Game of Thrones, Season 6, Episode 9: Battle of the Bastards
Well, it's a very beautiful action episode, if nothing else. I... don't quite like this episode as much as most reviewers out there did, from the couple I googled in the internet. It's not a bad episode by any stretch! It's got the most intricate battle sequences ever, and I think only Hardhome's action sequence impressed me more in this series. But, I don't know... I expected more, really. Don't get me wrong, as cool as it is to see the final confrontation between Jon and Ramsay, and to see that utter twat get devoured alive by his own dogs, I felt the episode was way too simple.
Leaving behind the Daenerys bit until the end of the review, let's talk about the titular battle of the bastards, which is a far more hilarious name than battle for Winterfell. I expected, well, more. I absolutely love the gritty feel of war, how it excellently portrays the visceral and not-at-all-romanticized manner of war with people dying all around Jon, random people clashing with random people, chaos, confusion, blood everywhere... that was realistic and awesome and portrays the real dark nature of war. It's not at all heroic after the initial charging horses, not one-sided like the more fantastical Daenerys battle earlier in the episode, and I can appreciate that a lot.
Nah, I really expected something more than just, well, Jon and Ramsay meet each other on the battlefield, Ramsay taunts Jon and by extension his entire army to charge forwards, and then start to overwhelm him with numbers, arrows, a corpse mountain and a shield formation. The predictable rescue by the Knights of the Vale happens. They take Winterfell. They kill Ramsay.
See, the battle for Winterfell has been foreshadowed all the way from the earliest episodes of this season, and for it to ultimately be so simple really felt... hollow, I guess? Which might be what they were going for, but I dunno. Melisandre does absolutely nothing throughout the battle despite having the ability to create shadow vagina demons, so no assassination or rescue attempt -- though like Sansa I highly doubt any kind of rescue attempt will remotely succeed. Brienne misses the battle, and so does the Blackfish thanks to the previous episodes, so that's two interesting characters out of the picture. Lyanna Mormont only gets a scene where she glares at Ramsay during the initial parley, though her absence is understandable. Even Ghost -- you'd think a sudden direwolf ambush would be on top of the to-do list for the stunt choreographers -- sits this one out. Ultimately, Davos really don't do anything significant, and Tormund really spends the entire episode just being a berserking viking.
The thing is, there is no point in the episode where I thought that the episode will end in any way that doesn't involve the Knights of the Vale arriving in full force as the big cavalry, and Jon alive, and Ramsay dead. The fact that pisses me off is that Sansa doesn't even tell Jon about the fact that she contacted Littlefinger, a fact that would definitely have changed Jon's big war plans. And the episode seems to paint this as Sansa Stark finally being independent and awesome and shit, and, yeah, in my opinion she totally fucked up something fierce, and I don't think I've actually ever disliked Sansa more than I do in this episode. Previously I've always thought that she's naive, or spoiled, or the unfortunate butt-end of misfortunes. Now I just think she's a huge idiot who thinks she's being smart.
Really, where does she get off telling Jon that he's an idiot for charging in? When she confronted Jon prior to the battle, and Jon goes 'what advice do you have for me?' she just gives some abstract 'don't do what he wants you to do', which is a whole lot less useful than 'hey, by the way, I have a small army charging here that no one knows about'. That really cost the deaths of a lot of people. And, yeah, Sansa's point about Rickon being doomed either way is totally valid and I agree on that, but not telling Jon about her secret army? That was dumb. And honestly from a storytelling perspective, the fact that we know that the Knights of the Vale are around -- they've been foreshadowed to be on Sansa's side since episode three, and we know Sansa wrote Littlefinger a letter -- really makes me hard to be scared that the Starks will lose the battle at all. It's just a matter of how many of the second-stringers die.
Granted, there's plenty of idiocy to go around because while Jon has enough sense to plan battles and try to make a pincer attack or whatever, Ramsay's chilling execution of Rickon right in front of his eyes -- and so cruelly giving Rickon the fleeting hope to run towards Jon -- causes the former Lord Commander to charge in like a blithering idiot, causing his army to charge in to save his Leeroy-Jenkins-ing ass, and he spends most of the battle with a bit of a lost expression on his face. Yeah, I know that's your brother and no one can fault you for running to save him, Jon, but charging in after Rickon's dead and done? When Tormund Giantsbane, who doesn't even know what 'ambush' means, knows that's a bad idea, you done fucked up, Jon.
Rickon Stark and Wun Wun the giant are the only named characters from the good guys to actually bite the dust, though damn if Wun Wun didn't give as much as he took. He's absolutely indestructible, the only one to actually do any sort of meaningful damage against the Bolton shieldbearers even with two dozen arrows sticking through him. And after Ramsay gallops off like the dickless coward that he is into the castle, Wun Wun singlehandedly did a two-minute siege and broke down the doors (no Hodor to hold your doors this time) though he ends up succumbing to his wounds, and Ramsay just shot him in the eye to finish him off because he's a twat.
And Rickon? That game of 'will Rickon reach Jon in time' is a harrowing scene, that's for sure, and I was on the edge of my seat... but not because I care for Rickon, because, hell, we barely knew the dude. He had like two lines over the course of all six seasons, he's a periphery character to Bran and he's honestly more important because he's a Stark. He's literally the one that never actually got any screen time at all, though... even Ghost has more personality than Rickon. And so it didn't really impact me emotionally that he died, mostly because, like Sansa, I didn't expect him to live. Even if Ramsay's sadistic arrow-shooting didn't get Rickon, I was sure that he was poisoned or something anyway, because that's the sort of thing that Ramsay would do.
