Battle of the Bastards (episode)

"Battle of the Bastards" is the ninth episode of the sixth season of Game of Thrones. It is the fifty-ninth episode of the series overall. It premiered on June 19, 2016. It was written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss and directed by Miguel Sapochnik.

Plot
As the Starks prepare to fight, Davos loses something dear. Ramsay plays a game. Daenerys faces a choice.

In Meereen
Daenerys and Tyrion discuss a plan to deal with the Slaver fleet. Dany wants to slaughter their army but Tyrion suggests talking to the masters offering terms of surrender. Daenerys, Tyrion, Missandei and Grey Worm meet with the masters. They tell Dany that they will let her and Tyrion leave the city if they hand over the Unsullied, Missandei and her dragons. She tells them that she had agreed to meet with them as she was offering them a chance to surrender as Drogon flies up to meet them. She rides Drogon into the bay as Rhaegal and Viscerion join them and they begin to burn the attacking fleet. Meanwhile, Daario arrives at the shore with a large Dothraki horde in tow. The Masters' soldiers abandon them, and Tyrion gives an ultimatum that one of the three masters must die, as punishment for their disobedience. The lowest of the three is immediately scapegoated by the other two, so Grey Worm chooses to kill those two instead. Tyrion tells the lone master to share what he had seen and what Daenerys is capable of.

Later, Dany and Tyrion meet with Theon and Yara who have arrived in the city. They offer Dany their fleet of 100 ships if she will help them deal with Euron and give them independence to the Iron Islands. Tyrion is wary of Theon of what he saw of him at Winterfell and of his crimes against the Starks but Theon insists he has paid for what he has done. Daenerys agrees to assist them if the Ironborn will cease all pillaging going forward, to which Yara reluctantly accepts.

In the North
Jon, Sansa, Tormund and Davos meet with Ramsay and Smalljon Umber before the battle. Ramsay offers surrender terms saying he will pardon Jon for breaking his Night's Watch vows if he will hand Sansa over. Jon and Sansa are wary of whether Ramsay has Rickon to which Umber throws out Shaggydog's head in response. Jon offers Ramsay a chance to settle their dispute in one on one combat but Ramsay refuses. Sansa refuses the terms of surrender and tells Ramsay he will die the following day before riding off.

After a meeting where Jon discusses the battle plan with Tormund and Davos, Sansa criticises Jon for attacking too early insisting that they could have gathered more men. Jon however insists that this is the largest army they could possibly gather. Davos and Tormund discuss their time serving both Stannis and Mance respectively, with both acknowledging that they may have been serving the wrong king for so long. Jon meets with Melisandre and insists to her not to bring him back if he should fall in the battle. Melisandre insists it's not her gift that has brought Jon back but the Lord of Light's and that only the Lord of Light can decide Jon's fate.

The armies gather the following morning as Ramsay brings out Rickon. Telling Rickon that they are playing a game, he tells Rickon to run towards Jon's army and as he does brings out a bow. Jon hastily rides out on a horse to try to save Rickon as Ramsay fires arrows at him. Ramsay appears to have no intention of hitting Rickon with his few shots but eventually, just as Jon was approaching his brother, Rickon is struck in the back with an arrow and killed. With Jon now defenseless in the middle of the battlefield, Bolton archers fire volleys of arrows in his direction with the Bolton cavalry charging at him as well. The Stark cavalry begin their charge to meet the Bolton cavalry, narrowly saving Jon from being trampled, as Davos eventually sends the archers forward realising that they are of more use in the middle of the battlefield.

The Bolton soldiers eventually surround the Stark forces in a horseshoe formation as Smalljon leads a group of soldiers over a hill from behind to attack them. Whilst Wun Wun is able to kill a few Bolton soldiers, Tormund eventually panics sending the wildlings backwards towards the hill. Jon is almost trampled by the wildlings, nearly suffocating under a pile of men crawling on top of him, but is able to eventually get back to his feet. As it appears the Stark forces are about to lose in a rout, a horn sends out in the distance as Littlefinger arrives with the Knights of the Vale waving flags of the Arryn sigil. On horseback, they begin to cut down the Bolton soldiers. Tormund is able to kill Smalljon as this happens, as Smalljon is momentarily distracted by the arrival of the Arryn forces.

