Book-Reader’s Recap—Game of Thrones, Episode 609—”Battle of the Bastards”

Note: This post is intended for those who have read the books in the Song of Ice and Fire series. As such, the post itself and the comments will contain spoilers. If you haven’t read the books yet, you can discuss this episode in our non-book reader (Unsullied) recap. Thanks!

Welcome to the Battle of the Bastards. Before we start in earnest, let’s just have a moment of appreciation for all the crew members who made this episode so memorable. We reported a lot on how much time was spent filming this particular hour, and it paid off.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, as “Battle of the Bastards” doesn’t begin anywhere near the titular battle. It begins in Meereen, which is having its own problems. The Masters of Yunkai, Astapor, and Volantis are attacking the city from the sea, and the episodes opens with a cool series of shots of a ball of pitch being put into a catapult, lit on fire, and launched into the air. War: it’s in the details.

Anyway, there is chaos in the city, as the pyramids are pelted with pitch and men consumed in fire leap off tall walls. Daenerys, newly arrived back at the Great Pyramid, looks over the scene with a face like a mother who’s just learned that her teenager took the car keys and drove her Porsche into a lake. Tyrion’s got some ‘splaining to do.

All things considered, he does a good job, pointing out that the Masters are attacking Meereen because he’s done a great job of restoring it back to health, and the existence of a prosperous city in Slaver’s Bay that doesn’t have slavery is an embarrassment to them. Don’t be fooled by the fact that Tyrion’s stammering like a kid who was just found locking his sister in the washing machine—he has some good points here, although it still doesn’t explain how no one heard about the Masters’ armada approaching until it was right at the walls.

Daenerys accepts his explanation, and then these two once again prove why they’re a good match. Dany wants to crucify the Masters, set their fleets on fire, and destroy their cities utterly. That’s strong leadership, but Tyrion preaches restraint: he thinks they should make an example of a few of the Masters so the others won’t try anything, and to use the ships to sail back to Westeros. He also reminds her that Aerys Targaryen was planning to burn King’s Landing to the ground (look at the Odds and Ends section for some thought on that), and dissuades her from following in the footsteps of the Mad King.

She listens, and meets the Masters on a bluff above Meereen. It’s the same three guys Tyrion met with back in “Book of the Stranger”—a guy from Astapor, a guy from Yunkai (whom we saw back in Season 3), and a guy from Volantis. They want Daenerys to pack up and leave, sans her Unsullied slave army and Missandei. Also, they’re gonna kill Rhaegal and Viserion. Uh-huh. Obviously, they haven’t caught wind of the fact that Dany now has a huge Dothraki horde behind her or that she’s gained control over Drogon, but she’s about to remind them.

Drogon swoops in on the meeting, and as usual, he looks freaking tremendous. I think he looks a lot better than he did last year. Did they get a new dragon guy?

Anyway, Dany mounts her favorite child (every mother has one), and flies off toward the Masters’ armada. Rhaegal and Viserion, hearing Drogon’s call, bust themselves out of their dungeon without breaking a sweat, and…yeah, that’s one way to do it. I would’ve liked some version of Quentyn Martell’s story to have made it onscreen (maybe the show could have sent the Sand Snakes or Areo Hotah in his place?), but at the end of the day, his job was to spend 30 chapters traveling to Meereen and then die. The producers cut right through his function here, but still, something would have been nice.

Drogon leads Rhaegal and Viserion into the air. They seem to be following him, and since he follows Daenerys, she essentially has control over all three dragons now. Also, on the ground near the entrance of Meereen, some Sons of the Harpy are killing…some people. I honestly don’t know who they are or why they’d be hanging out here—maybe they’re Meereenese citizens trying to flee the city while it’s under attack? Yeah, let’s go with that.

Anyway, the point of this little skirmish is to show Dany’s Dothraki horde rounding a corner and bearing down on the Sons of the Harpy like a lawnmower on a bunch of sorry-ass blades of grass. Daario is at the head of the charge. He chops off a head. Daario helped.

