SPOILERS AHEAD
Last night’s Game of Thrones (titled “Battle of the Bastards”) had everything long- time fans could have possibly asked for. It had Daenerys’ dragons, hungry and full grown, finally flying into battle for the first time and torching an armada of slave ships. It had a battle of wits between the two staple hero and villain characters in Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton, and a 25-minute epic battle sequence that will surely rate among one of the best of all time for an hour-long drama series, both in scope and cinematically.
The battle for Winterfell belonged on a big screen and was clearly shot for one. For fans complaining that the first season flying solo without George RR Martin’s source material has been a bit of a letdown, the clash between Snow’s cobbled-together army and Bolton’s was the show creator’s way of saying “See, this was why!”
The fight ended exactly how Stark fans and long suffering Sansa loyalists were hoping for it to end. Jon Snow was victorious (but not without the loss of his brother and loyal giant), and Ramsay took his beating right before he took a feeding to his own hounds, much to the quiet delight of a now widowed (and possibly pregnant) Sansa.
It was everything fans have wanted for five-plus seasons, and because of that, it was one of the worst episodes in Game of Thrones history. Everything happened exactly how you wanted it to. And that’s ultimately why Battle of the Bastards failed.
The show writers up until Battle of the Bastards almost took pleasure in unconventional story telling, as did Martin himself. When the Red Wedding went down, it both horrified and enthralled fans. Reaction videos flooded the Internet. It’s still one of the most talked about events in modern cable television, and plot wise its ripples are still being felt, all the way up to last week’s episode, which saw a confrontation between Jaime Lannister (who is finally acting like Jaime Lannister again) and the only team Stark survivor of the massacre, Edmure Tully.
While attempting to explain his logic for wiping out most of the characters show fans were rooting for in House Stark, Martin explained that he liked to take what people expected, and then write the exact opposite. Upon Ned Stark’s beheading, the natural progression would be for his son Robb to rise up in his place and get revenge on the Lannister clan that humiliated, betrayed and killed him. That all changed with the Red Wedding. Our perceptions of who was good and who was bad in Westeros (spoiler: everyone’s bad) were thrown to the wind.
The show took another unexpected turn at last season’s finale, which saw Jon Snow bleeding out from stab wounds to the heart and gut, betrayed by his own men of the Night’s Watch. Snow’s death was a perfect parallel to that of his half brother and father, a Stark family always thinking with their hearts instead of their head. What they feel is the right thing to do often has disastrous consequences in the real world.
We saw this with Arya Stark this season when she refused to carry out Jaqen H’ghar’s orders to assassinate a traveling actress. This resulted in Arya full of holes herself and bleeding out before using her training to finally rid the show of her nemesis. Arya was allowed to walk free because of her betrayal and appears to be on her way to rejoin her sister and brother in Winterfell.
Jon Snow, the show’s indisputable fan favorite and heartthrob, should have been left in the snow as a reminder that we can never become too attached to anyone in Westeros and that even the best-of-intentioned decisions have deadly consequences. Snow’s predicted resurrection changed the rules of the entire show. Now The Hound is suddenly back and every off-screen death, for instance, should be taken with a grain of salt (looking at you, Stannis).
It’s not to say that Ramsay Bolton should have prevailed over Snow in the battle. The writers did not resurrect Snow simply to kill him off again, and that’s the entire problem. Game of Thrones has become predictable in its wind down (season 8 is all but assured to be its last).
When we see an army of horses ready to run down Jon Snow on a battlefield, and he stands heroically with his sword drawn in hi-def slow motion, we simply know that nothing is going to happen to him. As hundreds of arrows pierce men from both sides, Snow is miraculously unharmed. As he is trampled and buried beneath a mountain of bodies, he finds himself pulling out of it.
The entire point of Snow trudging through snow and mud to form an army in the first place was at the behest of Sansa, who pleaded with him to leave the Night’s Watch to save their brother in Bolton’s captivity and retake Winterfell. But that all went out the window when, on the eve of the battle, Sansa proclaims to Snow that their brother was probably already dead. Thanks, Sansa!
Snow knows there are greater enemies coming and that perhaps some are already in their midst, and to drop everything at the pleas of a forgotten sister for a cause she later admits was pointless is betrayal of what is coming to Westeros. Ramsay Bolton was a charismatic nuisance, not the great arbiter of suffering and reckoning that the White Walkers are.
When Game of Thrones becomes just another formulaic fantasy, no matter how beautiful it looks, it betrays what made it the cultural phenomenon it has become. Ramsay Bolton famously looked into the hopeless eyes of Theon Greyjoy as he tore apart his appendages and proclaimed: “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.”
With his disposal, things seem to be on the road to exactly that – and that’s not only predictable, it’s boring.
