Game of Thrones Season Six **SPOILERS WITHIN**

And that ladies and gentlemen is why you should never abuse your dogs by starving them for seven days.

 

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Excellent episode. I must say I was worried that Jon Snow would take a 2nd bow again but Littlefinger to the rescue!

Danery's is back in business. Who knows she might even marry Theon's sister Asha. Certainly the conversation implied it.

Only 100 ships. Thought they might have more. It's a start though.

Loved the part where the sailors on the masters ships were just jumping off. They weren't even waiting for the dragons to BBQ them.

The Bastard Battle was intense. I think it was even more intense then Hardhome. It was just brutal.

And the final scene was awesome. Finally that rat bastard ran out of games and felt what every one of his victims felt.

 

Oh and Ramsay saying he's inside Sansa.....

I stick by the prego thing.....

 

My feeling has been that this is another Planet in the far future colonized by Humanity and for whatever reason the advanced society devolved. It's all of those references to the First Men

 

I feel like I've waited 6 years for this episode here... And still so much further to go. 1 more then off for another year.

 

I don't really know how I'm now expected to ever enjoy another hour of television. That episode set the bar, holy shit that was fantastic.

 

I used to think no one in GoT enjoyed plot armor, which made it more awesome. But clearly Arya and Jon do this season. Lame.

 

Changed my mind.....

Sansa is probably not pregnant. Given the way time flows in this show it must have been months from when she was raped by Ramsay to last nights episode.

 

I certainly hope she isn't pregnant... In addition to making the Starks perpetual victims, it's also such a contrived plot point that I could do without.

 

Well, that went exactly as predicted. I thought that the one dragon had cleaned house offscreen last episode, though. 'cause budget and all. Nice surprise to actually see it. Petyr appeared right on cue. A foreseeable anticlimax but a typical sly Littlefinger move. Save the day at no cost at all

Mark my words: there will now be a lesbian episode between Dany and that Iron Isles queenie (I really can't be assed to remember all the names, can I). But in the end it'll be Jon Snow and her.

Excellent episode. Straightforward. Did anyone else smirk at how Ramsay's sadistic fucktardness undid his army? They could have been back victorious with no man standing in Jon's bunch if it hadn't been for Ramsay who wanted them surrounded and tortured for a bit.

 

The battle sequence against Ramsey looked good visually, but didn't really explain how Ramsay managed a complete encirclement of a fast moving infantry/cavalry formation with a pike formation. That's a hard thing to pull off.

One major flaw in the scene is that for a pike formation to work, most of the points have to be down when in contact with the enemy. The one thing you can't do with a single pike is hold it in front of an opponent's chest and leave it there. If the enemy gets one hand anywhere near the pike's tip, the pike is rendered useless because the guy grabbing the tip has a heck of a lot more control over the tip than the pikeman does. The only way to make him let go is to --- have another pikeman stab him. For that you need more points out front. And of course once a person has grabbed a pike tip, he can just run back with it in a tug of war. His compatriots can grab on too, so the pikeman has to let go of his pike or get dragged into the enemy formation. If fellow pikemen chip in to try and win the tug of war then they have to drop their pikes.

The formation Ramsay's men were using could be termed "Here! Take my pike! Really, I'm not going to use it!"

Of course it's probably way too dangerous to show a real pike formation because the pikes stay in motion (so the tips aren't grabbed) and you have rows of pikemen behind the front rank who can't see all that well as they stab away.

But then it's also possible that GoT world hasn't developed true pike formations and they're treating them like spears, where the second rank of spearmen just stands ready to fill in the gaps in the front rank.

 

I was really upset that Wun Wun the Giant died. The entire time he was fighting the pike formation and bashing the doors of Winterfell I was yelling "can't he find a tree to knock over and use as a weapon?" Too bad he had to go.

 

They got rid of him at the behest of craft services. It was hard enough to keep the regular extras fed.

 

Until this episode, the most brutal battle sequence was the fight between Brienne and the Hound. This battle took the cake, shoved it in the mud, and stabbed it several times for good measure. I loved how they cut out any backing music like with the Brienne/Hound battle. Made feel even more brutal, especially with the sound effects.

 

Well, it's the North, so not exactly an abundance of trees...

I was sad to see him go, but figured it would happen. Wanted to see him just bust through the pike line with one giant surge, though.

Also, once far enough away, why the hell didn't Rickon turn around and run backwards? Easier to dodge oncoming arrows that way, ya know?!

 

Well, he had one at Hardhome when he was fighting the Wights and White White Walkers.

 

At this point I wonder if most viewers even care. He hasn't been on the show since S3 and he didn't have any lines this season.

Dragons vs Masters' Fleet was awesome. Was that Tyrion's idea? He used a similar tactic in the Blackwater Battle.

The biggest question right now is if there will be anyone left for daenerys to fight when she comes home. The northern armies are decimated, the wildlings are decimated, and the Lannisters/Baratheons are almost all gone.

