Sunday night’s episode of Game of Thrones finally gave us the big battle scene we’ve been waiting for all season. In a sense it gave us two. The first was Dany’s burning of the slaver ships, though it was rather quick and fiery and the bad guys didn’t stand a chance.
The second battle was the titular “Battle of the Bastards,” an oddly fitting episode for Father’s Day. It also marked a very fitting end for one particular villain who long ago wore out his welcome on the show: Ramsay Bolton, torturer of men and women, murderer of fathers and babies and helpless innocents, and all around wicked bastard.
We’ll start here, on the field, where Jon Snow has amassed his small army.
Across the distance is Ramsay’s much larger force, with traitorous Umbers in tow. None of the lords who swore to fight on Ramsay’s side turned out to be pulling a trick, as many fans had theorized and hoped. For reasons I still can’t quite understand, they went and fought and died for the Boltons, even while Ramsay himself stayed out of the fray. They watched as Ramsay killed Rickon Stark, the heir of Winterfell, in cold blood and did nothing. What pathetic, ridiculous wastes of life these northerners turned out to be. Good riddance to each of them as well, dead in heaping mounds on the field.
The Battle for Winterfell
As far as battles go, this was a pretty good one, though it was puzzling at times. Ramsay easily baits Jon Snow into riding forth alone to save Rickon. He almost reaches him, too, though Ramsay’s misses were all for show. He’s a masterful hunter and archer and could have killed Rickon at any point. Still, Rickon should have run side to side, or made for one of the burning crosses on the field, where he could have hidden at the very least. Alas, poor Rickon is dead. Like Osha, he was only brought back to die.
This is how many dead Starks now? Eddard. Catelyn. Robb. Rickon. Four. We have just Sansa, Arya, and Bran left. And Jon Snow. When King Robert rode to Winterfell, he had no way of knowing his arrival would spell the end for half his friend’s family. Of course, it was Littlefinger who, in so many ways, arranged all this misery. It was he who convinced Lady Lysa Arryn to kill her husband, forcing a vacancy in the King’s Hand position. And it was Littlefinger who betrayed Ned, as well, and who orchestrated all number of other plots to sew chaos and increase his power.
And now it is Littlefinger who shows up to turn the tide against the wicked Boltons and save the day at the last minute. We’ll get back to that in a second.
The battle itself was as brutal as anything we’ve seen yet in the show. It would have fit nicely in Braveheart, actually. Ramsay’s tactics are ruthless and brilliant, of course. He takes a page from Edward Longshanks and has his archers fire on friend and foe indiscriminately, because it really doesn’t matter to him. He has men to spare. (You might think such a tactic would finally convince Lord Umber not to race into battle, but such is not the case. Oh well.)
As Jon’s forces are decimated, the Boltons surround them, circling them inside a shield wall, with their backs pressed to the massive mound of bodies. They have tall shields and long-spears, which they use in Roman-style formation—something we haven’t seen in any previous battle in Westeros that I can recall. I admit to being a bit annoyed by this entire scene. It’s just another example of Ramsay doing everything perfectly. He was the one to ruin Stannis’s attack by stealth attack and fire last season. He’s also a military tactical genius, apparently, deploying strategies nobody else in the Seven Kingdoms has thought of. I’m also annoyed that the Boltons have so many men. It seems unrealistic that they’d have so many after their many battles, even with the other northern houses pledging their swords.
No matter. Sansa brings the knights of the Vale in at the last moment. Her brother is lucky to be alive at this point. Jon Snow has almost been shot by arrows, crushed under a horse, stampeded by heavy cavalry, sliced and diced a hundred different ways, and crushed under a mob of wildlings and soldiers trying to escape the massacre. Maybe Sansa should have introduced the knights of the Vale a tiny bit sooner, or let Jon know that she had them as an option, or something.
Earlier, in camp, she complains that Jon didn’t let her in on the battle plans. This would have been a good time to tell him about Littlefinger, and to at least bring that option to the table. They could have planned accordingly, instead of nearly being butchered to a man. I don’t understand why she didn’t do that, if she was planning to bring them anyways. I don’t understand why she had to complain about not being included in the conversation when she was standing right there and could have offered up her thoughts at any time. Come on Sansa, don’t be like Catelyn. Be smart and communicate!
