Game of Thrones S6 E9: Battle of the Bastards

I needed a cigarette after that and I don’t even smoke. After all the infanticide and adult murder and direwolf killing and torture and rape and flaying and castration, it was immensely satisfying to see Jon Snow beat Ramsay Bolton to a bloody pulp, see Sansa Stark’s ice-cold goodbye as the dogs chewed his face off, and see the Stark banner rise over Winterfell. It takes a lot to be the worst person in Westeros but Ramsay proved it again and again.

That little smile from Sansa, walking away while the starving dogs killed Ramsay, was the icing on the cake. She earned it. Given Ramsay’s cruelty, it had to be her at the end, and her role was exactly right, not actually siccing the dogs on him but not stopping them either. She correctly noted that the Bolton line will end now, while the Starks, for all their misfortunes, haven’t done all that bad, since four of five kids are still alive. I also loved her not having any of Ramsay’s posturing before the battle, walking away and saying “You’re going to die tomorrow, Lord Bolton. Sleep well.” The show telegraphed this end anyway, with all the setup with the hungry dogs and how poetic it is that the animals Ramsay used to kill so many actually killed him. (And as his last act of cruelty, he starves his dogs for a week.)

I had a feeling it would end with Ramsay dead, since it would be too much for Jon to die twice, but the tension in the Battle of the Bastards was … something else. It was like Game of Thrones’ version of Saving Private Ryan, with unending scenes of soldiers dying horribly. It showed the contrast between the two bastard heirs, as Jon is willing to get his hands dirty and Ramsay stands at a remove while his men fight. There was no way Ramsay would have won one-on-one combat and obviously, he didn’t.

It was looking very grim for the Starks and their allies but I figured something had to happen and then the cavalry arrived as the Knights of the Vale closed in. So Sansa’s letter saved the whole damn thing. I would hope she had some good reasons for not telling Jon about the third army.

With the battle so overwhelming, the events in Meereen stand out as odd but there was a connection between it and Winterfell: Tyrion’s quote about “It always seems a bit abstract, doesn’t it? Other people dying.” The perspective kept switching back and forth between leaders passively watching the battle and those on the ground, getting speared and crushed.

Daenerys was robotic in her plan to crucify the masters and all that because she tried it before and it backfired. Destroying the insurgency’s leaders was probably wiser. In a nod to the parable about Solomon giving the baby to the person who doesn’t want to cut him in half, Grey Worm spares the life of the only person who doesn’t sell out the others, instead killing the other two.

Yara was pretty sly in linking her cause with Daenerys’s. Each had a father who was an awful ruler and the two women will leave the world better than they found it. I loved Yara’s flirtation, saying she doesn’t demand marriage like Euron would of Dany but she’s “up for anything, really.”

I’m happy not only that Ramsay is done but that his story was done. There was nowhere else to take his cruelty and it was getting a little old. Let’s move on.