Ranking the episodes of Game of Thrones Season 6
By Dan Selcke
6. “Oathbreaker”
“Oathbreaker” has a lot of in-between scenes, more than most episodes. Some of them are enjoyable (Cersei crashing a Small Council meeting, Tommen meeting with the High Sparrow), some of them are harmless (Sam and Gilly on a boat, Daenerys arriving in Vaes Dothrak), and one is kinda painful (Tyrion trying to make conversation with Missandei and Grey Worm—I don’t know what tone Benioff and Weiss were going for here, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a mashup of boring and uncomfortable).
Luckily, “Oathbreaker” has some meatier stuff to go with all the sides, starting with Jon Snow. The best scene is the first, where Jon reacts to his resurrection. As an actor, Kit Harington has grown a lot over the course of the series, and as he looked down as his stab wound-riddled body, his eyes wide with shock and his breath short and ragged, I thought, “Yes, this is how someone who came back from the dead would act.” I’m still a little miffed he wasn’t given an Emmy for his trouble.
Having brought Jon Snow back to life, the show then had to make him a free agent. The final scene of “Oathbreaker”—where Jon quits the Night’s Watch—is nearly as important as the opening one. And once again, the cast and crew pull it off.
As in “The Red Woman,” Alliser Thorne makes a good showing. He killed Jon and accepts that he will be punished, but doesn’t plead for his life or rationalize his actions. “I fought,” he tells Jon from the gallows. “I lost. Now I rest. But you, Lord Snow, you’ll be fighting their battles forever.” Thorne’s dignity in the face of death makes his execution more than an exercise in righteous justice. It becomes a knotty scene about the weight of leadership, as Jon must kill not a lineup of mustache-twirling villains but his own brothers—men with good qualities who made mistakes—and a young boy caught up in something too big for him to fully understand. The scene succeeds not because Jon quits the Night’s Watch, but because it makes us understand why.
The other high point of the episode is the battle at the Tower of Joy. In a way, this scene is incomplete. Neither we nor Bran will learn what happened after Ned entered that tower until the finale. But who cares? Swordfights are awesome.
See?
I also love the clean, elegant way the show handles Arya’s return to the Faceless Man fold. Over the course of a couple of minutes, we see Arya greatly expand her skillset as she picks up points in quarterstaff-brawling, poison-making, and blind-fighting. The training montage is a time-tested cinematic technique, and “Oathbreaker” gives us a really good one.