As Ramsay sees his soldiers being cut down, he decides to retreat inside Winterfell, but Jon, Wun Wun and Tormund begin to give chase. One of the Bolton soldiers insists the Battle is lost but Ramsay assures him they as long as the Stark Army is too weak for a siege(despite the Vale reinforcements). Wun Wun however is able to break down Winterfell's gates allowing wildlings to pour into the castle. He is however overwhelmed by arrows and eventually killed by Ramsay. Despite the defeat of his army, He taunts Jon, saying he has reconsidered the option of one-on-one combat, but Jon overwhelms him and begins to beat him almost to death but stops after realizing Sansa can see what he is doing.

The Bolton banners on Winterfell are torn down and Stark Banners raised. Jon orders for Rickon's body to be buried next to his father as Sansa asks him where he is keeping Ramsay prisoner. Sansa goes to visit Ramsay in his cell. He goads her by telling her how she will never be rid of him because he is "part of [her] now" but eventually realizes Sansa has released his own hounds on him. The hounds begin to tear Ramsay apart as Sansa walks away, smirking.

Deaths

 * Belicho Paenymion
 * Razdal mo Eraz
 * Rickon Stark
 * Lord Smalljon Umber
 * Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun
 * Lord Ramsay Bolton

Cast
Starring
 * Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister
 * Kit Harington as Jon Snow
 * Emilia Clarke as Queen Daenerys Targaryen
 * Liam Cunningham as Ser Davos Seaworth
 * Sophie Turner as Lady Sansa Stark
 * Aidan Gillen as Lord Petyr Baelish
 * Carice van Houten as Melisandre
 * Nathalie Emmanuel as Missandei
 * Kristofer Hivju as Tormund Giantsbane
 * Iwan Rheon as Lord Ramsay Bolton
 * Alfie Allen as Theon Greyjoy
 * Michiel Huisman as Daario Naharis

Guest Starring
 * Jacob Anderson as Grey Worm
 * Gemma Whelan as Princess Yara Greyjoy
 * Ian Whyte as Wun Wun
 * Enzo Cilenti as Yezzan zo Qaggaz
 * Paul Rattray as Lord Harald Karstark
 * Dean S. Jagger as Lord Smalljon Umber
 * Art Parkinson as Rickon Stark
 * Bella Ramsey as Lady Lyanna Mormont
 * George Georgiou as Razdal mo Eraz
 * Eddie Jackson as Belicho Paenymion
 * Rory Mullen as Captain of the Bolton archers
 * Mark Tankersley as a Bolton general
 * David Birkbeck
 * Paul Garrett

Cast notes

 * 12 of 28 starring cast members appear in this episode.
 * Starring cast members Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister), Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister), Natalie Dormer (Margaery Tyrell), Indira Varma (Ellaria Sand), Rory McCann (Sandor Clegane), Maisie Williams (Arya Stark), Conleth Hill (Varys), John Bradley (Samwell Tarly), Dean-Charles Chapman (Tommen Baratheon), Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth), Jerome Flynn (Bronn), Isaac Hempstead-Wright (Bran Stark), Hannah Murray (Gilly), Jonathan Pryce (High Sparrow), Tom Wlaschiha (Jaqen H'ghar), and Iain Glen (Jorah Mormont) are not credited and do not appear in this episode.
 * This episode is the final appearance of starring cast member Iwan Rheon (Ramsay Bolton) due to the death of his character.

General

 * This episode focuses on only two storylines: the North and Meereen. The storylines involving Bran north of the wall, Arya Stark, Sam and Gilly, Dorne, The Wall, King's Landing, The Riverlands, and the Iron Islands do not appear in this episode. Yara and Theon's story has now merged with Daenerys' while the Vale storyline has now merged with the Northern arc.
 * The episode title refers to the showdown between Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton, the eponymous bastards who clash in battle for control of Winterfell and the North.
 * According to many cast and crew members, such as director Miguel Sapochnik, the "Battle of the Bastards" was jokingly referred to by the acronym "BOB" on-set.
 * With a 60 minute runtime, this is one of the longest episodes in the TV series.