But the real show is out in the bay, where Dany leads her dragons right into the heart of the armada and lights one of the boats afire with a simple “Dracarys.” And let that be a lesson to the rest of you boats!

I’m burning through this stuff pretty quick, but most of it is very visual. Just take it on faith that the dragons look remarkable.

Back on the bluff, Grey Worm tells the slave soldiers guarding the three Masters to leave or get wasted, and they can’t get away fast enough. The show hasn’t gone into this, but in the books it’s established that, apart from the Unsullied, the slave soldiers in this region are pretty useless and don’t have much love for the Masters, so I can buy that they’d run at the first sign of trouble.

Left alone, the Masters face down Tyrion, who thanks them for the ships and delivers some bad news: because they violated the pact they made in “Book of the Stranger,” one of them has to die. The Masters from Yunkai and Volantis offer up the guy from Astapor as tribute, since he’s lowborn. (I’m assuming the lowborn guy is from Astapor, since Dany would have killed all the proper Astapori Masters during her visit there in Season 3.) Grey Worm, perhaps acting according to plan or perhaps drawing on some of that rage he’s been getting back in touch with for the last three seasons, kills the other two instead. Twist!

Tyrion implores the remaining Master to tell people what he saw here. “Remind them what happened when Daenerys Stormborn and her dragons came to Meereen.” I have doubts as to whether that’ll be enough to stop future uprisings, but you gotta do you can.

Later (not sure how much later, but probably after the bay was cleared of hostiles), Daenerys receives Theon and Yara in her throne room. Tyrion rags on Theon for cracking wise about his height the last time they met at Winterfell, but if you actually watch their last meeting, Tyrion is digging into Theon far more than the other way around. But then again, the last thing Tyrion heard about Theon was that he’d killed Bran and Rickon, so I can forgive him for getting snippy with a self-alleged child-murdurer.

Daenerys, who’s wearing a lovely new gown of rich blue-grey, interrupts the awkwardness with some numbers: Yara and Theon brought 100 ships to Meereen. Together with the Masters’ fleet, that should be enough to get Dany’s army back to Westeros…at some point in Season 7. In return, the Greyjoy siblings want Dany to support’s Yara’s claim to the Salt Throne (sorry to be that guy, but I still don’t see why they changed it from Seastone Chair) over Euron, and to grant the Iron Islands independence.

Dany is willing to go along with the plan. The Dragon Queen seems tickled that Yara, and not Theon, wants to rule the Iron Islands. In fact, Yara and Dany almost seem to be flirting, and if the internet was willing to turn Brienne and Tormund’s brief scenes together into a romance for the ages, I don’t see why it can’t run with this.

Dany’s support of Yara’s claim comes with a price, though: she wants the Ironborn to stop “reaving, roving, raiding, or raping.” Nicely alliterated, Dany.  Yara agrees, hesitantly, and the two shake…forearms? What’s wrong with hands?

This was a cool scene, and I’ve really enjoyed Yara this year. I hope she plays a sizable part going forward.

Okay, let’s get to the meat of the episode. We’re in the North, on an eerily misty day, at a parley between Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton. Sansa’s with Jon, despite his pandering about her not having to be there. The reunion between the new marrieds is a tense one. “My beloved wife,” Ramsay says to Sansa. “I’ve missed you terribly.” Sansa looks like she wants to smack his mouth clean off his face, as do we all, including little Lyanna Mormont, who has come to the parley riding a little horse and scowling. Lyanna for president.

Given how badly Jon is outgunned, Ramsay offers what actually sound like decent terms, if only we didn’t know how treacherous he is. He wants Jon to bend the knee, surrender his army, and hand over Sansa. In return, he’ll pardon everyone, Jon for abandoning the Night’s Watch and the lords for betraying the Boltons. He doesn’t say what he’ll do the wildlings, but I think we can all guess.

