Photo: Helen Sloan/HBO

[This post contains spoilers from A Storm of Swords. But at this point, doesn’t your whole life basically contain spoilers for A Storm of Swords?]

The fourth-season finale of Game of Thrones had a lot going on — White Walkers, a few notable deaths, and the start of Arya’s next tragic adventure. What it did not have, however, is Lady Stoneheart, the back-from-the-dead, bloated-corpse version of Catelyn Stark. Frequent GoT director Alex Graves told us there were no real plans to have Lady Stoneheart appear, and now Michelle Fairley seems to have confirmed as much.

“Yeah, the character’s dead. She’s dead,” Fairley tells EW. “I knew the arc, and that was it,” she says. “They can’t stick to the books 100 percent. It’s impossible — they only have 10 hours per season. They have got to keep it dramatic and exciting, and extraneous stuff along the way gets lost in order to maintain the quality of brilliant show.” Not everyone considers a vengeance-minded zombie ghost “extraneous,” but life is full of disappointment.