use of Brienne, whom we’ve barely seen since early in the season. (I thought at one point early on that we might see her and Podrick become the series’ versions of the Ghost of Winterfell, but alas, we couldn’t even have that.)

3) In the books, the Boltons are at Winterfell with a number of other notable Northern lords and ladies. None of them are exactly heroic types, but I vaguely recall some general unease about their new Bolton overlords. Writing in a couple, or even ONE of them, might have created a check upon the Boltons’ power so that Ramsey would feel he had to be (or more likely, that his father would order that he be) on his best behavior, especially around Sansa, in order to keep these Northerners’ tepid support. Admittedly, none of these people were able to prevent the treatment Jeyne Poole, who was being passed off as Arya, receives from Ramsey in the books. I’m not sure if they even knew or cared, for that matter. But given the extreme departures the show has already made from the books, it would have been easy enough to create a Northern lord or lady or two who actually recognizes Sansa, regularly checks up on her, and whose presence causes an uneasy pause of Ramsey’s psychotic tendencies.

Any of these three options, which could also be used in combination with each other, could have believably prevented Sansa’s rape without having to write Ramsey out of character. In fact, they could have created a half-season of tension by hanging the lurking threat of Ramsey over our heads, knowing that whatever is preventing him from carrying out his base urges will only hold someone like him in check for so long.

And those are just ideas that I, some random fan on the internet, came up with pretty easily. A team of professional writers on arguably the most high-profile show on television should be able to do at least as well, and preferably better. Instead, they opted for the most brutal option, as the show has done so very often, choosing to tear down another woman rather than find ways to give her agency. It comes all back around to what I said in this post: the show seems to only know how, or rather, be interested in trying to shock us with horrific twists. At some point, that just becomes bad writing, and that’s an incredibly big factor in why this isn’t a very good show this season.

The entire Dorne plot, for instance, has essentially amounted to nothing; it produced some strong Jaime and Bronn banter early on, but it failed to build up the Sand Snakes and the tension surrounding the competing Myrcella plots, had an anticlimactic confrontation, and basically petered out from there. Or take the circumstances leading up to Stannis making the choice to burn Shireen. We’ve been repeatedly told that Stannis is the greatest military mind left in Westeros, but while camping in the winter in enemy-occupied territory, he can’t even defend his own camp from 20 men causing an absolute catastrophe. (The show tried to skirt that by having him angry at the guards, and Davos mentioning the Northerners home-court advantage, but a couple of throwaway lines didn’t really make up for the fact that this great general was written into a convenient contrivance of being wholly unprepared for an obvious threat.) And the attack relied also on Ramsey apparently being able to lead a crack team of ninjas; the writing has built Ramsey up as highly gifted in physical and psychological torture, but him being suddenly gifted in covert ops literally came out of nowhere.

And there are other examples, too, but suffice to say, it’s just been a largely sloppily written season even aside from its problems with women and parades of horror.