Battle of the Bastards

Plot

In Meereen

Daenerys, Tyrion, Missandei, and Grey Worm meet the Masters, who offer terms of surrender. Daenerys counters that the meeting was called to discuss the masters' surrender. Daenerys rides Drogon into Slaver's Bay with Rhaegal and Viserion to burn their fleet. Grey Worm kills two masters, sparing Yezzan; Tyrion tells him to warn the other masters of Daenerys' power. Meanwhile, Daario and the Dothraki slaughter the Sons of the Harpy.

Theon and Yara arrive in Meereen to ally with Daenerys. They offer their fleet, and renouncement of the reaver lifestyle, for Daenerys' help overthrowing Euron and recognition of Yara's claim to the Iron Islands.

At Winterfell

Jon, Sansa, Tormund and Davos meet with Ramsay and his bannermen. Jon refuses Ramsay's offer to exchange Sansa for a pardon, and Ramsay declines Jon's offer to settle the dispute in single combat, knowing he has 6,000 men versus the Starks' 2,400. Sansa assures Ramsay that he will die the next day. Ramsay gloats that he has starved his hounds in anticipation of feeding Jon and his advisors to them.

At camp, Sansa insists the Starks' army is too small and warns Jon not to underestimate Ramsay. Davos and Tormund discuss Stannis and Mance and acknowledge they may have previously served the wrong men. Davos discovers where Shireen was burned, and realizes she was killed by Melisandre.

The armies gather outside Winterfell the next morning. Ramsay releases Rickon and has him run to Jon while shooting arrows at him. When Rickon is killed, an enraged Jon charges Ramsay's army, and the battle begins, leaving many dead and creating a wall of corpses. This wall allows the Bolton infantry to kettle the Stark forces while Smalljon prevents escape. Jon survives a trampling, but the Stark forces appear doomed. Suddenly a horn sounds in the distance, as the Knights of the Vale arrive led by Littlefinger and Sansa. They smash the Bolton army, bringing victory to the Starks, while Tormund kills Smalljon in the chaos.

Ramsay retreats to Winterfell and orders the gates closed. After the giant Wun Wun destroys the gates and Stark loyalists overwhelm the garrison, Ramsay shoots Wun Wun in the eye with an arrow, killing him. Jon overpowers and beats Ramsay, but stops short of killing him upon seeing Sansa. Jon orders Ramsay imprisoned, and Winterfell returns to House Stark.

Later, Sansa visits Ramsay, imprisoned in the kennels with his hounds. Sansa tells Ramsay that House Bolton will die with him, as he is the last male heir. Ramsay insists that his hounds will not turn on him, but Sansa reminds him that he has starved them. The hounds close in on a bloodied Ramsay as he slowly becomes horrified, and then devour him. Sansa walks away, smirking in satisfaction.

Production

Writing

"Battle of the Bastards" was written by the series' creators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Elements of the episode are based on the sixth novel in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter, which author George R. R. Martin hoped to complete before the sixth season aired. In an "Inside the Episode" segment published by HBO shortly after the episode aired, Benioff and Weiss said that the final battle was primarily inspired by the Battle of Cannae and the American Civil War. According to Weiss, "We went back to the Roman fight against the Carthaginians in the Battle of Cannae where the Romans got caught in an encirclement by Hannibal and just slaughtered to the man. We used that as our model". Benioff said, "The 'Battle of the Bastards' becomes incredibly compact. All these men, all these combatants, crammed into this incredibly tight space on the battlefield. You read accounts of the battles in the Civil War where the bodies were piled so thick it was actually an obstruction on the battlefield". Episode director Miguel Sapochnik said in an interview that the Battle of Agincourt was the original inspiration but the concept was adapted to fit budgetary constraints.

Weiss said that they wanted to depict a full-fledged battle, "From the beginning we knew that one thing we'd never had on the show was a true medieval pitched battle where two sides bring all the forces they can into play in some battlefield that's somehow negotiated or agreed upon and they go at each other until one of them wins and the other one loses. This is a staple of human history, and we started to look through film samples of it. There really wasn't one that both made you feel what it was like to be there on the ground and gave you a sense of the geography of the battle." According to Benioff, they also wanted to demonstrate the role luck plays in battle, "Just to feel the kind of randomness of it where there's arrows falling from everywhere, people are getting killed, people are getting trampled by horses, and so much of it is just luck. Jon Snow is a very skilled combatant, but part of the reason he survives this battle is just he gets lucky".

