Game of Thrones Screencap Breakdown: “Battle of the Bastards”

We go inside the “crush,” as we termed this sequence.

It’s a face-off with Smalljon Umber. In another fantasy series, this fight would happen as the armies stood back and watched and the winner would basically turn the tide of the battle and the good guy’s forces would win. Right?

And that may have been in the original script. But at this point in filming, the production found itself running out of time, and decided to go “off book” and improvise.

The result was far more realistic. The wildlings do exactly what they would do in this situation: they panic and start running for the body wall, not noticing they’re trampling their commander (who wasn’t really running things to begin with.)

You know those stories of people being killed when they were trampled by a panicking crowd? Yeah, that’s basically this.

Except that the wildlings can’t get over the body wall, so the trampling stops and Jon is basically just pinned by a crush of bodies.

Everyone remarks how this bit is about Jon being reborn, but what struck me is that he he looks like he’s afloat on a sea of humanity, bobbing along unable to move forward or backward.

Others are also floating on that sea.

But they’re not going to let that stop them from killing anyone, even if the only weapon they have is their teeth and the knowledge of where the big neck vein is. (It’s doubtful Tormund knows the words “internal jugular vein.”)

Next: The Horns