Thankfully, the only casualties that weren’t unnamed soldiers and wildings were the last giant (no!!!) and young Rickon Stark. Tormund very nearly dies, but decides to rip out Umber’s throat with his teeth instead. Nice move. Everybody almost dies, but nobody of any real consequence outside of Rickon (whose importance to the story has been negligible for a long time now) meets their maker—on the Stark side, at least.
Good riddance, Ramsay.
Ramsay Bolton is dead. Good riddance. (Credit: HBO)
Ramsay is fed to the hounds, which is fitting. It’s also wonderful
because he’s finally taken off his guard for once. His composure is
shaken. Instead of going down with a maniacal grin on his face, his last
words are to a dog, ordering him unsuccessfully to get down. The dog
rips his face off instead. “They were loyal,” Sansa tells Ramsay before
he dies. “Now they’re starving.”I’m glad to see Ramsay go. He was too perfect a villain. In a sea of grey, the bastard of Bolton was the darkest jet black. While some characters are wicked but human—many of the Lannisters, for instance—Ramsay was merely vile. Actor Iwar Rheon did a terrific job in the role, and he was delightfully vile at times, but he was simply too good at everything he tried. He was the Mary Sue of bad guys, and it got old sometime a season or two back. I’m glad he’s dead, and that Jon won, and that we can move on to other, more interesting villains, like Littlefinger and the High Sparrow.
Oh, and Melisandre. She’s not necessarily a bad guy, but she did convince Stannis to burn a bunch of people, including his own daughter. Davos discovers the truth of this finally, on his walk outside of camp. He comes across her pyre, and finds the little stag he carved for her there in the ashes. It looks like next week there will be some confrontation between him and the Red Lady at last.
All told, this was not as great a battle episode as Hardhome was last season, but it was still a pretty intense battle. I guessed the knights of the Vale would show up to save them, so it wasn’t exactly an unpredictable episode, but I was actually really worried that they were going to kill off Tormund. A small part of me thought maybe they’d go full shock value and just kill Jon again, too. If Beric Dondarrion can keep coming back, so can Jon.
In the end, thankfully the good guys won. And the bad guys won, too, if you count Littlefinger as a victor—which, of course, he was. Now he’ll want to marry Sansa, of course, and become Lord of Winterfell himself. Then he’ll control the Vale and the North. I’m a bit worried about this, since he has pretty much all the fighting men at Winterfell right now. If she denies him, what sort of pressure could he apply?
For now, though, let’s take a moment to celebrate. House Bolton has fallen. As we fly up, up, high above Winterfell we can see the flayed man banners falling, the direwolf banners once more hanging from the castle’s walls. We’ll let the inhabitants of the castle take a breath, however brief, and enjoy the victory.
We’ll fly to the only other location seen in tonight’s penultimate episode:
Meereen
Three very important things happen in Meereen.
Number One
The most obvious is that Dany frees her dragons and rides over the slaver fleet, burning some of the ships and putting a very quick end to the assault on the city. Apparently many ships remain unscathed by the dragon fire, which is good since they’ll need them to get to Westeros—if, of course, that’s what they ever intend on actually doing.
Probably the best thing about all of this is just how glorious the dragons were, and especially Drogon. The CGI has only improved over the years, and the dragons have never looked so good as they did tonight. As Dany burns the ships, you can’t help but marvel at just how incredible it all looks. HBO has spared no expense, it would seem, and good thing, too.
With the enemy defeated, the overly confident slave masters find themselves in a much more precarious position. They’d come to negotiate the surrender of Meereen, making all sorts of outrageous demands. Dany would have to leave on foot. She’d leave the Unsullied and Missandei to be sold back into slavery. And her dragons would be butchered. I guess they didn’t realize Drogon was out and about. Sort of a minor detail.
Tyrion tells them that one of the three Great Masters would have to die, so two of the men choose the third. Grey Worm walks up, and the man falls to his knees begging for mercy. So Grey Worm just takes his knife and cuts both the standing mens’ throats in one fell swoop. Double Kill! I laughed out loud. It wasn’t that I didn’t expect a twist. I just didn’t expect it to be so badass.
Oh, and the Dothraki show up and ride roughshod into Meereen to kill the Sons of the Harpy on the ground. I’m sure a horde of horse lords in the streets of Meereen will be a totally okay thing for the city and won’t cause any problems whatsoever.
