Unlike the other prominent deaths, Jon Snow’s storylines are entirely up in the air. It doesn’t seem at all to me like he was supposed to stay dead and they changed their minds because of his popularity. The mystery of Jon’s parentage is pretty much the sole remaining mystery from the very beginning of the story. That and Jon’s fulfillment of his story is pretty much necessary. That doesn’t mean that Jon has to succeed or be the hero. But if he stayed dead the story would just seem uncompleted.
To me, the question is whether it ends up meaning something.
If it was “Jon’s alive, oh he got killed… (9 months between season) …haha, he’s alive, suckers! now we’ll never speak of it again”, that seems like a cheap stunt. If the fact that he died and has come back then becomes crucial and relevant to the plot going forward, and it certainly could (for instance, has he been freed from his NW vows? will Melisandre now start advising him?) then I think it could seem “earned”.
Well, every story is someone’s story, and this, to a large extent, is Jon Snow’s. Killing him off now simply wouldn’t have made any narrative sense, and be just in fulfillment of the fan’s expectations that ‘anyone can die’. Killing people and piercing the occasional plot armor is fine fun, but only if it ultimately occurs in service to telling a good story; killing people just because and to show that noone’s save doesn’t really accomplish anything. In this case, there would just have been hours upon hours of plot and character development rendered utterly pointless, a retroactive waste of time, and for virtually no payoff.
And yet, even while thinking the above, I found myself expecting Jon not to wake up; that maybe, just maybe, we’ll end the episode with him on a funeral pyre, and that’s that. And this is what keeps me coming back: ultimately, ‘everybody dies’ is just as boring as ‘noone (of consequence) dies’, but so far, the show has been consistently surprising and subversive of many classical story expectations, while nevertheless not just succumbing to the allure of subversion just for subversion’s sake.
So when I watched the Red Woman perform her ritual, I was basically thinking, this can’t work, you haven’t had your moment of atonement and humility yet, causing you to renounce your hubris and having faith for faith’s sake; but again, my expectations were overturned. And it makes perfect sense, because if there’s a god in the real world, then this must be how he/she/it acts: sometimes, the devout are scorned, and the faithless rewarded.
I’m thinking something like this.
From a real-life medical point of view, if you are stabbed in the stomach like Roose was, do you immediately die, like he did?
Is it possible that if someone is stabbed like that, they still have a few seconds to stab you back? I would assume so, but so many close-up stabbing scenes show the stabbee as just standing there and then falling down dead.
Yeah, that’ll work.
Max Von Sydow is 87. I wonder how many other shows now have an actor that old.
I guess Von Sydow must follow the Michael Caine idea. Caine said he thinks actors should not retire. He said as long as they call him, he will continue to act. When the calls stop, that’s when he will stop acting. Caine is 83.
What GoT hasn’t done is killed off someone pointlessly. It has killed off important characters in unexpected ways. But it hasn’t killed off anyone whose death would have rendered a major plot line unresolved. Jon’s death would have short-circuited a lot of elements dependent on him, especially the fight against the White Walkers, and was basically not going to happen. (Other characters who won’t be arbitrarily killed off before their plot lines reach some kind of resolution are Bran, Arya, and Danaerys, and probably Tyrion and Baelish).
I just caught up on the finale of Season 5 two weeks ago on DVD. I’ve religiously avoided reading anything at all about the show in order to avoid spoilers. Jon’s “death” came as a complete surprise to me. But within an hour of watching it, I had concluded he would be brought back, especially because of the presence of Melisandre. I did not think the same about Stannis’s death, even though his death wasn’t actually shown, or (as I thought immediately after watching it) the apparent deaths of Sansa and Theon. All of those were either necessary or at least possible in plot terms in a way that Jon’s was not.
(Aside from anything else, the fact that Jon’s death was set up as the very last scene of the season indicted that it was a cliffhanger and not just a shocker. In all other seasons, the climactic events have taken place in the next to last episode of a season - Ned Stark’s beheading, the Battle of the Blackwater, the Red Wedding, the Battle of Castle Black - leaving the final episode for mop-up. (True, Tywin’s murder did occur in the last episode of Season Four, but everyone knew he had it coming at some point, so the fact that he would be killed wasn’t any real surprise.))
The closest comparison to Jon’s death was Robb Stark’s, a well-liked character who seemed to be the chosen hero to restore the Stark’s fortunes. But Robb wasn’t essential to that plotline since there are still other Starks running around, not the least of whom is Jon.
GoT isn’t just a series of random events. Even shocking and unexpected events have to make dramatic sense. Jon’s death at that point would not have made dramatic sense.
Surprised people thought Sansa and Theon were dead. That would have been a really lame way to kill off 2 main characters.
I think it was a purely visualized scene, in that a LOT of people thought they were committing suicide. If enough people thought that, then it’s on the director.
That reminds me , has anybody committed suicide on the show? I don’t recall anyone but I could be wrong. Not counting people who died in combat where they had little chance of winning.
We’ve seen the Lords of three Great Houses go in two episodes, Doran, Roose and Balon. If I were Mace I’d be investing in some serious personal security.
Selyse.
In real life as in TV, whether you die from a single stab wound or not depends on it’s necessary for the plot. (Kind of surprising the maester just stood there and watched and didn’t try to help Roose.)
Ramsay isn’t what you’d call a character of great nuance, is he? He and Joffrey are both so thoroughly evil that they were disappointing among all the many complex characters.
Miranda had just been killed by falling from about the same height, and certainly wasn’t clear that the snow outside was deep enough to break their fall. It would have been ironic and pathetic for them to have met their deaths together at Winterfell. It wouldn’t have been a great way to kill off two important characters, but it would have been dramatically possible, since neither of them is necessary to their plotlines. I was glad to discover my initial assumption was wrong, though, in part because the characters have a lot more potential to be realized.
As a main villain, Roose’s death at some point was predictable. However, although ironic and appropriate (being betrayed by his own son) it was lamer than it might have been.
I don’t know why anyone would think that. It was a moderate distance fall onto freshly fallen (loose) snow. It was extremely clear from context that their plan was to escape. Injury seemed possible, but it didn’t seem fatal at all.
The maester was smart enough to know if he tried to help Roose he would have been dead too.
I was thinking about this exact issue last night, but I disagree with your conclusion. These characters live in a different and more brutal world than we. Even the ‘good guys’ do things that are pretty awful by our standards (Daenerys having all the Mereenite slavers crucified was vengeful and extreme, for example). We need a bit of that Ramsay/Joffreyesque psycopathy to make the rest seem more moral and relatable, because they would be less so otherwise.
Speaking of, did you guys see that Ramsay’s actor has been cast in a film as Hitler? He’s really going to have to tone it down for that role. 
Band name!
And Maester Cressen.