Game of Thrones is the ultimate guilty pleasure. It’s like a super high-budget soap opera. The writ­ing is bad. Cliffhangers propel the story. Characters enter into the fold and die—violently—at random. And there is so much sex. The main difference be­tween Game of Thrones and, say, Days of Our Lives, is that Thrones features some very fine actors, Pe­ter Dinklage the best among them, his poor, tinny English accent notwithstanding.

I hope Tyrion Lannister, played by Dinklage, does not die; it will kill me. When Sean Bean’s character died at the end of the first season I was so shocked that I considered quitting the show. Since then so many characters that I’ve grown attached to have been point­lessly cut down that I’m desensitized to it. Last sea­son’s finale was no exception.

The first episode of season five, which aired on Sun­day, mostly attempted to pick up some of the pieces that had been strewn about at the end of season four. Skipping back and forth between all the show’s dif­ferent threads, the episode felt scattered in the same way Thrones as a whole feels scattered. There’s hardly enough time in a sixty-minute episode to check in with all the characters, let alone for the plot to advance in a really substantive way. This problem, of course, is not distinct to Thrones, but the show is sagging under its own weight.

I hate when people compare Game of Thrones to The Lord of the Rings—by which I mean the original Lord of the Rings, not those Hobbit movies, the bas­tard children of the outstanding original trilogy. A clear narrative arc drives The Lord of the Rings, and its po­litical allegories—most of which relate to the Second World War—are deliberate and thoroughly thought out. No part of Thrones feels deliberate. While watching Thrones, you can imagine its author George R. R. Mar­tin sitting in some dark room typing at an old Smith Corona typewriter and yelling, “And then this happens! And now this happens! And now this!” I haven’t read the books, and serious Thrones fans argue that there is indeed an overarching structure to the story; all will be revealed when Martin concludes the series, whenever that might be. I disagree, but in some ways the lack of direction doesn’t bother me. I’m happy to just go along for the ride, especially because Martin is very good at engineering interesting political machinations and relationships.

That’s when Thrones is the most fun, when it’s a show about backstabbing and conniving and deal mak­ing and politicking. The show is weaker when it leans too heavily on the supernatural—and on special effects in general. Starting with the opening sequence of the series, Thrones has been lurching slowly closer to a show about dragons, monsters, and sorcerers. I prefer the gaming that gave the series its title, and HBO isn’t really equipped to pull off a huge-budget CGI action sequence, although they’ve spent a ton of money on the series, and it shows.

As for this season, the first four episodes have leaked online, and they’re very entertaining, especially the sec­ond, third, and fourth episodes. The show is escapism at its best, without claiming to be anything more. Un­like House of Cards, which seems to fancy itself a seri­ous, intellectually-stimulating drama in the mold of The Wire, Deadwood, or Breaking Bad, Thrones, even while taking itself a little too seriously, is willing to double down on some really silly twists and turns.

The question that the series faces is how its writers will handle the moment when the television show out­paces the series of books it’s based on. Currently, Mar­tin is finishing up the sixth book, out of seven planned, and at the end of this season the show will have covered most of the content through the fifth book, although some of the story lines in the show have departed from the chronology of the books. Bran’s storyline in the show, for example, has already reached the end of the fifth book, whereas Arya is somewhere in the middle of the fourth book. At some point, Martin will have to tell the writers of the show how he intends the books to end, and they will in turn have to decide whether they want to follow the plan he outlines or carve out their own path. It’s a weird dynamic, given the outsize popularity of the show and the relative obscurity of the books it’s based on. (By the way, the books are called A Song of Fire and Ice. The television show’s creators wisely took the name Game of Thrones from the title of the first book.)

Given that we’re only about halfway through what will probably be an eight- or nine-season television show, a lot of time remains for the writers and produc­ers to experiment with changes in pacing and style. For example, they might decide to include fewer gratuitous sex scenes. There seems to be an attitude at HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax that dictates if you can do it, you should—like when Julia Louis-Dreyfus tells Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm that she wants to be in a show on HBO so she can say “fuck.” But the sex in Thrones is either a drag on the plot or it’s pointless, not at all like the gritty violence in, say, The Sopranos.

Game of Thrones is HBO’s biggest attraction today, drawing far more subscribers than shows like Silicon Valley and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Coming into the fifth season, we’re a little desensitized. We’re not surprised by the constant surprises, and it’s unclear how they’re going to keep coming. But I’d be kidding if I said I wasn’t glued to the screen anyways.