Warning: spoilers ahead for Season 5 of Game of Thrones and book four of A Song of Ice and Fire, A Feast for Crows.
Secrets about casting for Season 5 of Game of Thrones feel like they’re being spilled left and right. Book readers might have an idea of what’s ahead, but the television series has regularly been altering plot points and removing or combining characters. It makes watching the series surprising for everyone. I raised my eyebrow at some of the recently revealed casting announcements for the next season, and now I’m doing it again thanks to some excited tweets from @neversquare.
The now-deleted tweets mention her friend’s daughter landed an audition for Game of Thrones, and that the role is for a young Cersei Lannister. Winter is Coming screencapped the comments before they were trashed:
This news, paired with the fact that a character called Maggy the Frog is being cast, most likely points to one thing: a flashback. If it’s all true, this will be the first time Game of Thrones has delved into flashback territory despite the fact that the device is used in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Back in 2012, Game of Thrones co-producer and writer Bryan Cogman talked with MTV Geek about his reluctance to mirror the book in this area. He stated: “The book does brilliantly flash back through memory, and through people telling stories of the past. If you were just take those passages from the book and do them on screen, you would be doing a flashback every five minutes! It would be very jarring, and very difficult to sustain the momentum that you want to sustain.”
Obviously, that was two years ago and things change, but I’d like to think this flashback is coming into the picture because it’s important to the events of both the books and television show. The trip down memory lane to Cersei’s childhood in Lannisport was related in A Feast for Crows. Cersei heard about a fortune teller called Maggy the Frog and grabbed a couple of pals and sought her out. Cersei threatened the fortune teller until she agreed to look into Cersei’s future.
Cersei didn’t like what she heard from Maggy. The fortune teller predicted that she would marry the king, Robert Baratheon, and foretold the exact number of children each of them would have. She also had thoughts about the fates of Cersei’s children, but to avoid further spoilers, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether you want to read about the full exchange at Westeros.org.
It’s going to be fascinating to get a look at a younger version of the queen, and I have to wonder if this means we’ll see more flashbacks in Game of Thrones. What do you think? Let us know your opinion in the comments.
HT: The Mary Sue
They should’ve made a flashback/dream/memory about the Tower of Joy back in S01
We need a Ned flaskback more than anything. More Sean Bean… that’s all I ask. Ned was by far the best character I have ever seen or read. Anymore time watching him will be time well spent.
Bran is probably about to start seeing shit in the weirwoods now, season 5 might be full of insight. i hope to see the tourney at harrenhall 🙂
I could see it being used as the cold open for the beginning of season 5. I think it would be fitting because one of the last major moments of Season 4 (SPOILER ALERT READ AT YOUR OWN CAUTION) will be Tyrion killing Tywin. Since the scene is as much about Cersei’s siblings as it is about her (I say siblings because I believe the valonqar is Jamie and not Tyrion), I think that would allow a cold open flash back to logically occur without causing too much interruption in the fairly linear story structure that GoT has stuck to.
And by “the scene”, I mean the flashback scene.
I think the flashback in this instance fits in with the narrative of Tommen’s wedding in the books, so I could see Cersei reflecting on that in the show and the viewers seeing her memories as a flashback. I don’t see them doing it much more in the future. I think it’s one of the few actual flashbacks in the books. Others are usually indirect references in conversation.
aye… memory is hazy but i wasnt the maggy flashback a dream sequence? that a bran chapter in ADWD are the only quasi flashbacks i can recall. Almost everything else is explained in exposition.
Well, there are the Tower of Joy scenes, which are Ned flashbacks.
Well, if that’s true then her daughter can say goodbye to that job, probably.
Daughter subsequently fired…