Then Ramsay gives the funniest line of the night: “I am a man of mercy.” That would have killed at Tyrion’s little joke roundtable last week. Jon tries a different tack: he challenges Ramsay to single combat, but Ramsay points out that he’d be stupid to accept, since there’s no guarantee Ramsay would beat Jon in a one-on-one fight but almost every guarantee that he would on the battlefield. Ramsay brings up Rickon, his bargaining chip, and when Sansa asks him for proof that Rickon is really around, Smalljon Umber tosses Shaggydog’s severed head onto the ground. Wow, that head is remarkably well-preserved. I mean, the fur is still on it! Wouldn’t an enormous direwolf skull have done?

Speaking of direwolves, where was Ghost this whole time? Did you spend all the CGI money on Wun Wun or something, show?

Ramsay starts back into his sales pitch, but Sansa interrupts him with the line of the night: “You’re going to die tomorrow, Lord Bolton. Sleep well.” Then she drops the mic and rides off. There seems little chance of parlay after that, so Ramsay makes some parting threats about feeding Jon and friends to his hounds (he’s been starving them for a week in preparation for these new visitors) and rides back to Winterfell as the drums pound menacingly.

Later, Jon, Davos, Tormund, and Sansa talk strategy. Davos points out that Ramsay will meet them on the field of battle, inadvisable as that may be, because he knows that “the North is watching,” and that the other Houses won’t follow him if they sense weakness. Tormund is scared of Ramsay’s cavalry, but Jon makes a well-formulated plan to dig trenches on either side of his army to nullify the effect of Ramsay’s mounted soldiers. So long as Jon can goad Ramsay into charging first, they stand a chance. What a good plan, Jon! I hope you don’t crap all over it later!

Sansa, who spent much of last season getting to know Ramsay in the most uncomfortable circumstances imaginable, seems to sense trouble in the air. After the others have left, she advises Jon that Ramsay is the one who knows how to push people’s buttons, not him. She also says, basically, that Rickon is a lost cause—as a trueborn male heir to the Stark name, he represents a threat to Ramsay’s dynasty, a threat Ramsay won’t suffer to live. “Just don’t do what he wants you to do,” she tells Jon. The first time I watched this, I was sort of with Jon that Sansa’s advice didn’t seem actionable, but considering how on the money she was about everything, I should have given her more credence.

Sansa also brings up what she said in “The Broken Man”: that they shouldn’t have attacked Winterfell until they had a larger force. She doesn’t mention that, with Littlefinger’s help, she may have a larger force in her back pocket. Even at this point, she doesn’t fully trust Jon. “No one can protect me,” she says when Jon promises to keep her safe from Ramsay. “No one can protect anyone.” Sansa 2.0 is a cynic.

Outside, Tormund and Davos chat about Mance Rayder and Stannis, their lost kings. The show gets in its second “Tormund is dumb” joke of the night when the wildling misinterprets Davos’ comment about Stannis having “demons in his skull whispering foul things.” Earlier, in the meeting, the show made much of him not knowing what a pincer attack was. I think we could have done without either of these. The two philosophize a little more about the wisdom of following kings (“Jon Snow’s not a king,” Tormund says), before Davos walks off to think, his pre-battle tradition. He also mentions “shitting my guts out,” because this is Game of Thrones and it couldn’t leave well enough alone.

Elsewhere, Jon wanders into a tent occupied by Melisandre, who gets her first lines since “Book of the Stranger.” After a bit of banter, Jon orders Melisandre not to resurrect him if he dies tomorrow. She points out that she takes her orders from the Lord of Light, not Jon Snow, but even though she’s technically going over his head here, this is still very much Melisandre 2.0: chagrinned, humbled, and not nearly as certain of herself as she used to be. “I have no power,” she says. “Only what he gives me and he gave me you.” Even now, neither of them are quite sure why the Lord did that, but there’s little to do but go on.

