Game of Thrones: To the Reckless Go the Spoils

Every week for the sixth season of Game of Thrones, Christopher Orr, Spencer Kornhaber, and Lenika Cruz will be discussing new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners are being made available to critics in advance this year, we'll be posting our thoughts in installments.

Spencer Kornhaber: Go ahead, bask in relief at Winterfell returned to the Starks, Ramsay cast to the kennel, Daenerys slaying slavers, and all of Game of Thrones’s most compelling characters still breathing despite the demise of few-to-no-liners like Rickon and the giant Wun Wun. But don’t let the endorphins distract you from the grand lesson of this episode, which is that Jon Snow really and truly knows nothing.

The safest-seeming prediction for how the Battle of the Bastards would go was that the Stark coalition would fight to the verge of defeat before Littlefinger’s army would save them, allowing Sansa a moment of revenge on Ramsay Bolton. The one big counterargument was that such an outcome seemed, well, too predictable. Tonight, Melisandre was even heard equivocating like a Thrones blogger writing a preview post, telling Jon that he could die again. But as is typical lately, the show chose the most obvious route—then executed with cinematic verve and just enough suspense.

That suspense largely relied on Jon making like a typical Stark man by putting emotional displays of honor over practical concerns. A lot of planning went into this battle, involving chips on tables and furrowed brows and synonyms for “flanking.” The result was a big, clear strategy for how to reverse the odds: Let the Boltons make the first attack. Sansa pleaded with Jon to be aware that Ramsay would try to goad him into doing something stupid. Jon said he wouldn’t fall for it.

And yet fall for it he did, abandoning logic at the first sign of toying from Ramsay. Granted, it would have been difficult both morally and moralewise for him to do nothing as Rickon ran from Bolton arrows. But for him to then charge against the Boltons after Rickon’s death, spurring his army to give up its important defensive position, was madness. As it was then demonstrated, this mistake should have gotten him and all his men killed, Sansa raped and/or killed, and the North lost permanently. Salvation only came thanks to the sister who he’d ignored, calling upon her frenemy (frenemuncle?), the de factor leader of the Vale.

Big-budget fantasy battles are easy to come by in Hollywood these days, but this one did stand out by breaking up the hack-and-slash slog with a few concrete, memorable elements. The longbow is a pivotal invention in military history, and here we saw the advantage that its coordinated use gave the Bolton side—an advantage ensured by the fact that they were the ones being charged at and not vice versa. While the phalanx is more reminiscent of ancient Greece rather than the medieval Western Europe that Westeros most directly resembles (and here are helpful Reddit historians explaining why that is), its implementation tonight came as a surprise and created some very tense viewing. Jon drowning in bodies will go down as one of the squirmiest, most unsettling moments in Thrones history.

Part of that squirminess owed to a sense of danger: Thrones usually kills off characters who err in the manner that Jon did tonight. If he wasn’t going to be trampled to his doom during the main skirmish, his weird confrontation with Ramsay in the Winterfell courtyard seemed like it might have resulted in him joining Wun Wun as a sad, dead porcupine. After all, running into a hail of arrows instead of having your soldiers gang up on your last remaining opponent is some Oberyn-level hubris. But the Lord of Light or at least the gods of Thrones ratings needs Jon alive, plausibility be damned.

The warfare in Meereen was far less tense than at Winterfell because it felt like the culmination of all of Daenerys’s too-sudden conquests, but with even more video-game camera swoops. You could even say it was a hat-trick of her greatest hits: 1) dragons;  2) converting enemy forces with promises of freedom; 3) murdering/intimidating pompous emissaries.

The Lord of Light or at least the gods of Thrones ratings needs Jon alive, plausibility be damned.

Far more interesting were the conversations before and after battle. Tyrion admonishing Dany to avoid scorched-Essos tactics so as to not be like her father should only fuel online speculation that the Khaleesi may turn into a Mad Queen. But her exchange with Yara and Theon showed that she’s actively trying to avoid becoming a villain. It was among the more overtly feminist scenes that the show has ever provided, a satisfying depiction of two women trying to break with millennia of gender roles so as to also break with millennia of injustice. Yes, Yara represents a smaller fighting force than uncle Euron, but Euron would force Dany into another marriage while Yara, delightfully, is merely open to the idea of a gay royal wedding.

The women-power themes in the East were matched in the West by Sansa ensuring victory for her house and then telling her longtime tormentor that she’d erase his name. Will she make like Dany and use her clout to try and “break the wheel” of cruelty in the realm? Throwing Ramsay to the dogs doesn’t exactly speak to a merciful heart, but if anyone has earned the right to feed a human to animals, it’s her and this human and these animals. More telling will be how she chooses to use wield influence with Littlefinger. Tonight’s battle wiped out the Stark army almost entirely; if Baelish wanted to take formal control of the North, he could. Why shouldn’t he, really? He’d be a smarter ruler than Jon.

Chris and Lenika, you’ve written a lot about anticipating the death of Ramsay. How do you feel now that it’s happened?

Entries from Christopher Orr and Lenika Cruz to come.