Posted in: Game Of Thrones, HBO, TV | Tagged: Catelyn Stark, game of thrones, george r r martin, HBO, Jaime Lannister, max

Game of Thrones: HBO Series Deprived Us of "Zombie Catelyn Stark" Plot

Like in the books, we could have gotten a whole Zombie Catelyn Stark plotline during HBO's Game of Thrones - but it wasn't meant to be.

Game of Thrones, the HBO TV series, has ended – but the books haven't. We may never see the final books and their ending, but we live in hope. The books are so dense that several characters and entire storylines were left out of the show, the most glaring being the whole Zombie Catelyn Stark storyline.

Warning: there will be spoilers for the books now, even though those books have been out for over ten years and fans of the books already know about them.

Okay, so everyone who's watched Game of Thrones knows that Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairey) bought it at The Red Wedding. She died the same way she was killed in the book: they slit her throat. That was it for Catelyn Stark on the show, and that was it for her and Michelle Fairey, who has had to find jobs on several other TV shows ever since, including as a gangster's widow who takes over the firm in Gangs of London. In the novels, however, that was not the end of her story.

"Game of Thrones" Didn't Give us Zombie Catelyn Stark

In the books, Catelyn Stark's body was unceremoniously dumped in a river, but Nymeria, Arya's direwolf, drags it out, and it's found three days later by the Brotherhood Without Banners. Their leader Beric Dondarrion, who has died and been resurrected several times, gives up his life to resurrect her despite warnings that she'd been dead for too long, and people getting brought back from the dead area are always a bit messed up. They're never the same as before. That's Game of Thrones for you; everything has a major downside. So yes, Catelyn Stark is brought back, and she is seriously messed up. She looks like a zombie, and her skin is all icky from being in the water for three days after she died. Do you know what your hands look like after being in the bath for too long? Well, author George R.R. Martin spares no detail describing what she looks like now. All her wounds are unhealed, including her slit, exposed throat. Oh yeah, that also means she can't talk anymore, and she is very pissed off.

So what's an angry zombie who's lost everything supposed to do? Why, take over the Brotherhood Without Banners and turn them into a band of marauders who go around hunting down and murdering anyone from the House of Frey for the betrayal at the Red Wedding, of course. Zombie Catelyn Stark, or Catelyn Stark 2.0, is now called Lady Stoneheart as she leaves a trail of bloody terror and covers up the wound on her throat so she can speak in a really creepy way. She really wants to hunt down and kill Jaime Lannister because she thinks he ordered the betrayal at the Red Wedding. Hundreds of pages later, she captures Brienne of Tarth and forces her to lead Jaime into a trap so that she – Zombie Catelyn Stark – can kill him.

And that's where we left off Jaime and Brienne's fate in the last published Game of Thrones novel, A Dance with Dragons. That book came out in 2011. We're now in one of the longest cliffhangers in literary history. But let's think about how we didn't get Lady Stoneheart, or Zombie Catelyn Stark, rampaging through the countryside, murdering and massacring all kinds of fools before threatening to kill Jaime and Brienne on TV. How cool would that have been, right?

Game of Thrones is streaming on MAX if you want to watch The Red Wedding again and think about what could have been. Zombie Catelyn Stark!

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!