Outside camp, Davos is on his walk—no shitting as of yet. He stumbles upon the remains of Shireen’s pyre from “Dance of the Dragons” and finds the little stag he carved for her. He picks it up and slowly realizes what must have happened, as a horn blows from Winterfell and a distant fire lights up the night. It’s a portentous, haunting moment:

And now for the battle proper. This is where “Battle of the Bastards” stops being a normal episode of Game of Thrones and becomes David Benioff and Dan Weiss’ special 2015 project. You can tell that they put a ton of effort into this.

The Bolton and Stark armies are arrayed at opposite ends of a wide field. So many banners. So many extras. So many pregnant silences. Jon rides to the front of the line and looks out across the landscape: by way of greeting, Ramsay has hung a bunch of flayed corpses upside-down on crosses and set them on fire. So far, he’s definitely winning the mental Battle of the Bastards.

And he’s got more mind games to play. Between other striking shots of the armies (the Bolton shields framed one over the other make for a splendidly morbid image), Ramsay drags out Rickon Stark, his hands tied together. He marches him out where Jon can see, raises a knife high…and cuts the bonds on the boy’s wrists. “Do you like games, little man?” he asks Rickon—rhetorically, I’m sure. “Let’s play a game.”

Ramsay wants Rickon to run across the field of battle to Jon and safety. Rickon, who hasn’t had a line all season, bounds across the field of war as Ramsay pelts him with arrows from back behind the safety of the Bolton line. Jon, ignoring all his carefully laid plans, gallops off to save his half-brother, as Ramsay surely hoped he would. Much as I loathe him, I gotta give Ramsay credit here. Sansa was 100% right: he’s much better at mind games than Jon is, and Jon, being his father’s son, has to do the heroic, stupid thing even if it means making himself vulnerable.

The wide shots of Jon and Rickon rushing towards each other establish a great sense of space. Thanks to spoilers, I knew this scene was coming, but it was still incredibly tense, especially after Ramsay’s third arrow, which the score sets up as a big deal, misses. But the fourth arrows creeps up out of nowhere and takes Rickon in the heart. He falls over dead. It’s awful.

Jon is filled with righteous anger. We are filled with righteous anger, and even though I know it’s suicide, I get where Jon is coming from when he charges headlong into the enemy lines, his men at his back. That’s the brilliance of this scene; even though what Jon is doing is stupid, I understand and even sympathize with him, which is infinitely better than a character who acts dumb because the plot demands it.

Onto the breach go Jon and his friends. There are rapturous, thundering shots of horses’ hooves hitting the ground, and of mounted men lowering their spears as they charge into battle. It’s just epic filmmaking—everyone on the Game of Thrones team deserves a thousand fruit baskets for making this sequence feel big as can be.

Bolton arrows fly through the air. They miss Jon, but they get his horse, and he tumbles off, battered but alive. Ramsay orders his cavalry forward, and there’s a stirring moment when Jon realizes he’s fallen into Ramsay’s trap and prepares to face down the oncoming wall of heavy horse, Longclaw in hand. And then there’s a bracing moment where his own cavalry charges up behind him and meets Ramsay’s in an explosion of dirt, blood, and flesh. The contrast is magnificent. That’s it—I’m finding out where Miguel Sapochnik lives and sending him a fruit basket. I suggest you all do the same.

And then we have the money shot: an unbroken long take of Jon Snow navigating the chaotic field of battle. He knocks dudes off horses, he slices out intestines, he narrowly avoids getting hit by about two dozen arrows, he tries to talk to a guy who takes an arrow in the face before he can speak two words, he seethes, he gets back into it, he grimaces and yells and stabs as the dead pile up around him, while Ramsay bellows at his archers to rain death from above. Good. God. My blood’s getting so hot it’s going to boil out through my skin.

The combatants are dying so fast and furious that there’s a wall of dead in the middle of the field. (As Dan Weiss mentions in the Inside the Episode feature, piles of corpses were known to form battlefield obstacles during the Civil War.) The reserves choose this moment to join the fray. Davos and company charge from one end while Smalljon Umber charges from the other.

