Review Roundup: Season 6, Episode 9 “Battle of the Bastards”
“Battle of the Bastards” has finally arrived, and boy were there some reactions to it. As expected, pretty much every critic reacted positively to the spectacle. (Director Miguel Sapochnik has much to be proud of with his work on this show.) But the mechanics underneath were met with question marks and frustration, bringing to the fore some long-boiling criticisms about Season 6 as a whole.
These criticisms came largely through discussions about Ramsay’s death, and so it’s instructive to compare reactions to that event as a starting point. Here’s Laura Bogart at Salon, summarizing the “ding-dong, the witch is dead” camp:
"The actual Battle of the Bastards is a perfect example of the show giving its fans what they ask for—the good guys winning for once—with a heartrending complexity. It feels good to watch Jon Snow punch Ramsay Bolton into oblivion. And it feels really goddamn good to watch Sansa Stark stand on the other side of the cage as Ramsay’s hound takes that first bite out of his face[…]there’s a sense that the series is moving more deftly and confidentially into its final stretch of episodes, and that it is capable of making its fans happy without sacrificing the pathos that has distinguished it."
"Ramsay dies horribly, which was the whole point of making him so evil: so that the audience could feel good about enjoying his death. Mission accomplished, though finding pleasure in someone’s horrible death because they are the sort of person who takes pleasure in people’s horrible deaths is a pretty bizarro way to look at either justice or violence.[…]Sansa stares for a moment as the hounds rip him apart, and as she walks away to the sounds of shredding and screaming, a smile creeps to her lips. She might finally be back in Winterfell, but Sansa doesn’t seem much like a Stark here; indeed, if she resembles anyone in this moment, it isn’t Ned, or Littlefinger, or even Daenerys. It’s Cersei."
Alan Sepinwall at HitFix found himself emotionally unmoved by anything that happened at the battle; he mostly attributes this to Ramsay, and the way the character desensitized the audience to horrific things:
"Even with occasional attempts to show how growing up in Roose Bolton’s shadow — and without his name — shaped him into the monster we see before us, he was always a one-note monster: smarter, stronger, and just plain crueler than anyone who crossed his path, and without the kind of nuance that the series bestowed even upon Joffrey. So his death[…]never became something to celebrate. Ramsay had been a blight on the series for far too long, causing enormous suffering for its own sake.[…]the way the show had used him for five seasons rendered me incapable of feeling anything but relief that the episode hadn’t somehow ended with all the surviving Starks (including Bran and Arya) locked in the dungeons of Winterfell as Ramsay’s latest playthings."
The A.V. Club’s book-reader reviewer, Myles McNutt, addresses the mechanical issues involved, summarizing the problem with Rickon Stark’s death, which everyone else also noted as being largely plot-based:
"Rickon never had a place in the larger narrative, and so his place here feels arbitrary, and yet also functionally necessary in ways that speak to the emptiness of the battle itself. The storyline doesn’t work without Rickon, and yet Rickon’s presence adds nothing, creating a justification for a battle to mark the climax to Ramsay’s villain arc and yet doing nothing to make that battle more compelling. Ramsay’s evil is not escalated by his killing of Rickon: I’ve long been desensitized to Ramsay’s acts of torture and murder, and this just felt like more of the same."
Meanwhile, the Meereen battle was met with similar levels of ambivalence. Laura Bogart again reiterates her argument about “the hollowness of Dany’s arc this season”; Unsullied A.V. Club reviewer Brandon Nowalk had this to say about the contradictions in Dany’s storyline:
"What really makes Dany a hero isn’t legal but moral. She wants to make the world a better place than when she found it.[…]In short, Dany thinks we can all play nice without violently dominating each other. The problem is she wants to create such a world through violent domination. And so far, that’s worked out okay for her. Meanwhile, Tyrion’s stab at diplomacy only made the Slaver’s Bay quagmire worse. Is the only way to achieve the greater good to impose it with an iron will?"
This is essentially an echo of Laura Hudson’s argument from above: when the show has spent so much time telling you how to feel about something (Dany’s conquering; Ramsay’s sadism and toxic masculinity), is it really a surprise that we cheer on Dany and welcome Ramsay’s demise?
Alyssa Rosenberg at The Washington Post points out an important aspect of the Dany/Tyrion/Greyjoy scene, touching instinctively on why George R.R. Martin chooses the POVs that he does in the books:
"Dany, Yara, Theon and Tyrion aren’t united simply by the fact that they had rotten fathers. Dany and Yara are women. Tyrion and Theon both have disabilities. Their shared experiences of disparagement, cruelty and even torture have given them different perspectives on the consequences of power callously yielded. They’ve had to rely on their brains, their emotional insight, and their loyalty. “Game of Thrones” is not exactly a show that’s going to make the second-wave feminist argument that putting women, or members of any other marginalized group, in positions of authority will automatically change society from top to bottom. But as Dany learns to rule in Meereen and Sansa rises to power in Westeros, it’s certainly asking what might happen when people who were meant to be bartered as chattel start to broker their own deals."
Whatever the case, there was a general sense of relief at finally being able to leave Meereen behind.
The culmination of all this discussion was a review on Vanity Fair by Joanna Robinson titled “The Deceptively High Stakes of Season 6.” After running through the list of hollow deaths this season (ranging from the returning Season 3 characters to the high-profile actors like Max von Sydow, Ian McShane, and Essie Davis, Robinson addresses the issue of the resurrection/rebirth themes embedded in Season 6:
"Perhaps all this hollow-feeling carnage can be traced back to the resurrection of Jon Snow—which still feels like it has no enduring consequences in the world of Game of Thrones. We saw Jon go a bit feral as he nearly beat Ramsay to death, but there’s still no indication that he came back wrong.[…]Sandor Clegane also doesn’t die in the books, but don’t all these resurrections make death feel cheap in Westeros when once it was the show’s most famous calling card? Game of Thrones became so popular because anyone could die, especially your favorites. But that wasn’t the case tonight."
I’d like to formally dub this the “Death and Return of Superman” argument, because this is exactly what happened to death in comic books after that ridiculous early-’90s Superman plot. Whether or not this represents how you personally feel about this season is, of course, up to you. But it was fascinating to see how the pivotal penultimate episode of a Game of Thrones season pulled together a lot of underlying issues some critics were having with the season as a whole.