Small Council: What did you think of “Battle of the Bastards?”

What did we like about “Battle of the Bastards,” the ninth episode of Game of Thrones Season 6? What didn’t we like? Tell us your opinions, and vote it our poll!

KATIE: Episode 9 usually pulls out all the stops, but “Battle of the Bastards” took things to a whole new level. The pacing was A+ and, while I’m no authority on cinematography, the battle scene was on par with and even better than some I’ve seen in major motion pictures. But more than that, the narrative of this episode hit all the sweet spots. I could watch it every night before bed and it would probably help stave off the insomnia, because watching Jon punch Ramsay repeatedly in the face is super cathartic, partly because I wanted it so badly but never thought it would actually happen. Sansa’s resilience—which peaked here in a big way—added 15 years to my life. The eldest remaining Starks delivered, as we had to know they would, but watching it unfold was like watching all my wildest dreams come true.

Jon recognized, from the moment of the parlay with Ramsay, that this battle may have been more Sansa’s than his (it’s likely he wouldn’t have gone to war if it hadn’t been for her). And so Sansa took the reins of Ramsay’s death. Sansa looked her abuser in the eye and took everything away from him, even while he tried to tear her down one last time. “I’m part of you now” may sound like a cheesy villain line, but it’s a very true representation of how abusers talk to their victims. Sansa deserved her revenge, she deserved justice, and she deserved to feel good about that. That doesn’t make her cruel, sadistic, or any less like Sansa; it makes her a player in this game, and one who knows her worth. Even Jon understood this, which is why he stopped himself from beating Ramsay fully to death and gave him to Sansa instead.

A lot of fans have been speculating as to why Sansa didn’t tell Jon that she had an army at her disposal, but it’s actually not as difficult to determine as it appears: 1), Sansa didn’t know that she could guarantee the Knights of the Vale (or perhaps she didn’t want Jon to protest or interfere), and/or; 2) after being used and abused for so many years, Sansa doesn’t trust men as easily as she once did. Jon may be family, but Sansa has had to go it alone for a long time now, and can’t bring herself to allow anyone else to call these shots when she can call them herself.

Asking for Petyr’s help doesn’t mean Sansa trusts him, either—but she knows she can use him, and at the time there’s nothing else to be done but to reach out to him. She tried to tell Jon in previous episodes that they needed to wait, that they needed more men, that they couldn’t play into Ramsay’s hands, but Jon was at a loss for another option. After the outcome of the battle, I do think Jon and Sansa will trust in each other more fully, and hopefully Jon will punch Petyr in the face, too. Gotta love Littlefinger, but he needs to get hit. (I tweeted my wish that Jon would punch Ramsay a few hours before the episode aired and got that, so hopefully I’m just sort of psychic about punching.)

Side note: I wasn’t going to say anything, but this has gone on too long and now I have to…if the show isn’t setting up for an eventual Jon/Sansa romance, they need to start monitoring their subtext better. But personally, I say forget that and go for the romance.

DAN: I’m not picking up any romance vibes between Sansa and Jon, but I guess it wouldn’t be the weirdest relationship in the show’s history.

I’d like to go big picture this week, since I think “Battle of the Bastards” calls for it. The battle sequence in the North was remarkable. But it wasn’t just technically masterful for the sake of being technically masterful: it showed the horror and ugliness of war with an immediacy that George R.R. Martin’s novels, however descriptive, can’t. Plenty of fans have found the show wanting in comparison to the novels, and they have good points: the show isn’t as internally consistent, or nearly as detailed. To some extent, this was bound to happen—with limited time and dozens of live human beings to manage, the show could never have as many details as the books, and it was always going to be harder to keep the ones it did have straight.

Generally, detail is something that books will always have over movies and TV. But cinema has its own advantages, namely a knack for stirring emotion. The battle sequence outside Winterfell stirred a lot of it. From Rickon’s desperate run to safety to Jon Snow being caught in the middle of a pitched battle to the horrifying moment when he’s nearly trampled to death by his own men, “Battle of the Bastards” rode waves of emotion of varying sizes straight through to the end, when the Knights of the Vale breached Ramsay’s shield wall and we all caught a breath. There was barely any dialogue—the sequence let the images wash over the audience until it felt nearly as drained as Jon himself.