In the "Inside the Episode" featurette Benioff said about Daenerys Targaryen's transformation during the series, "I think Dany's been becoming a Targaryen ever since the beginning of Season 1". According to Weiss, "She's not her father and she's not insane and she's not a sadist, but there's a Targaryen ruthlessness that comes with even the good Targaryens". Benioff concluded, "If you're one of the lords of Westeros or one of her potential opponents in the wars to come and you get word of what happened here in Meereen, you have to be pretty nervous because this is an unprecedented threat. You've got a woman who has somehow formed an alliance where she has a Dothraki horde, a legion of Unsullied, she's got the mercenary army of the Second Sons, and she has three dragons who are now pretty close to full grown. So if she can make it all the way across the Narrow Sea and get to Westeros, who's going to stand in her way?"

Casting

"Battle of the Bastards" was the final episode for actor Iwan Rheon, who had played Ramsay Bolton since Game of Thrones' third season. His first appearance was in "Dark Wings, Dark Words", as a then-unnamed "boy" who helps a captured Theon Greyjoy. Before he was cast as Ramsay, Rheon auditioned for the role of Jon Snow. In an interview, he described learning about his character's fate: "I had received half the scripts, five episodes, then I got the call. They joked, 'Isn't it great Ramsay ends up on the Iron Throne?' As soon as they said that I said, 'He's dead, isn't he?' It's cool. I've had four lovely seasons here. It's been great to be involved with such an amazing show. I think it's kind of right he goes down. Because what else is he going to do after this? He's done so many things. It's justified and it's the right thing to do. It's the right path. He's reached his peak. It's nice for the audience that he goes out on this high, if you will." In that interview, Kit Harington talked about Rheon: "I love Iwan's work. He's an incredibly detailed actor who's created a character who's remarkable and despicable."

"Battle of the Bastards" was also the last episode for recurring character Rickon Stark (Art Parkinson), who had appeared since the series premiere episode "Winter Is Coming". In an IGN interview, Parkinson said that he was tipped off about his character's death: "Whenever I was told that I was coming back for Season 6, before they sent me through the scripts and stuff, they sent me through a ring just to say, 'Listen, so that you don't get a shock whenever you read the scripts, just know that you die this season.'" He continued, "Whenever I came back, I was excited to come back, and the scenes all seemed pretty amazing. I was so happy to re-embrace the character." According to Parkinson, he was sorry that Rickon would die but his manner of death was a compensation: "It was a cool death, and it was always going to be a good death, so at the same time, I was pretty happy."

Another character departure was Smalljon Umber, played by Dean S. Jagger. In an interview, Jagger talked about his casting: "I prayed for it. When I heard I got the part my knees buckled. It was a life-changing moment." Before becoming a professional actor, Jagger dug trenches and worked at a mattress factory to pay his way through acting school and was a professional rollerblader. Ian Whyte also made his last appearance in "Battle of the Bastards" as the giant, Wun Wun; he had played Gregor Clegane during the show's second season. Special-effects supervisor Joe Bauer said about Whyte's casting as Wun Wun, "We wanted a large performer because somebody who would be 14, 15 feet tall would have more weight and mass to move around, and a person who's a normal size would have a very difficult time pulling that off".

Filming

"Battle of the Bastards" was directed by Miguel Sapochnik, who had directed the fifth-season episodes "The Gift" and "Hardhome". In an Entertainment Weekly interview before the episode aired, Sapochnik said he was brought on board by Benioff and Weiss after his previous-season success; "Hardhome" won several awards, including Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards. About how the episode should be shot, he said: "Every battle on Thrones is unique. I think that's why Benioff and Weiss keep doing them. In the case of 'Battle of the Bastards' – or 'BOB' as we affectionately called it in production – David and Dan wanted to do a thing of spectacle, a strategic pitchfield battle they hadn't had the resources to do back in season 1 or 2. I was particularly interested in depicting both the horror of war and the role of luck in battle." Benioff called Sapochnik's work on the episode some of the best in the series' history.