In the North

 * The production team was very excited that the "Battle of the Bastards" featured in this episode is the largest on-screen battle they have ever been able to depict, due to a significantly increased budget from HBO over the years - in contrast with how they originally intended to depict the Battle of the Green Fork on-screen in Season 1, but later found that they simply didn't have the budget at the time so they had to leave its events off-screen. Even the budget for Season 2 averaged about $6 million per episode, and the showrunners infamously had to beg HBO for an additional $2 million to complete the Battle of the Blackwater sequence that year. While exact budget figures for Season 6 are unclear, it is known that the budget now averaged about $10 million per episode - $100 million for a 10 episode season. Of course, the budget probably wasn't evenly distributed across the whole season, and a considerable amount was spent realizing the Battle of the Bastards.
 * Director Miguel Sapochnik said of filming such a large-scale battle for the TV series: "David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] 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."
 * Miguel Sapochnik previously directed Season 5's "Hardhome", featuring the Massacre at Hardhome sequence, which is why the showrunners felt confident putting him in charge of such a major battle sequence in this episode.
 * The entire Battle of the Bastards sequence took 25 days to film (including not just the fight scenes but all major character interactions in that subplot). Most hour-long TV drama episodes only take about 10-12 days to film one entire episode. Four separate camera crews were needed.
 * The Battle of the Bastards required 600 crewmembers to film (from cameramen to props masters to the costumes department), 500 extras, and 25 professional stuntmen (for close-up shots).
 * Another element that the production team was very happy about is that this is the first battle in the TV series which actually depicts cavalry columns charging on-screen (previously they were only mentioned as occurring off-screen). Using large numbers of Horses to film cavalry charges is very expensive, particularly for TV shows instead of feature films. For filming the Battle of the Bastards, no less than 70 horses were used on-location: they didn't simply use only a dozen horses then digitally double them up seven times over - 70 live horses actually appear on-screen. Another complication is that heavy rains in Northern Ireland made the ground at the filming site too muddy to charge on, so the production team had to lay about 160 tons of gravel over the field to give the horses some traction.
 * During the melee sequence in the first phase of the battle, the camera follows Jon Snow around through the chaos of the battle in a tracking shot that lasts for an uninterrupted 60 seconds (though there are a few split-second moments when horses run in front of the camera which may have been used to hide shifts between different takes).
 * In the Inside the Episode featurette, the showrunners state that one of the visual cues they incorporated into the episode was taken from the real-life Battle of Cannae between the Roman Republic and the Carthaginians under Hannibal. In that battle, Hannibal's smaller army totally surrounded the slower Roman heavy infantry, until thousands of Roman soldiers were standing in a giant circle literally being crushed into each other, shoulder to shoulder: the men on the edges being killed by enemy spears, while the men in the middle were totally trapped by the great press of the human wall and unable to move. Similarly, when the Stark forces are surrounded by the Bolton shield wall in this episode, they are totally crushed against each other, and Jon has to struggle to fight his way up just to breath.
 * The Romans at Cannae were caught in a classic double envelopment. Jon Snow himself mentions this maneuver by name in the episode, and indeed his plan was similar to Hannibal's: half the center of their line make a feigned retreat to allow their flanks to circle around the enemy's sides (though it became a common goal for tacticians ever since Hannibal). Jon hoped to anger Ramsay enough to attack him head on to lure him into this. As the episode demonstrates, Jon doesn't understand that Ramsay has a great low cunning when it comes to laying traps for other people, and Ramsay ends up luring Jon's army into a double envelopment by killing Rickon in front of him.
 * Ramsay Bolton never actually fights with a sword in the entire battle - he only uses a bow and arrow to toy with his enemies. This is in line with a point from the novels: Ramsay has absolutely no military training, and isn't actually a proficient swordsman. He isn't a coward, and he will brazenly charge at enemies, but he has no formal technique, and cannot hope to compare to a formally trained swordsman like Jon Snow. In the novels, Stannis points out that all Ramsay does is sadistically torture prisoners who cannot possibly fight back against him - he's never actually fought anyone in direct combat.
 * The TV show invented a scene in Season 4 of Ramsay fighting off a raid by Yara's ironborn on the Dreadfort, bare-chested and wielding daggers, but even this was more of a surprise raid than formal combat, and his guards outnumbered her small raiding force.
 * In the "Inside the Episode" featurette, the showrunners explain a major point about Ramsay Bolton's reactions from when the army of the Vale shows up onwards: Ramsay cannot mentally process that he is losing. This explains his bizarre lack of fear up until almost the moment of his death: he is so used to sadistically torturing people he has complete control over in his dungeons that when a situation finally goes beyond his control, he cannot mentally accept the reality of what is happening - instead he just continues to hold on to the confidence that somehow, he'll be able to employ cunning and tricks to get out of this, until it becomes an outright break with reality:
 * When Ramsays army gets caught out of formation and totally destroyed by the knights of the Vale, he tries to wave it off by saying that he still has Winterfell and it can withstand a siege - even though the army of the Vale, tens of thousands strong, is at the least going to besiege the castle, this makes him look weak enough that the rest of the North will rise up against him, and there is no hope of the Lannisters sending him any aid. His remaining general realizes that all is lost even if they still have Winterfell for the moment, but Ramsay seems almost glib about it.