Well, not that drained—let’s not go nuts—but weathered. That’s what good cinema should do: elicit an emotional response, irrespective of whether the plot holds up under scrutiny, or even of whether there is a plot.

Note that I’m not saying that the plot of “Battle of the Bastards” didn’t hold up—I’m saying that’s not the point. “Battle of the Bastards” will become a landmark episode of TV because of its commitment to bringing us to that battlefield alongside those characters by any means necessary.

RICHARD: First of all I have to say, like Dan, I thought that “Battle of the Bastards” was a fantastic piece of cinema. I can’t recall a better orchestrated battle sequence than what we saw this past Sunday (comparisons to the Normandy beach storming at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan comes to mind) and the action blew me away. Miguel Sapochnik is a genius, pure and simple. This will always be one of my favorite episodes of one of my all-time favorite shows.

That said, I have to raise an issue that’s been creeping into the show all season: predictability. I’m not talking about storylines starting to wrap up or the good guys finally winning here and there. I’m talking about fear, specifically my fear that the big fish characters I have invested so much time and emotion into are going to die. When Ned Stark and Robb/Catelyn Stark died, entire A-level storylines and hours of our investment died with them. We felt an intimate sense of loss. When we were afraid that Jon Snow was dead, we suffered because we had labored alongside him, and we hoped that he might succeed in his quest.

Jon Snow did not die. We got him back and it was brilliant. But in order to maintain its edge on the narrative guillotine, the show, like a mob boss, has to prove it’s willing to off a big fish once in a while, for any reason, and it hasn’t done that lately. We hadn’t seen Osha, the Blackfish, and Rickon for years, so their deaths, hurled into the meat grinder of Season 6, lacked immediacy. Hodor and Wun Wun’s heroic deaths were brutal and sad, yes, but neither could be called a big fish character, and big storylines did not die with them. It was great to see Ramsay Bolton get what what was coming to him, but his character had always been so shallow and murderous that his death did not affect me how I thought it might. His destruction was the flat stomp of a cockroach without bloody-glorious echoes in the corridors of my soul.

Yes, Game of Thrones has given us some superbly-packaged storytelling over the last season or so, and yes, I have enjoyed them immensely, but the show is now playing it safe with its major characters and the result is the loss of the razor-sharp tension and anxiety that made the earlier seasons such a deliciously frightening and exhilarating experience. Before, I was terrified for most every character on screen at every moment. In “Battle of the Bastards,” I didn’t want Tormund, Jon, Davos, or Sansa to die, but I was also pretty certain they were safe. That’s what I’m talking about here: the willingness to kill big characters once in a while was how Game of Thrones make my heart pound with dread, and I don’t have that feeling any more.

RAZOR: What was not to love? In one episode we got both the battles of Fire and Ice! I mean, how thematically important was that? Here we sit on the precipice of the finale of Season 6, and we’ve finally got Dany and her entourage ready to come to Westeros (I hope), and we’ve got the Starks finally back in Winterfell after five seasons…what a day to rejoice!

Now, having gotten all the niceties out of the way, I’m sure that the Season 6 finale will see nothing but blood and mayhem, destruction and gore befall our favorite heroes. I mean, it is Game of Thrones, right? But we aren’t here to talk about the finale, so let’s break out some bullet points, because I know how much my fellow council members love those, muwahahahahahaha!