Credit HBO
The second most important thing that happens takes place just before the parlay and swift defeat of the Masters. Daenerys tells Tyrion her plans. She’s going to kill all the masters and burn their cities to the ground, returning the ancient metropolis’s to the dirt.
This is when Tyrion tells her the truth about her father. He tells her about the wild fire, and the Mad King’s orders to burn King’s Landing and all its people to the ground.
“This is entirely different,” she shoots back. But Tyrion reminds her that she’s talking about burning entire cities to the ground. It’s not so different at all. It’s a good reminder to the increasingly ruthless young Targaryen. If she has any of her father’s madness, I could see things going very badly for the people of Westeros when she finally arrives there.
Number Three (already!)
The third important thing involves teleportation.
You see, Theon and Yara Greyjoy must have teleported to reach Meereen this quickly. Either that or the show’s timeline is just wacky and nonsensical. Meereen is literally on the other side of the world from the Iron Islands. The Greyjoys would have needed to sail south from the Iron Islands (which are north and west of King’s Landing) all the way past Dorne, then around the southern spread of the continent and across the narrow sea. At this point, they would still be about that entire distance all over again away from Meereen. They’d need to sail hundreds more miles just to reach Old Valyria before they were even able to enter Slaver’s Bay. It’s a jaw dropping distance.
That the show has taken to just teleporting everyone everywhere speaks to its need to speed things up and just get the story over with, which is a shame. Littlefinger and his army can teleport from the Vale to the North with no issues. I guess Lord Frey didn’t mind letting them past the Twins without a fight. Brienne was able to teleport to Riverrun from the North even faster than Jaime was able to teleport from King’s Landing to Casterly Rock (where one assumes the army is, or else why haven’t the Lannisters simply used those seven thousand men to stomp the High Sparrow’s head in?) to Riverrun. I could go on. The point is, the show has done away with any semblance of travel, and travel is a hugely important part of what made this show to begin with.
Tyrion’s travels and trials in Westeros introduced us to Bronn and to the mad Lysa Arryn, and helped us understand who Tyrion is and how he deals with tough situations. Jaime and Brienne traveling from Riverrun to King’s Landing resulted in Jaime getting his hand cut off, and in his first true acts of selflessness and valor. Even just the journey from Winterfell to King’s Landing in the very beginning of the show was crucial to our understanding of the world and its characters. On this road, Sansa’s direwolf was killed and Arya’s fled (never to be seen again.) Joffrey revealed just how much of a human piece of dung he truly was, and we got our first glimpse of the cruel Hound. We learned so much on that road.
But those roads no longer exist in this show, because everybody just fast travels everywhere and it doesn’t matter how distant anyone is from anywhere, they’ll show up in the next episode without a doubt or a scratch.
In any case, Theon and Yara make a deal with Daenerys. They’ll give her their ships so long as she helps them against Euron and gives them back the Iron Islands. Dany, in return, wants them to stop reeving and raiding and raping, which Yara agrees to.
The conversation is pretty good, though I think all of this would be far more interesting if we knew Euron had a dragon horn that could control dragons. Oh well, that’s been cut. Now Dany and her ships will teleport to Westeros, I guess, and her huge army of barbarians and dragons will totally upset whatever sort of political dynamic was at play there. I’m still not sure how they’re supposed to handle any of this. Maybe a big war with the Iron Fleet will decrease her numbers? Though she could simply burn Euron’s ships with her dragons.
I did like how each of the characters in the throne room had terrible fathers. Tywin Lannister was a terrible father to Tyrion, and a power-hungry, brutal, cold opportunistic man. Aerys Targaryen was far worse, still. And Balon Greyjoy was just a miserable old bastard. Dany agrees that all their fathers were terrible, but unlike them she wants to make the world a better place. My question is whether she will, or whether her horde will make things far worse. Of course, perhaps even that will be worthwhile so long as her dragons can stop the White Walkers.
An odd episode for Father’s Day with all this talk of wicked fathers and bastards and the like. They should have tossed in a Sam scene with his loving dad just to round things out.
Still, a very good, action-packed episode if you just look past teleportation and some weird sibling dynamics up in the North.
What did you think?
 Sunday night’s episode of Game of Thrones finally gave us the big battle scene w...){kind=link}
0 comments:
Post a Comment