 * Ramsay seems almost serious, not sarcastic, when he tells Jon he now "accepts" his offer of personal combat - despite being surrounded by Jon's soldiers with bows pointed at him, Ramsay is still smiling at the situation as if this isn't the end.
 * Ramsay continues to grin as Jon beats him to a pulp - apparently because he thinks Jon is venting his anger but won't actually kill him. Even at this point Ramsay is still totally confident that he'll get out of this somehow.
 * The Inside the Episode featurette directly states that the reason Jon stops before he can beat Ramsay to death with his bare hands is not out of some sense that sparing him is the honorable thing to do, but specifically because he looks over at Sansa and realizes she has more right to kill Ramsay than he does. Ramsay apparently continues to smirk through this because he incorrectly interprets this as that the Starks are going to spare him.
 * Even when Ramsay is tied up in a chair in the kennels, he is still filled with his habitual confidence that he can just trick his way out of this somehow, that for whatever reason the universe won't let the Starks kill him now. He seems outright surprised when Sansa points out that his own dogs will indeed eat him because he starved them for a week. Only at the moment that the dogs start biting him, for a precious few seconds before he dies, does Ramsay know fear and realize he isn't going to survive this.
 * According to Dan Weiss in the Inside the Episode featurette, the original draft of the episode had Jon's final confrontation with Ramsay occur on the battlefield, once he penetrated to the very rear of the Bolton lines where Ramsay was. In subsequent drafts they decided that it had more dramatic resonance for Jon to actually confront (and then pummel) Ramsay inside the courtyard of Winterfell itself, given that this whole battle is about the Starks fighting to retake their home - thus the final confrontation occurs within their home castle.
 * According to Sansa, House Bolton died with Ramsay. No other relatives or cousins have been mentioned in the novels either, so if Ramsay indeed kills Roose (and Walda's baby) in the next novel, this would apparently make him the last living Bolton - directly because he killed all the others.
 * Additionally, it is unknown if there are other members of House Umber in the TV continuity now that Smalljon Umber is dead (there were other sons and uncles in the novels). The fate of House Karstark is unknown, as it is unclear if Harald Karstark survived the battle.
 * We have no idea if Rickon Stark will actually die in the next novel, or if this is a condensation of the TV adaptation. In the books, Rickon is hiding out on Skagos, a remote island off the northeast coast of the North itself, and has not been captured by the Boltons - though it is always possible that he may be captured at some point in the next novel, or perhaps be killed by someone else (not necessarily in this fashion).
 * On the other hand, the fact that George R.R. Martin named Rickon's direwolf "Shaggydog" may have been a clue all along that even in the books, Rickon isn't going to live to be the heir to Winterfell. A "Shaggydog" is a literary term for a long-running and seemingly significant plot thread which ultimately doesn't go anywhere, subverting audience expectations (the opposite of a Chekhov's Gun). By the end of the fifth novel, it appears that Bran Stark will stay north of the Wall with the Children of the Forest, and that Rickon is going to return to rally the Northern Houses against the Boltons. It would be in keeping with Martin's penchant for unexpected plot twists if in the next novel, it turns out that Rickon actually dies, and - as in this season of the TV series - Bran Stark will actually head back south of the Wall again.
 * Rickon Stark had no speaking lines in Season 6. He hasn't had any since he separated from Bran Stark in the Season 3 finale. Of the youngest child actors introduced in Season 1, however, only Art Parkinson (Rickon) has stayed with the TV show all the way through Season 6. The other two very young children from Season 1 were Tommen Baratheon and Myrcella Baratheon, both of which were later recast (their original actors only recurred through Season 2).
 * Sansa Stark never even met Ramsay Bolton in the novels, much less married him. This was a heavy condensation of the TV series with a different character, Sansa's best friend Jeyne Poole, who was passed off as Arya so Ramsay could claim the North through her (the Boltons and Lannisters didn't know what happened to either of the Stark girls). As such, Sansa probably won't directly oversee Ramsay's death in the books like this - though even in the books it may turn out to be poetic justice that he will ultimately die when someone feeds him to his own starving dogs (the Bastard's girls), given how infamously he has used them to kill dozens of his victims and hunted girls for sport with them.
 * In the novels, the Bolton army is supplemented by forces from the Northern vassal Houses that only grudgingly serve them, such as House Manderly and elements of House Umber, but these vassals are actually planning to betray the Boltons when a crucial moment presents itself (i.e. by changing sides mid-battle). In this episode, Jon Snow even points out that Ramsay Bolton's army only serves him out of fear, don't like or respect him, and would abandon him if the opportunity presented itself. Ultimately this has no impact on the final version of events in the TV episode: Smalljon Umber actively fights for Ramsay, never betrays him, and dies fighting in the battle. The only hint of this thematic point is when Sansa later points out that Ramsay starved and mistreated his hunting dogs so much that they will eat him, even though he blindly insists that they are "loyal" to him.
 * With the death of Wun Wun, it's possible that the race of Giants is now extinct.
 * Davos Seaworth finds the burned wooden stag he made for Shireen Baratheon, next to an old pyre, and realizes that Melisandre burned her alive. On set, Liam Cunningham (Davos) actually let Kerry Ingram (Shireen) keep that specific carved stag - this burned one must be a duplicate prop.

