So the
director got asked about the obvious absence from the Game of Thrones finale (Storm of Swords spoilers):
Speaking to Vulture, Graves said that he first asked aloud about Lady Stoneheart during his third-season episode featuring Beric Dondarrion—the Brotherhood Without Banners leader who is Lady Stoneheart’s creator—only to have showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss say, “Oh, yeah, you know, that’s a whole thing that we’re just not sure what we’re going to do about.” As Graves tells both Vulture and Entertainment Weekly, they’re still unsure. “It was never going to be in the season,” he says, “yet it took off on the Internet like it was going to happen.”
Besides wanting, as always, to upset the Internet, the Game Of Thrones team had other reasons for keeping the character out of play. They already had a whole mess of concurrent storylines to keep track of, for one thing, but also: “To bring back Michelle Fairley, one of the greatest actresses around, to be a zombie for a little while—and just kill people?” Graves says to EW. “It is really sort of, what are we doing with that? How does it play into the whole story in a way that we’re really going to like?”[