Small Council: What was the best action from Game of Thrones Season 6?

Fights, battles, clashes of all kinds…this week’s Small Council session is all about action scenes. Which ones got our blood pumping, our hearts racing, and our vocal chords strumming? Read our takes below, tell us yours in the comments, and vote in our poll!

DAN: There was plenty of action to go around in Season 6—so much, in fact, that action scene aficionados have at least one for every mood. Feel like a well-choreographed mano-a-mano? Look no further than the fight at the Tower of Joy (that’s more of a mano-a-mano and mano and mano, but close enough). Want shock and awe? Daenerys riding Drogon into battle above Meereen should do it. Arya and the Waif had a foot chase, the Hound and Jorah mixed some comedy into their skirmishes, and of course pretty much all of “Battle of the Bastards” was epic. It was a good year for action.

But if I were going to pick a favorite, I’d go with the first fight scene of the year: Brienne slaying the Bolton soldiers in “The Red Woman.” And Pod and Theon helped.

I appreciate the conviction that Gwendoline Christie brings to Brienne, particularly when she has to do physical acting. She yells, she grunts, she heaves, and she throws her whole body into the task. She helps sell the urgency of a scene, and she was in fine form here. I particularly enjoyed the moment where Brienne leaps into an oncoming horse and stabs a dude off it.

Don’t get me wrong—I love the huge scale of “Battle of the Bastards,” but taking things smaller can allow a badass moment like that to land in a way that it might not if it’s sandwiched between other bits of bombast. It also makes sure we focus on the emotions of our principals. Brienne, Pod, Theon, Sansa—I was scared for all of them, and the compactness of the battle reinforced that.

The falling snow gives this battle a unique look, too, a bit of quiet beauty to go along with the carnage. This is brutal, messy, memorable bit of action filmmaking.

KATIE: I have to give it up to “Battle of the Bastards” here. The episode played out rather predictably—we knew (or at least strongly suspected, with reason) that Jon would live, that Sansa would arrive with the Knights of the Vale in tow, and that Ramsay would be bested. But none of that lessened the battle’s impact; it didn’t make the fight less brutal or bloody, and personally it didn’t stop me from nervously biting my thumb so hard that I left teeth marks.

Because, ultimately, this battle scene made you feel everything it should have, at all the right moments. I might not have broken a sweat over our hero Jon Snow’s fate—he’s already died once, after all—but he certainly wasn’t the only major player in this game. I cried for Rickon, my gut clenched when the Bolton army was closing in, I thought Tormund was dead for sure and cheered myself hoarse when instead he crushed Smalljon Umber, and then I cried some more when Sansa appeared with an army at her back (clearly I’m a crier, whatever). I was restless and a little sick at the sight of all the blood and devastation, at how real it all seemed, how it was dirty and ugly and not at all glorious and heroic the way you see in so many other battle scenes. Game of Thrones tends to stray from that trope, but “Battle of the Bastards” was all grit and grime in a way we haven’t seen before.

It was raw and real and perfectly paced, huge not only in scale but emotional resonance, too. We’ve been building up to a Stark-Bolton showdown for seasons now, and the Starks who ended the battle victorious are two of the most downtrodden—Ned Stark’s bastard, who rose to Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch only to be killed by his own men; and the always underestimated Sansa Stark, who finally won the fight for herself and her home. “Battle of the Bastards” hit all the right notes, and it did so in the most satisfying way possible. It was a triumph for the good guys, and after years of watching the Starks suffer, it made a profound difference to see them gain a piece of their family and their home back, and it gives me hope that they might restore their name to its former glory.

RAZOR: Obviously I could pick any myriad of scenes from the Battle of the Bastards, but that would be too easy, as I’m sure anyone else could do that just as easily as Ramsay could hit Rickon with an arrow from 120 yards away. I think I’ll pick Dany torching the slavers’ fleet, on the back of Drogon, assisted by Rhaegal and Viserion.

This moment was actually a bit of a an amalgamation of a moment from A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, and something invented for the show. Watching Drogon wing his way behind the Masters as they haughtily tried to negotiate terms with Dany and her retinue sent chills down my spine. And then to have him land and bow his head and neck for her to climb on his back…it was clear that Dany had gained mastery over him.

The scene also paid off the moment in “The Children” when Dany locked Rhaegal and Viserion in the underground chamber. When they broke out and took flight with their mother and brother, it released two seasons’ worth of tension, and the Mother of Dragons actually lived up to her name.

Then Dany and Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion all hovered over the slavers’ ships, and she uttered the word she had trained them to recognize all their lives: “Dracarys.” After that, you knew Dany would win, and attain a fleet that would sail her back to Westeros.