It took 25 days to film, requiring 500 extras, 600 crew members and 70 horses. Benioff described the difficulty of coordinating horses in battle scenes, which is why they are rarely used except in "big budget war films". Weiss added, "Miguel's really outdone himself. Fully fleshed out medieval battles require a tremendous amount of resources and choreography to get them right. It feels like we're doing something fresh that you don't see on TV and movies very often." Four camera crews were used for the battle scene. The 500 extras were largely the Snow and Bolton armies as Wildlings, archers, swordsmen and spearmen. Each army was trained separately to create off-screen rivalry between the two groups, and visual effects were used to expand the army to thousands. Kristofer Hivju, who plays Tormund Giantsbane, said about the intensity of filming the scenes: "It was pretty intense, actually. When you have 20 people running around getting squeezed together, and you're trying to chop at another bearded guy with a sword, you are not out of danger. You're laying down in the mud, and one wrong step, you won't have a face anymore. It was very intense, and Miguel insisted on making it that muddy and messy. War is not beautiful. Sometimes you see action sequences where battles seem organized. I know that from how the Vikings fought. It's not beautiful. It's hard. It's hard work. We had to shoot moment-to-moment, chronologically. We would shoot one sequence 80 times per day."

In an interview after the episode aired, Sapochnik detailed the process of filming the battle and called Akira Kurosawa's Ran an inspiration in shooting the scenes: "I watched every pitch field battle I could find (footage of real ones too), looking for patterns — for what works, what doesn't, what takes you out of the moment, what keeps you locked in. Interestingly one of the things I noticed is that staging of these battles through the years has changed dramatically. Back in the day you'd see these huge aerial shots of horse charges and there were two big differences. First, it was all real — no CGI or digital replication. And second, often when the horses would go down, you can kind of tell they got really hurt. Nowadays you'd never get away with that, and nor would you want to."

Reception

Ratings

"Battle of the Bastards" was watched by 7.66 million American households in its initial telecast on HBO, slightly more than the previous week's rating (7.60 million viewers) for "No One". The episode competed with game seven of the 2016 NBA Finals. It had a 3.9 rating in the 18–49 demographic, the highest-rated show on cable television that night. In the United Kingdom, the episode was seen by 2.450 million viewers on Sky Atlantic (the channel's highest-rated broadcast that week) and had 0.118 million timeshift viewers.

Critical reception

"Battle of the Bastards" received immense critical acclaim, with many calling it one of the best television episodes of all time. Critics cited the size and scope of the battle in the North and Daenerys's scene with her dragons at the beginning of the episode. It has a 98% rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes from 65 reviews, with an average score of 9.08 out of 10. According to the site consensus, "'Battle of the Bastards' delivered one of the greatest battle sequences in the show's history, and some savagely satisfying vengeance as well."

IGN's Matt Fowler gave the episode a 10 out of 10, writing in his review, "At this point, it seems like the pattern when it comes to the ninth episode of a given season of Game of Thrones is tragic death, amazing battle, tragic death, amazing battle, and so on. And this being Season 6, it was time to land on a phenomenal clash of swords and shields — and 'Battle of the Bastards' certainly delivered." He continued, "Game of Thrones did not disappoint when it came to this season's great northern battle, as Jon and Sansa's differences were spectacularly highlighted in a savagely strong war chapter that saw House Stark overcome huge odds to reclaim their home. Plus, Daenerys got to soar, as her dragons quickly stopped a violent siege with fury and fire." Jeremy Egner of The New York Times also praised the episode: "As directed by Miguel Sapochnik, who also oversaw last season's terrific 'Hardhome' episode, the lengthy sequence was terrifying, gripping and exhilarating, sometimes all at once, a sweeping display of all the different ways one can die on the battlefield." Egner called Ramsay's death an episode highlight ("Ramsay Bolton's demise was arguably the most eagerly anticipated death ever on Game of Thrones and the show handled it with flair, dispatching him in a poetic, canine-fueled fashion that was no less satisfying for being telegraphed early on"), and concluded about Daenerys's scene: "Daenerys Stormborn had a few words for the slave masters who launched their attack last week. Those words included 'surrender or die' and 'thanks for the ships', as we saw another thrilling action sequence that I believe reunited the dragon triplets for the first time since they were quite young." Myles McNutt of The A.V. Club wrote in his review, "This battle works as a climactic moment for Game of Thrones as a cultural event, selling us on the scale and ambition of the producers and their production teams, all who should be commended for the accomplishments from a technical perspective." According to James Hibberd of Entertainment Weekly, "Was this the show's best episode? It's hard to immediately process that question. Maybe? Probably. It's almost certainly the most exciting hour and had the most jaw-dropping battle sequence we've seen yet on TV."

Accolades

The episode received a record six Primetime Emmy Awards, including awards for writing and direction. "Battle of the Bastards" has been nominated for 32 awards and has won 19.