For the past several episodes of “Game of Thrones,” we’d had a nice vacation from our universal nemesis Ramsay Bolton. (And an even nicer vacation from Dorne. Does Dorne still exist?) When we saw Ramsay again last night, on the field outside Winterfell, in “Battle of the Bastards,” he looked, dare I say it, pretty good: rested, organized, decent at shooting arrows, less insane. In a perverse way, I had started to miss him: we knew he was out there, and I wanted to keep my eye on him, especially if he happened to be around dogs, direwolves, babies, or apples. Last night, the big showdown we’d long anticipated—one of them, anyway—came to pass: Jon Snow and Sansa returned to Winterfell, their rightful home, ragtag armies in tow, to fight the Boltons’ army, an impressive and terrifying force as disciplined as its leader is nuts. It’s not a fair fight, and it’s not looking good as the troops first meet. Go, soulful bastard! Die, sadistic bastard!
Happily, in last night’s episode, a drama that significant didn’t get interlarded with too many other plots: just one, whose ingredients (Dany, Tyrion, dragons, and so on) were high-quality but whose execution was uninspired. As the episode begins, we pick up where we left off, Meereen-wise: Dany has appeared out of nowhere; a fleet of slavers is flinging fire through the air, ship-to-pyramid; and Dany is giving Tyrion a look like “Ta-da!” and “Explain yourself!” at once. (Oh, please, I found myself thinking. Big help you’ve been.) Soon enough, after a quick tough-guy conversation with the slavers and a few swoops of all three dragons—breathing fire on wooden ships carefully, to save the fleet—and a stampede of Dothraki (where the hell did they come from?), Dany has reasserted herself over Meereen, the Sons of the Harpy (who are busily stabbing and slashing as always), and the harborful of rebel slavers. “Thank you for the armada. Our queen does love ships,” Tyrion says. He’s been delivering a lot of punch lines this season, but he hasn’t had much to chew on dramatically—and his witticisms aren’t what they used to be. He sounds even fussier than usual. I’m hoping that next season he has a bit more to do.
Back to the battle! Good vs. evil: at last we meet. On the fields outside Winterfell, the scrappy army of the Westeros decent: the Starks, the Wildlings, Wun Wun, and so on, including the tough girl-king Lyanna Mormont, with, presumably, her army of sixty-two, who fight like six hundred and twenty. On the evil side, Ramsay is being strangely reasonable. They discuss the terms of their battle—One on one, just us bastards? Jon asks; No, thank you, Ramsay replies, and Hello, Sansa, my dear wife. It seems strange that they manage this uneasy civility, and that everyone decides to get a good night’s sleep before the big fight. Ramsay is the kind of guy who’d like nothing more than to spring into your tent and torture you as you sleep; how anyone can relax while camping on his lawn I don’t know. He has Rickon Stark, he reminds them, chucking a direwolf’s head onto the ground; he also mentions that he hasn’t been feeding his dogs. Good night, you jerk.
For an army of goofballs at an away game, the Starks have an impressive war-room setup: lanterns, tables, maps, a diagram made of rocks. They talk of trenches and flanks. It reminds me of a scene from “Top Secret!,” because I don’t generally watch movies with war rooms in them. Tormund, Jon Snow, and Davos Seaworth furrow their brows and try to figure out a strategy, and afterward Sansa scolds Jon for not asking her about what to do. She’s the only one who knows how Ramsay thinks, she reminds him. Good point.
“I would’ve told you not to attack Winterfell until we had a larger force,” she says.
“It’s all we have!” Jon says. I’m not entirely sure why they’re giving us this plotline of tension and miscommunication between Jon and Sansa—he’s not a sexist, and they trust and love each other; I don’t know why he wouldn’t consult her or why she’d be keeping secrets. Or why she wouldn’t just speak up in the war room. These choices by the writers aren’t good for anybody, including us.
“I’m not going back there alive,” she says.
“I won’t ever let him touch you again,” he says. “I’ll protect you.” She tells him that no one can protect anyone. Another good point.
In a cozy fireside scene—I’m still expecting a wild-eyed Ramsay to show up and murder everybody—Jon Snow tells Melisandre (why’d they bring her? just for resurrections?) not to bring him back if he gets killed again. I had been wondering how they’d handle this: How mortal is Jon Snow? Can we worry about him dying again, or what? This conversation seemed to exist to reassure us that we could feel some dramatic tension about the possibility of his dying.
Back in the land of startling abruptness—Meereen—the Greyjoys have shown up. Hello, Greyjoys! I didn’t notice your boats or hear you knock. Tyrion and Dany, on a regal platform, have an exposition-heavy conversation with a grim Theon and a swaggering Yara; this scene could and should have been thrilling, but, like everything in Meereen this season, it feels too easy, rushed, undercooked. Tyrion chides Theon for having mocked his height in Winterfell long ago, as if he doesn’t mock eunuchs every chance he gets. Dany and Yara have a lot to bond over: bad-king fathers, leadership; now that we know Yara is into women, we also get some mild flirting.
“Our fathers were evil men,” Dany says. “They left the world worse than they found it. We’re not going to do that. We will leave it better than we found it.” Wasn’t she just hollering that she was going to conquer everybody in the Seven Kingdoms? “No more reaving, roving, raiding, or raping,” she says.