ANI: I had to think about this one for a while, because there ere a lot of action sequences that blew me away this season. For me, it ultimately came down to two: the battle at the Tower of Joy and the Night King’s attack on the Three-Eyed Raven’s cave.

Interestingly, these two sequences had a lot in common. The cave battle happened after a long lead build-up over the course of the episode, one that involved a deep dive into the history of Westeros. Then Bran forfeited the cave’s protections with his foolish choices, and the White Walkers came down upon him and his companions. As for the fight at the Tower of Joy, one could argue that the lead-up to that moment had been coming since August 1st, 1996, when Ned Stark sat in a cell and remembered back to his sister and her dying words, “Promise me, Ned…” Certainly, the show had been building to this sequence throughout the previous episode, when Bran went into the past and saw his aunt in her youth.

Like the cave battle, part of the reason the Tower of Joy sequence was so thrilling was because it was rooted in the show’s own history. Also, while Game of Thrones has been hit or miss when it comes to fight choreography, the fight here was splendid. Yes, there have been great sword fighting sequences before, like during the Battle for Castle Black. But for each of those, there’s been a battle at the Water Gardens. To see the production finally nail a one-on-one fight sequence, and to nail it that hard, was just as satisfying as finally seeing the fight on screen at all.

As for the cave battle, it had many features, from the wights attacking from all sides, to magic grenades, to the loss of Summer (felled by winter) and the death of the Children of the Forest. But above all, it one thing the Tower of Joy sequence did not: the surprise ending. After all, the Tower of Joy fight happened in the past, and the past is already written, the ink already dry. Even if we didn’t know that Howland Reed stabbed Arthur Dayne in the back, we still knew that Arthur Dayne was killed.

But even though the episode The Door leaked ahead of airing, the twist ending—that the outcome was already cemented in the past as much as the outcome at the Tower of Joy fight was—came as a complete surprise to viewers when they saw it. Hodor’s survival was so assumed that people read the spoilers “Meera and Bran escape” and yet didn’t put together that meant he was going to die. His death had already been written just as Arthur Dayne’s was, and even longer ago.

COREY: Okay, so I’m going to say that this was the most action-packed season we have had yet. Between the Battle of the Bastards, the invasion of the Three Eyed Raven’s cave, the fight at the Tower of Joy, and the battle of Slaver’s Bay, it was a violent year. And while every action scene was well done, the one that stood out to me was the fight at the Tower of Joy.

There are two main reasons for this (three if you count all those awesome lightsaber videos that came out afterwards). First off, that scene was so well-choreographed that I had flashbacks to that epic duel between Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon Jinn, and Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace. (Sorry-not-sorry for all the Star Wars references). That was some serious sword play, and my only wish is that it had included Kingsguard knight Ser Oswell Whent, who was at this scene in the books.

That brings me to my second point. Book-readers like myself had been looking forward to seeing the fight at the Tower of Joy since Ned described it in very first book of the Song of Ice and Fire series, A Game of Thrones. Ser Arthur Dayne was remembered by many in the books as being the greatest knight to ever live, even by such notable warriors as Ser Barristan Selmy and Jaime Lannister. He was the Mohammed Ali or Bruce Lee of his time, and with such a lofty reputation, there was some worry that the character wouldn’t translate effectively to the screen.

So it was a joy to see Dayne legitimately wreck shop like no character before him. In the books Jaime has a line about Dayne being a painter who’s favorite color was red, and it was awesome to see such an artist at work, if only for a few brief moments.

RICHARD: It was a great season with a lot of great action sequences, but I also have to go with the obvious choice and nominate the monumental clash of armies in “Battle of the Bastards.” Although I had some issues with character action in the sequence, there is no denying the power of Miguel Sapochnik’s cinematic achievement. Sapochnik slowed and quickened the ebb and flow of the sequence with the deftness of a symphony conductor, allowing us to catch our breath between bloody assaults while also ratcheting up the tension. He also maintained a number of narrow-focus character threads through the brawl, which is an achievement in itself.

I’d also like to mention—I remember reading this somewhere—that the battle reinforced how brutal fighting in this era could be: the power of a barrage of arrows and the crushing force of sword blows, along with the psychological impact of the cavalry charge, made for the most violent hand-to-hand fighting imaginable. I wouldn’t argue with any of the other choices on this list because they all win big on their own terms. I’m choosing “Battle of the Bastards” for the win on pure cinematic action achievement and epic scale.

A note on the poll: the Battle of the Bastards was so massive and had so many high points that it seems a disservice to lump them all into one option, so we’ve broken it up a bit.

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Via http://winteriscoming.net/2016/08/05/small-council-what-was-the-best-action-from-game-of-thrones-season-6/