But, yeah, griping about the handling of the episode aside, it's a pretty awesome action episode, and I rewatched it a couple of times. There were some really great effects and chereography as far as the battle goes, with a great tracking shot with Jon charging through the enemy forces, hacking his way through random Bolton men throughout the confusion and chaos while sometimes being saved by things that happen in the background. From the tense arrow scene with Rickon to the grit-encrusted gigantic melee in the field, to the nice little hopeless situation as the Bolton shieldbearers lock down the Stark forces and go 'hoo hah hoo hah', to Ramsay running like a pussy, to the power trio of Jon, Tormund and Wun Wun charging at the castle, to Wun Wun single-handedly crushing the gates, to the final confrontation between the bastards and cathartic beatdown of Ramsay, to the moment when the Bolton flags were torn down and Sansa confronts Ramsay and eventually kills him, it's a riveting episode all throughout.
Tormund being an insane berserker for what little he got was fun too, and his visceral confrontation with Smalljon Umber, ripping out his carotids with his teeth, is pretty awesome.
I just wished... there were more, y'know? With Hardhome there was a two-pronged attack by the wildling forces, there were battles on multiple fronts, and there was the drama between Ygritte and Jon. With the battle of Blackwater there likewise was a battle on at least two fronts, the whole subterfuge with the wildfire bomb, and, yes, Blackwater was finished with a cavalry arriving, but on Blackwater it's an actual surprise instead of me going 'okay, when will Littlefinger come' at the back of my head throughout this episode.
And I think one of the biggest lack of tension is that, well, they just went through several episodes just to bring Jon Snow back, so there is no way that they're going to kill him off when we know Melisandre is literally in the next tent over. She even makes it clear that she'll try to revive Jon again if it comes to that.
It's appropriate that Sansa was the one that gets to kill Ramsay. Her look to Jon while he was beating the smarmy bastard half to death with his feet is a definite sense of 'I wanna finish him off'. Despite their argument (and Sansa being a secret-keeping bastard) it's clear that Jon does respect Sansa enough to honour her wishes, and despite her being a bit of a shit throughout the episode, her confrontation with Ramsay is pretty spine-chillingly awesome, with her basically telling Ramsay that despite the atrocities that he has done, even his victims will forget him. And Ramsay so assholishly starving his hounds leads Sansa to, well, unleash the hounds upon Ramsay, delivering the slightest bit of cruelty that he had delivered to the good people of Westeros. If I had my way, I would've put Ramsay through a month-long torture like what Ramsay put poor Theon through, but a brutal death? I'll take that. It's cathartic, it's predictable, but damn. Seeing Ramsay get his comeuppance? My only real regret is that he didn't get more.
Speaking of getting comeuppances, Daenerys meets up with Tyrion and have a bit of a conversation... which honestly doesn't even make sense considering their situation. Tyrion talks about how King Aerys was insane and was planning to basically blow up everyone in the city, but what Daenerys is proposing is to, well, dracarys the fuck out of the slavers who are unrepentant and have been given chances to surrender. Which ends up happening anyway, though possibly not to quite the extremes that Daenerys initially wanted. I dunno. It just doesn't segue into the actions that they take later on really well.
And, yeah, we want to establish Daenerys's giant Dothraki Horde playing a part, but really? A bunch of random Sons of the Harpy dudes stabbing more random people in front of the city? That felt really out of place, though hey, I'll assume that the Dothraki continue to charge into the city and murder every single person with a golden mask.
The slave masters are all 'yeah, you should surrender, beggar queen', but they clearly underestimate the dragons, and, shit, Drogon is positively monstrous now, the size of a big dinosaur. And Viserion and Rhaegar blow up the door to their little cellar prison to join their brother as they soar through the skies of Mereen, eating up Game of Thrones's entire visual CGI budget for this season. Yeah, now we know why they can't afford the stuntmen needed for a proper Arya/Waif fight last episode.
It's awesome, of course, as the dragons just rampage around and shoot fire and blow ships up, scaring the masters to submission. Tyrion and Grey Worm kind of get the Masters' bodyguards to, y'know, rightfully run for their lives instead of dying for masters who don't care about them, and then Tyrion gives them a sadistic choice of his own -- one of them must die for atonement. The Masters immediately push the lowborn member among them (which was one of the more sympathetic ones we saw earlier in the series, I think?), only for Grey Worm to execute the others. Tyrion, with a very soft-spoken tone, puts the fear of god in the lowborn master and tells him to fuck off and not mess with the dragon queen.
We also get an additional scene with Tyrion and Daenerys meeting up with the Greyjoy siblings, who apparently arrived on Mereen offscreen. Tyrion lording over Theon is hilarious, and Daenerys, Tyrion and Yara bond over gender equality and the fact that their daddies are both shit kings. It's honestly a bit of a slower scene considering everything else that happened in this episode, and I'm surprised we didn't get this scene in the next episode or earlier this season. Though, hey, Theon and Yara has just joined the court of Daenerys Targaryen, with the simple condition of 'no more raiding'. We discuss Euron (who's a bit of a disappointment considering his awesome introduction) a bit, but Yara brings up the fact that he wants to offer Daenerys his 'big cock', so... yeah.
Overall, it's definitely a very enjoyable episode... I just honestly expected and wished more. But Ramsay Bolton's dead, we get big armies fighting and giant dragons dracarys-ing an entire fleet, so I can't say that I'm unhappy with the circumstances, really.
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