 

It seems like this season has been the most predictable. Perhaps it has to do with the showrunners being free from the books? The Battle of the Bastards was visually great, but everyone knew Littlefinger would save the day. Hope the season finale has some unexpected twists (like Sansa getting in way over her head).

 

But the battle did highlight what a horrible leader John Snow is. Sansa warned him repeatedly that Ramsay was a sadistic plotter who liked to set traps, yet Snow just rode straight into an incredibly obvious one and doomed his army to total defeat. Only his sister's message to Littlefinger saved Snow from his own hubris and ineptitude. If he'd have just waited fifteen or so more minutes instead of rushing headlong into a trap that screamed "TRAP!", Littlefinger would have arrived anyway and they could have formulated plans based on having Ramsay outnumbered. Ramsay would have retreated into Winterfell to prepare for a siege, but the giant would have battered down the door and that would be that.

It's obvious John Snow is unfit to rule the seven kingdoms, at least without Sansa telling him what to do.

It's also obvious in this episode that Daenerys is equally unfit without the advice of Tyrion Lannister.

So what needs to happen is to have Tyrion marry Sansa and put them on the throne.

 

The series is in the process of tying up loose ends and bringing storylines together ready for the finale. At this point if you killed any "hero" character it would make the remaining few episodes be about the repercussions of their death. So the ones the audience wants to live will live for the moment, and come the final couple of episodes a bunch of them will die to give the ending weight.

I suspect this is pretty much for the same reason all the tree elve people died. The fantasy characters are designed for a specific environment and putting them outside that could look comical. Can you see a giant or crazy albino tree person walking around Kings Landing for example?

Anyone want to bet how this season will end? I think it's going to be snow starting to fall.

 

Don't you think Jon might have fared better if Sansa had told him "Hey! I sent a raven to the Knights of the Vale and they might be coming to help us. The Lord of the Vale is in love with me and his step dad loved my Mom."

The way I see it, if Jon had waited LITERALLY 1 hour, he might have been able to save Rickon's life and Wun Wun for that matter.

 

True, but Sansa had no way of knowing whether, much less when Littlefinger would show up.

 

The cinematography in this episode was just utterly amazing. Incredible.

 

True... But why not mention it? She had plenty of opportunities and Brienne even asked her why she didn't tell Jon about meeting with him several episodes ago. There was a clear point in this episode again where Jon asked her what he should do and she says, "I don't know, but we need more men". Jon says he's asked everybody and still, she said nothing of even the possibility. Sansa's silence on this was so blatant and so... Loud, that I think the writers are going to have to touch on it at some point in the future.

 

There are more important "buts" to go on the back end of that statement. The Battle of the Bastards was visually great, but nothing about the battle made even the slightest lick of sense. We have the idiot child running in a straight line when someone is shooting arrows at him. We have the idiot child being hit by a lone arrow through the heart at a distance that an entire hail of arrows couldn't manage to even nick Jon Snow. We have Jon Snow trying to lose the battle by committing suicide only to survive by a perpetual barrage of deus ex, not even counting the timely Littlefinger arrival. We, in general, have both sides exhibiting all the tactical abilities of a drunken, microcephalic sloth. We have Sansa not saying anything about messaging Littlefinger. We have a battle where the dead are piled an order of magnitude higher than the number who fought in the battle.

The best thing about how the battle played out is that they didn't try to surprise with the result after years of setting things up so that only one result made sense. I suppose Ramsey getting eaten by his dogs, face first, was an appropriate ending for him, but even that could have been much better handled; having his starving dogs wait for no apparent reason until a moment of highest drama to eat his face, rather than making the effort to have the timing of his death sensibly line up with a dramatically appropriate moment was just lazy writing. There are a lot of people rationalizing this scene by saying that Sansa set the dogs on him, but that's not actually true. The dogs just waited until she showed up and made her speech to start to feed.

The battle was designed purely for visual appeal. If you read that battle in a book, you'd throw the book away. This is generally a problem with the big battle scenes on the show, although this case was by far the most egregious example.

 

All excellent points, and yet, this is a show for TV; and so the imagery does earn credit. It went so far beyond what I thought possible; I don't think I've ever seen the like on TV, and rarely in cinemas.

 

I have to agree. Even though this is fresh in my mind, I can't recall an hour of original TV that I've enjoyed more.

 

I have to agree with a point I just heard: Littlefinger was always going to show up to that battle a half hour late. So any way you slice it, lots of people were going die before the Knights of the Vale cleaned house. Littlefinger continues to play the game better than anyone else.

 

I can't disagree with any of that. My suspension of disbelief was broken by the story told by those visuals, but the threshold for breaking suspension of disbelief is a personal matter. I don't question the visual artistry of the battle scene, but I found the literary artistry lacking. I much preferred the Meereen side of this episode.