Tormund and his division, complete with Wun Wun, finally make it to Jon’s location, and we’re happy to see them for two seconds before Ramsay unveils his next trap: he orders his infantry soldiers, all of whom are equipped with spears and large shields, to surround the Stark forces on three sides, with the wall of corpses providing a fourth. For the record, I think this was Ramsay’s plan all along, since he was firing arrows into the tumult without caring whom they hit—he just wanted to make bodies. Man, he thought this through.

The episode deploys terrifying image #28 as Ramsay’s shield wall slowly advances on Team Stark, the Bolton soldiers grunting out war cries as they skewer anyone in stabbing range. It’s like Jon’s army is being advanced upon by a line of blue-and-red robots. The tone of the battle changes here, from “war is chaos” to “war is a waking nightmare.”

Team Stark is pressed backwards towards the wall of corpses as the Umbers climb over it for some close-quarters fighting. Jon, now caked in blood and mud, takes down randos as Tormund and the wildlings hurl themselves against the shield wall—Wun Wun, who can pick up Bolton soldiers and tear them in two, is a big help here. All the while, Ramsay watches the hell he’s made from a distance.

As the Bolton men advance and the bodies mount, the show turns up the horror imagery. A man who’s lost both legs tries to pull himself up the corpse pile. Retreating wildlings tumble over a dead horse. Jon is knocked down, and suddenly, trampling seems like more of a danger than stabbing. The show plays Jon’s experience like a drowning. He’s pulled under the tide of bodies, his vision dappled with the sight of people scrambling over him, his hearing muffled, his breath ragged. It’s suffocating, and when Jon finally emerges from the press of bodies to breathe the air, the camera pulls out to show him lost in a dirty sea of dead and dying men. It’s hell on earth.

What’s great about this sequence is that it has a point of view. Yes, it’s very impressive technically, but it, and the episode in general, has something to say about the futile, horrifying nature of war. We can complain about the events of the episode being predictable, but I think it’s better to focus on how forcefully and vividly those events are depicted. “Battle of the Bastards” has earned that.

Anyway, just as all seems lost, a horn blows in the distance. Tormund, engaged in a mano-a-mano with the Smalljon, gets the better of his opponent, Ramsay looks to the side, and an Arryn banner flaps in the breeze.

Gandalf

Littlefinger has come to save Jon and his army.

Or, more accurately, Sansa and Littlefinger have come to save Jon and his army. She sits beside Littlefinger as the Knights of the Vale charge into the rear of the Bolton shield wall, and we wonder what she was doing while Jon and company were getting their asses handed to them.

Finally given some breathing room, Jon glares at a gobsmacked Ramsay, who retreats. Covered in the filth of battle, Jon looks animalistic as he, Wun Wun, and Tormund follow Ramsay back to Winterfell.

Once inside the castle walls, Ramsay starts to hunker in for a siege, but Wun Wun is not obliging. He starts pounding on the gate as only a giant can, and despite Ramsay’s men filling him full of arrows, he breaks through and collapses in the courtyard. Jon and the wildlings spill in after him, and the battle would seem to be over when Wun Wun takes one final arrow from Ramsay, right in the eye. The last of the giants falls over dead.

Ramsay, sounding pretty smarmy for a guy in his position, now takes Jon up on his earlier offer of single combat, and there’s an exciting little sequence when Jon advances on Ramsay, who lodges arrow after arrow in a Mormont shield Jon picks up off the ground. Jon, his eyes wild, reaches Ramsay, and proceeds to beat him half to death with his bare hands. It’s gotta be cathartic for a lot of viewers.

But Jon stops short of actually killing Ramsay when he sees Sansa. As Weiss says in the Inside the Episode video, Jon knows that Ramsay is ultimately Sansa’s to finish.

