There are several Game of Thrones episodes that are often discussed when it comes to the subject of which is the best installment of the HBO show. However, one of them comes up more often than most, and while I agree it is Game of Thrones' finest effort, it still lacks something that made many of its competitors so especially memorable. What it lacks doesn't particularly make it a worse episode — it's that good — but its absence is impossible to simply ignore.
Game of Thrones season 6, Episode 9, "Battle of the Bastards," saw an incredibly cinematic approach to documenting Kit Harington's Jon Snow as he leads the effort to take back Winterfell from the Boltons. With a reported budget of somewhere around $11 million, "Battle of the Bastards" puts many feature-length fantasy epics to shame, with a fraction of the resources and less than half what an expected runtime would be for a genre-heavy movie. At just one hour long, "Battle of the Bastards" is a nail-biting, adrenaline-inducing, high-octane masterpiece. But what was it missing?
"Battle of the Bastards" lacked any unexpected character deaths that anyone really cared about
Countless people died at the Battle of the Bastards, on both sides. However, almost all of them were nameless soldiers who had never appeared in the show before, and understandably never came back. (Lady Melisandre would have been very busy.) Still, the episode was shot and directed so brilliantly that every death felt important to the overall outcome of the conflict. It was hard to care on a personal level about any of these characters meeting their respective ends, though.
The episode did kill named characters, but for various reasons, none of them really felt like true Game of Thrones deaths. For instance, Art Parkinson's Rickon Stark was the first life claimed. He'd been part of the show since its premiere, at least in an on-and-off fashion. The issue was that Rickon had never felt like anything more than a minor character. He was definitely the Stark child that Game of Thrones paid the least attention to, and he was often completely forgotten about at times. I can't name any of Rickon's personality traits.
While it's inarguably tragic for Jon that he was unable to save Rickon, it didn't resonate with me all that much on an emotional level — I doubt it did for many other viewers, either. Similarly, it's tough not to feel like "Battle of the Bastards" wanted Wun Wun's (Ian Whyte) death to be a landmark moment in the episode. But it just...wasn't. The towering giant was instrumental in the fighting, but he hadn't had enough notable character moments in the lead-up to his death for it to feel all that much like a tragedy that pulled at the heartstrings.
The only real, near-iconic death was that of Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon). After spending four seasons establishing himself as a vile human being and perfect villain, seeing him fed to his own starving dogs was darkly satisfying. Still, seeing him get no less than what he deserved was just simple justice. Sure, justice doesn't always happen in Game of Thrones, but Ramsay's death still felt like an inevitability at some point, rather than anything that was all that unexpected.
The closest "Battle of the Bastards" came to an unexpected, high-profile death
Jon Snow could easily have died at several points in Game of Thrones if things had gone even a little differently, but he was one of the few main characters who survived the events of the entire story. Still, that didn't stop the show from teasing the possibility of his demise in various episodes, and "Battle of the Bastards" is the biggest example of these kinds of situations. With Game of Thrones' "anyone can die" formula already strongly established by the time of this iconic episode, Jon's death felt like a real possibility when the fighting began.
"Battle of the Bastards" clearly knows the audience is anticipating Jon's death, too. In a sequence that feels like it lasts at least a hundred years, Jon's scrape with death comes in the form of being almost crushed and/or suffocated. The episode waits an agonizingly long time to reveal that Sansa (Sophie Turner) has rallied additional troops, turning the tide of the battle. Had it not been for this very fortunate development, then Jon would surely have seen his end at this point. And yet, with the loss of the battle that would follow, Game of Thrones would definitely have a different best episode, if the story could even have stayed on the rails without Harington's character.
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