• Dragons! Drogon was finally reunited with Viserion and Rhaegal, which was a long time coming, and it was awesome!
• Drogon got big…like, really big.
• Grey Worm is back, and his fighting form has never looked better.
• Tyrion was a bit of a dick to Theon.
• Yara flirted with Dany, and Dany seemed to dig it.
• In the North at the parlay, even though Sansa got the mic drop, it was Lyanna Mormont who stole the spotlight with her RBF (Resting Bi*ch Face).
• Sansa should have told Jon about the Knights of the Vale, plain and simple, and she had the chance, but she blew it, and thousands of men died.
• Tormund had the line of the night with, “Happy shitting”
• That burnt stag is going to come back to bite Melisandre in the old wrinkly ass.
• Rickon should have ran in a serpentine pattern. He should have zigzagged.
• I get charging out to save a loved one, but when Rickon died, Jon should have turned around and hauled ass back to his army. When he didn’t he forced his army to charge and got thousands of men killed. He’s no better than Sansa in that regard. (Ned Stark mistake.)
• This was THE best battle scene on Game of Thrones history.
• That crush scene still gives me nightmares.
• R.I.P. Wun Wun
• Ramsay knew he was going to die and therefore never drew a sword.
• Jon picked up a Mormont shield. Think of that symbolism.
• Ramsay told Sansa that he is in her now. That doesn’t mean she’s pregnant, it means that she’s a bit sadistic. The proof? She fed him to his hounds, and walked away smiling.

I loved “Battle of the Bastards” and have watched it about five times so far. I would rank it as the best episode in the series so far. And now I turn my eyes to the Season 6 finale, “The Winds of Winter.” Boy, does it have some large shoes to fill.

ANI: In terms of landmark achievements, Game of Thrones can stop now. That was it. That was the pinnacle of what the show will do in terms of resetting the standards for battles on the small screen. Heck, it was a landmark achievement that deserves to be listed with those on the big screen. Run this episode in IMAX, please. I’ll go see it.

Game of Thrones has been groundbreaking the whole way through, ever since it first hit airwaves in 2011. Not only did it reset benchmarks for how fantasy should look on TV, but it showed that lent itself to episodic storytelling more than it did to movies.

It also changed the way our fantasies present themselves. By grounding the action in familiar political dynamics, Game of Thrones tricked an entire generation of cool kids into falling in love with sword and sorcery, dragons and heroes, and the moralizing parables that fantasy has always represented. Along the way, it changed the parameters of what we expect in our storytelling. Heroes no longer automatically survive. Brutal twists that don’t land in the finale are becoming normalized. And every season the CGI work improves on a scale that mirrors our technology curve.

With this week’s double battle of Fire in Meereen and Ice in Winterfell, the show has taken things to yet a higher plane. You thought Game of Thrones won all the Emmys last year? There’s still a million plots they have to wrap up. Just you wait.

COREY: Where to even start? Despite hinting that the episode would take place entirely in the North, “Battle of the Bastards” also contained quite a bit of action over in Meereen, and I will posit that it was a very deliberate choice on the part of producers. With respect to everyone’s favorites, they wanted to show off the two characters who will likely be the most important in the coming battle against the White Walkers: Jon and Daenerys. It almost justifies the stalling scene where Tyrion, Missandei, and Grey Worm sat around making bad jokes, since they wanted to fit the battles of Fire and Ice into the same episode. Almost.

I will agree with Katie: I am picking up some slight romance vibes between Jon and Sansa, which on its face might seem odd, unless Jon is really [SPOILER THEORY REDACTED], and then it’s only slightly less weird. Also, remember that George R.R. Martin originally had Arya and Jon falling in love in the first drafts for the series way back when the Spice Girls were still a thing.

Moving on…

I was especially thrilled with the Battle of the Bastards because of its originality. I liked the encroaching shields because it felt exactly like the kind of tactic a complete psychopath like Ramsay would use. Strategy-wise, a shield wall in a line would have been just as effective, but would not have inspired the claustrophobic fear that the semi-circle did. And while it’s been said, the crushing scene with Jon was downright amazing. We all knew going in that at some point Jon would find himself in significant peril, but rather than having it occur in some sort of sword fight, it came at the hands feet of his own terror-filled troops. Loved that.

I wasn’t a fan of the final showdown between Jon and Ramsay, mainly because Ramsay felt like a colossal idiot just standing there trying to hit Jon with arrows. I would have liked to have seen Ramsay pull that cross draw knife he killed Roose with, or act as if he was surrendering and then try something, basically anything other than standing there waiting for Jon to deck him.

All in all, that was my only quibble with the episode, thus making it one of the best episodes of the series. Can’t wait for the finale.

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