Next, we get a series of quick aftermath scenes, which I’m thankful for. I didn’t like when “The Watchers on the Wall” ended on a cliffhanger as Jon went out to meet Mance Rayder. “Battle of the Bastards” actually gives us some resolution. The Bolton banners come down off Winterfell’s walls and the Stark banners go up. Melisandre walks the castle ramparts (as she predicted she would back in “The Gift”), and Davos turns Shireen’s carved stag over in his hands, contemplating revenge. In the courtyard, Jon orders that Rickon’s body be buried beneath Winterfell, “next to my father.” Sansa asks Jon where he put Ramsay, which leads us to the final scene of the episode.

It’s dark out, so some time has passed. Ramsay wakes up tied to a chair in the kennels, the same place where Fat Walda and her son were eaten by dogs earlier this year. Sansa stands outside, behind iron bars. I’m not exactly sure how Sansa arranged all this—surely some people helped her with the supervillain set-up. In any case, Ramsay seems to know he’s done for, but tries to get some final digs in at his wife before he joins his father in a very special pit in hell. “You can’t kill me,” he says. “I’m part of you now.” That line strikes me as cheesy, but it does set up Sansa for a nice takedown. “Your words will disappear. Your house will disappear. Your name will disappear. All memory of you will disappear.” Those are fighting parting words.

As it was destined to be, Sansa has arranged for Ramsay to be eaten alive by his own hounds, the ones he was starving in anticipation of battle. It’s ironic, if a bit predictable, and I wonder why the hounds didn’t come out of their cages and eat him before Ramsay awoke. Also, while the special effects in this episode were spectacular, the one where the hound takes a bite out of Ramsay’s face looks a bit off. The scene is creepy and all, but there are a few niggles that are bugging me.

Anyway, Ramsay is eaten. What a fun little sentence. Sansa walks off, and smiles just a little bit. Vengeance is hers.

Odds and Ends

Jaime Lannister, that gossip. Unless I’m reading them very, very wrong, in the books, Tyrion did not know about the Mad King’s plan to burn down King’s Landing—he was perplexed when he found caches of wildfire under the city in A Clash of Kings. The fact that Jaime keeps the Mad King’s plan, and his secret heroism, to himself is what makes it weigh so heavily on him, and why his bathtub confession to Brienne is such a huge moment.

Now, considering how close the brothers were, I can buy that Jaime told Tyrion about the Mad King’s plan at some point. Still, this puts past scenes in a different context, and makes Jaime’s insistence that he’ll kill Tyrion the next time he sees him more meaningful.

Also, on a plot level, Tyrion mentions that some caches of wildfire were placed under the Sept of Baelor. That’s where Cersei’s trial will be in the finale. Also recall that Qyburn was investigating a mysterious rumor last episode. They seem to want us to take one and one and make two here.

And now, a Father’s Day message from Game of Thrones. The scene between Yara, Daenerys, Tyrion, and Theon was unexpectedly fun, and contained the closest thing to a Father’s Day message we could hope for when Dany pointed out that everyone in the room had a terrible dad. “They left the world worse than they found it…We’re going to leave the world better than we found it.” Well, wishful thinking never hurt anyone.

Too soon, Game of Thrones! This episode was chockablock with memorable images. I mentioned a bunch in the write-up, but some others deserve singling out.

• Oh, dear god, that shot where Rickon’s dead body was pelted with arrows, Way too soon, show!
• I loved any shot during the battle where we saw the placid, blue sky above. That’s a great contrast—this is a life or death situation for our characters, but in most places in the world, it’s a lovely day.
• Let’s talk more about that unbroken long take. It reminded me a bit of a similar shot from “Hardhome,” where Jon had to fight his way through wights to get to a hut where he left a cache of dragonglass daggers. That shot was more useful narratively, since it followed Jon as he battled his way from point A to point B, but this one was more important thematically, since it showed what a clusterfuck medieval warfare was.

Score! I don’t have the vocabulary to adequately state why, but Ramin Djawadi’s score helped enormously to make “Battle of the Bastards” feel as momentous as it did. Kudos, sir.