In Meereen

 * The Second Siege of Meereen appears to be playing out slightly differently than this in preview chapters from the unpublished sixth novel. The Unsullied and Second Sons counter-attack against the slaver-alliance from within Meereen (as in the episode). Daenerys Targaryen hasn't returned on her dragon yet (to attack the slavers from the air), nor has she brought the Dothraki horde to Meereen, though this will probably occur. One element curiously omitted from the TV version is that in the books the Greyjoy fleet arrives right in the middle of the battle, attacking the slaver-alliance's fleet from behind, pinning them between two fronts. Thus, it appears that in the book version, the slaver alliance is going to be boxed in from four directions: the Unsullied/freedmen/Second Sons army coming out of the city, the Dothraki mounted horde coming out of the mountains to the east, Daenerys on her dragon from the sky, and the ironborn fleet arriving from the west. The TV version doesn't mention the arrival of the Greyjoy fleet, they simply appear in the next scene in the throne room having already arrived in the city.
 * In the "Inside the Episode" featurette, the showrunners point out that while they play it for comedy, Tyrion Lannister's botched attempt at an explanation to Daenerys upon her return to Meereen is meant to be accurate: he did do a good job of stabilizing rule over the city, and if he hadn't there would have been nothing left but ashes by the time she came back; indeed the whole reason that the slaver alliance is launching a full scale attack is because his rule of Meereen was going so well that they were feeling truly threatened by it.  The joke is that it's difficult for him to summarize an entire seasons' worth of subplot that Daenerys wasn't present for in just a few sentences, so when it comes tumbling out of his mouth all at once it seems incredulous at first.
 * The other slave-masters say that Yezzan zo Qaggaz is lowborn compared to them - he is an aristocrat and a slave-owner but apparently not a very high-ranking one. In the books, Yezzan was actually one of the lead slaver-masters from Yunkai, but the TV version drastically condensed this and basically just re-used the name.  It isn't even clear which of the slaver-cities TV-Yezzan is supposed to be from:  in the books he was from Yunkai, but he is only seen at Meereen in Season 5 (though Yunkish slave-masters do trade in Meereen), then in Season 6 he apparently fell into representing the newly reconstituted slave-masters in Astapor.  Apparently the TV version of Yezzan is a low-ranking slave-master who just travels between the three cities buying and selling, not a member of one of the old and powerful aristocratic families that is rooted into one place (as he is in the novels).
 * In the backstory from the novels, there have been several naval battles in the past during which dragons were deployed against enemy ships - given that all ships in this medieval era are made of wood, and therefore flammable, these generally tended to be one-sided affairs. A single dragon can wipe out an entire fleet.  During the Targaryen Conquest, Visenya Targaryen used Vhagar to destroy the entire fleet of the Vale on her own.  The largest naval battle in the Dance of the Dragons, the Battle of the Gullet, involved a massive fleet sent by an alliance of the Free Cities against Dragonstone, but two thirds of the fleet was destroyed by a force of five dragons and their riders.
 * Tyrion Lannister accurately recalls to Theon Greyjoy that they previously encountered each other at Winterfell, back in Season 1 episode 4 "Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things". Incidentally, their scene in that episode was also the only time that the existence of Theon's uncle Euron Greyjoy was alluded to in the TV series before Season 6, though Tyrion phrased it vaguely by referring to Theon's "uncles", but not naming them.
 * Tyrion seems to note with some sympathy now that Theon was an outsider amongst the Starks - alluding to the fact that Tyrion was always considered an outsider among the Lannisters.

Memorable quotes
Sansa Stark: "No one can protect me. No one can protect anyone."

Smalljon Umber: "Who owns the North?!"

Ramsay Bolton: "Do you like games, little man?"

Razdal mo Eraz: "Your reign is over. "Daenerys Targaryen: "My reign has just begun."