“That’s our way of life,” Yara says, looking troubled. O.K., fine. They shake on it with some weird new elbow-shake they made up. Goodbye, reaving.
Back to the action! As the battle gears up, it’s hard not to feel that Jon Snow and co. aren’t just undermanned but underthought. As Sansa had pointed out, Ramsay isn’t just a fighter; he’s a psychopath—you don’t trap him; he traps you. His army has set up a bunch of cool, disgusting flaming “X”s that really make a statement, because they’re upside-down bodies set on fire. Ramsay’s other opening gambit, unsurprisingly, is emotionally manipulative: he sends Rickon running, defenseless but free, as Ramsay shoots arrows at him.
I don’t know about you, but I hadn’t quite expected Ramsay to have this much military sophistication. He’s got an impressive army with fancy flags, swords, shields, helmets, horses, and those flaming horrors. Compared with all that, the Starks’ army—Jon Snow, Tormund, Wun Wun, and the gang—looks like the cast of “The Muppet Show.” And even though Ramsay just hangs back, yelling stuff, his army is tight and taught, disciplined, and he’s definitely in charge. He’s not just an extremity-chopping madman in this battle: he knows what he’s doing.
One of my flaws as a viewer of drama is that I tend to hate battle scenes. Fighting, to me, is both stressful and boring. But I loved the Bastard vs. Bastard battle scenes. The stampeding horses alone were incredible to watch. We care about the outcome of this fight—it’s a showdown seasons in the making—and, of course, we despise Ramsay and are eager for him to die. In classic battle-scene fashion, the good guys are outnumbered, and the odds are against them; they’ll need to muster plenty of pluck. After a while—arrows, quivers, neighing, swords, grunts—there’s a beautiful bit of battle-scene choreography, in which the Boltons surround our heroes’ army with their terrible shields and spears, perhaps the most menacing circle I’ve ever seen. Even after Wun Wun breaks up the mayhem a bit—as Ramsay watches from afar, it looks like a Gorg is playing in a landfill—the Stark crew is surrounded, and things aren’t looking good.
Perhaps in part because I’d been listening to Biggie Smalls all weekend, halfway through the battle, it hit me: somebody’s gotta die. I began to fret about Tormund. I realized in a mild panic that he is beloved but expendable, the kind of character it would be dramatic to kill off without the muss and fuss of losing a Sansa or a Jon Snow. The grunting, clanging, and charging get worse; the circle closes in. There is trippy camera work, like we’re dying. Maybe we are. Cellos, muted fighting, Jon Snow gasping for air in the teeming mass. I started hoping that Wun Wun would pluck our heroes out of the mosh pit and carry them to safety. Mystical strings play, sombre like a requiem; then some beardy menace head-butts Tormund.
Then: a horn! What the hell is that? Cue the swelling orchestra: it’s the Knights of the Vale, and Littlefinger! And how happy we all are. Or I am, anyway. In the nick of time, they gallop in, flags unfurled, breaking up the geometry of that cursed circle, sending Ramsay into retreat. Too easy? I don’t care. Bad timing? Sure, but it’s dramatic, and all we lost was Rickon (who, as Sansa had pointed out earlier, was a goner no matter what), some people we don’t know, and possibly part of Tormund’s face. (Yuck.) I love Littlefinger and Sansa, call me a nutcase, and I still don’t understand why she didn’t tell Jon Snow about this maneuver she’d cooked up. But I’m all for it.
At Winterfell, Ramsay says, “Their army’s gone.”
“Our army’s gone!” a man says.
“We have Winterfell!” Ramsay says. Not for long, you creep. Wun Wun’s fist smashes through the wooden castle door, then fumbles around for the lock, as if he has locked himself out of his car and is reaching in through the window. Bashing through, letting the good guys back where they belong, he’s like a Hodor in reverse. And then he dies like one, too: he’s already a staggering pincushion full of arrows, and then dumb old Ramsay shoots him in the eye, poor thing. Ramsay, managing to find smarmy wit everywhere, tells Jon that he has reconsidered: he will fight one on one. Soon enough, Jon is punching his face in, and I’m yelling for more, like a lunatic at a bullfight. Punch, punch, punch, punch, punch. God, this feels good. Is he dead enough? Not for me! And, disgusting person I’ve become, I feel that Ramsay can’t just be punched to death. Maybe you feel the same way. I want him chewed up, chopped up, flayed, grilled, or worse. Others may disagree.
But first: home sweet home—the unfurling of the Stark wolf flag on the Winterfell walls. It’s been a big couple of episodes for castle-flag replacement. Rickon is carried off to the family crypt. “Bury Rickon in the crypt next to my father,” Jon Snow says. Must be nice to be back in one’s bed, near one’s own crypt. A snow begins to fall, and Sansa, fittingly, gets the last word with Ramsay, who’s tied up in a dungeon, with the vibe of Hannibal Lecter. “Hello, Sansa,” he whispers. She gives him a good cold speech and then reminds him that he hasn’t fed his dogs. Ah, the old bark-and-chew. Never have I been so happy to see someone’s face pounded in, then eaten off by his own dogs. Sansa watches calmly, then smiles. You’ve come a long way, baby. Or she’s become a monster, and so have I. The women of Westeros are on the warpath. Next week, the season finale: reaving, roving, and raiding.
Source: THE NEW YORKER
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