The question on everyone's mind after the Season 5 finale, when this became apparent, seems to be "Why did Benioff and Weiss combine two full novels into Season 5, instead of the normal one book per season they were doing before?"

Indeed, the third novel is so long they actually had to split it into two halves to create Season 3 and Season 4.

Books four and five were oddly structured in that book four covers all events in the Seven Kingdoms (except the North), while the fifth novel takes place during the same time period, covering events outside the main Seven Kingdoms (Meereen, The Free Cities, the Wall, and Stannis/Boltons in the North).

Overall many professional critical reviews (io9, etc.) have pointed out just how rushed the season seemed. This varied by storyline, but several storylines were omitted entirely, such as the Iron Islands and Riverlands (though we will see those next year, thankfully).

Many characters were drastically truncated, however.

The big ones that are most drastically condensed are Sansa Stark, Stannis Baratheon, and Dorne.

I don't think anyone would defend what little of Dorne we saw this season; it was painfully short and of sub-par quality for the show.

Meanwhile, they argued that they had to combine Sansa with the Bolton storyline because "there wasn't enough time" to fit her in otherwise....at the time, I assumed they meant "not enough time in two seasons, with a dozen other plotlines also vying for time". Now I wonder if Sansa could have remained in the Vale if there were two seasons - thus condensing two books into one season directly led to her controversial maritalrape by Ramsay Bolton.

The Stannis storyline, once he left the Wall, raced to a conclusion even drawing from the next novel, but is now widely held to be anti-climactic.

I think there are three possible explanations for the decision to condense two full novels into one season:

• 1 - Benioff and Weiss have grown tired of the show, want to work on other projects, and are now self-consciously trying to get the show done as quickly as possible, knowing this will sacrifice the quality (personally I find this unlikely).

• 2 - Benioff and Weiss have become so obsessed with having Red Wedding-scale, Battle of Castle Black scale climaxes at the end of each season that they were focused more on rushing to the climaxes of books four and five than on setting up those climaxes properly. I think they could easily have used the Massacre at Hardhome, LS, or several other story points as a decent ending to Season 5 had the stopped in the middle of the novels. What, they felt Sansa's Vale storyline was anticlimactic and boring? So they "fixed" this by reversing her character arc and having Ramsay Bolton rape her on the wedding night?

• 3 - Some have suggested that the actor contract crisis played a role, which involved the five core cast members (Cersei, Jaime, Tyrion, Jon, Daenerys). TV shows rarely go on for over six seasons so the actor contracts had to be renegotiated -- if these negotiations failed, the show would be forced to end with Season 7, in which case Benioff and Weiss did not "choose" to do this. The theory is that fearing the contracts wouldn't work out, they went into "worst case scenario mode" in Season 5, rushing plotlines....only to then find out that the actor contract dispute was successfully resolved, HBO just agreed to pay the actors more money. Now after Season 5 ended, HBO executives are openly saying "Why not have 10 seasons?" (They won't have that many, but the point is we'll probably get Season 8 now).

On top of all of this, in Seasons 1 to 3 Benioff and Weiss frequently said "we're going for seven to eight seasons" ---- there are going to be seven novels, they get eight because they split the third novel in half across two seasons. If they instead BURNED THROUGH two books in a single season now...what's going to be in that extra eighth season? Do they intend to split the sixth novel across two seasons?

So which of these three theories seems most plausible? Are there any other separate explanations you would like to introduce?

-->I doubted the theory that they wanted to rush to "the cool climaxes" like the Mutiny at Castle Black, because of how badly rushing makes plotlines suffer - I mean look at how badly the Dorne subplot suffered as a result (not even mentioning the Sansa one).

Did they voluntarily condense two novels into one season? Or was it circumstances beyond their control? Due to the actor contract crisis? If it was beyond their control I actually commend them for doing fairly well with limited resources in adverse circumstances.

But who CHOSE to truncate their own work like that?

I mean they're always complaining about how hard it is to adapt so much novel into a single TV season and they wish they had 12 episodes to tell it all, but physically cannot make more than 10 episodes a year. 212 day a year shooting schedule.

If anything, what has been the question since the beginning of the TV series, repeated constantly? "What if you outpace the material from the current novels"? "What if you overtake the books?"

This was the pervasive fear. And their answer...was to burn off the two TV seasons' worth of material they had left from two novels, in a SINGLE TV season?

What we do know is they said they wanted to condense the Sansa/Vale and Bolton storylines since the early writing phases of Season 2.

WHEN was the decision made to condense two books into one season? Clearly not "from the beginning" of Season 1 (they didn't have plans that far in the future they didn't know if Season 1 would be successful). ----Was it in early Season 2? Or, was it a decision they made right before writing Season 5 itself?

This was a mistake on every level.