Game of Thrones 6x9 'Battle of the Bastards': Why Do We Fight?

Game of Thrones 6x9 stages one of tv's great epic battles, down down to the chaos that is but a taste of war's incomprehension.

Reviewed while listening to two songs from Liar that echoed the anxiety of watching the episode, and a wonderful tune by Nym and Spherelet to cal me down.

*** MORE SPOILERS. But, c'mon, let's be real. You already know what happened, right?***

… The Things They Carried. That’s what this episode reminded me of.

Tim O’Brien focused on various ways to bend, twist, or completely fabricate the truth in his masterwork about the Vietnam War, blurring fiction and non-fiction such to a point that you are hard-pressed to tell the difference. It leaves the reader somewhat disoriented, mindnumb from trying to figure out truth from fiction, from attempting to comprehend the narrative. We try to understand, but are left wanting when O’Brien shifts the truth almost randomly. One thing was said and wasn't true, but actually was. Or was it? Though I'm sure this was anything but random. It’s the only thing he can do, the only way to give even a taste of what we in truth were never going to be able to comprehend. We weren’t soldiers in that war, we weren’t in the shit. We’ll never understand. All we have are O’Brien’s mesh of confusion. A glimpse of his own raging terror in the heat of battle. His perception of the games of war.

In a way, it’s the one thing we can relate to Ramsay Bolton about. See, he knew he didn’t understand war. He knew he would never be a soldier fighting in a mess, that he’d be overwhelmed by the chaos and almost certainly die. Like the battle against Stannis, he merely waits until it's over, then delivers the final blow. Jon understands, so Jon is right there, blood and mud and all manner of torment in fighting. Ramsay of course was never going to fight Jon, because that’s not what he is. What he is is a monster, who instills fear mixed with tapping into the most primitive motivations of people. His lieutenant leads the bulk of the army into battle with the cry ‘Who holds the North?’ ‘WE DO!!’ And they charge, with fervor. Not for Ramsay. But for their own sense of power and dominance over other men. Ramsay knows this, and exploits it. He evokes a bloodlust in them leading by example, and then gives the opportunity to satiate it. His only true method of sustained control and victory in battle is through games. It makes him honest, more dangerous… and entirely dissolved from the real world. The world where children are not toyed with. Even the worst of Westeros would just kill Rickon and be done with it, for whatever scheme they're making in power. But Ramsay only understands manipulation. Not of Rickon. But of Jon.

That is the core of this battle, Jon’s motivation, and our emotional connection to how it all ends. It’s brilliantly done, considering that Rickon was all but forgotten and has never really had a role to play in the story (he might in the books. We’ll see). Also considering that Jon and Ramsay had not been extensively acquainted with each other, something Sansa immediately brings up in trying to get Jon to change tactics. But none of that matters, because of the type of villain Ramsay is. I argued last week that Rachel in Orphan Black is an effective villain because of how personal everything she does is to the audience and the central characters we care about. She’s tied to the other clones. But that is the exact opposite of Ramsay’s strength as a villain. Nothing is personal to him. He holds no value in any tangible thing. He just exists to play his own creative games. He wants to control people, stick hooks under their skin and ring them up on strings, and watch them dance from the pain and suffering. So there doesn’t really need to be a more personal connection between him and Jon. We care about Jon, and Jon cares about Rickon. And Rickon’s a child. Thus, we care about Rickon. It’s not personal, it’s circumstantial. It’s the writers pulling a tactic from Eisenstein, streamlining to the audience’s sympathy and anger by harming a child. Regardless of how little we saw of him, and how little Jon and Ramsay had measured each other up, the gut is wrenched when that last arrow pierces Rickon’s heart. Compounded with the nice editing of Ramsay shooting off what we’re meant to believe is his last arrow and missing, only to throw another out there (we knew there was another, but the show lets the tension of that knowledge sit there, with the score dropped and a holding of breath as Jon gets closer to something we know he'll never reach), and the moment is effective. And it casts a final shadow over Jon’s struggle to finally slay one of the greatest villains in modern history.

The Battle itself, if you strip away the context of Jon and Ramsay and Sansa and all, is stupendous. And horrifying. Incomprehensible, truly. The shots of men trying to hold their guts in place as the show mirrors Saving Private Ryan (or, honestly, real war), the hill-sized piles of dead bodies, and how Ramsay’s charging soldiers simply jump over the bodies or push them down in their fueled bloodlust. And then there's that shot following Jon, for near a minute if not more. All of that thrusts us into the heart of war and all its atrocities. And it begs to question about Rickon’s role in all of this. They’re not merely dying for him, they didn’t know him. It’s not personal. But it’s what he represents. And what Ramsay represents. Some may be fighting for what they believe is right, avenging the betrayal of the Boltons. Some may be fighting for personal vengeance. Some, like the Freefolk, are fighting to surivve, knowing that Ramsay would've come after them. The reasons for fighting vary, but the result is the same living nightmare. 'Bastards' holds nothing back in that. It shifts from the immediate and visceral experience of bare survival when it follows Jon, to the screams of men whose organs are tossed and held, to the pile of bodies, over which more men die. Then to Ramsay, all watching from afar, ordering arrows to literally rain terror, not caring, unlike Davos, if he hits his own men. They're not men to him. They're pieces of a game. He knows himself for what he is. As does Jon. Jon is a warrior. He almost believes Melisandre's offhand comment that the Lord of Light brought him back solely to die in this battle. This is his reality. This is his shit.

So now that this task is done, and Winterfell reclaimed, but with another Stark lost, he must confront his purpose again. Melisandre briefly grazes the subject in her conversation with him. Most likely, Jon is at least part of the Prince That Was Promised. And he'll need to let fate draw him to that purpose. Game of Thrones chooses to not fully clarify the results of this battle in this episode. Why these men died. It was not simply to reclaim Winterfell, or provide a haven for the Freefolk. Was it to make the first defense below the Wall in preparation for the Long Night? Was it to be the first domino toppling Lannister rule? The show leaves it somewhat ambiguous, choosing instead to focus on the overwhelming death and horror of the battle itself, and the immediate grief over Rickon. And, at long last, the final blow to Ramsay the Bastard.

It was a precipitating battle, if you will. 'Bastards' indeed is only three fourths about the battle itself, with twenty or so minutes set in Mereen with Danaerys, the likely other part of the Prince, finally making solid groundwork in prep for her return to Westeros. In one feel swoop, she has both the Slave Masters' ships and the 100 ships of the Greyjoys. And she's made a pact with the Greyjoys that gives hope for them being less archaic and shitty, demanding they stop the three Rs of their culture. 'No more reaving, roving, raiding. And raping.' It's a potential glimpse of light in the future. She even states it flat out. She, the Greyjoys, and Tyrion all had fathers who broke the world and left it worse off than when they'd found it. Her job now, as is theirs, is to make it better. Tyrion himself reminds Danaerys of this when she threatens to raze the other slave cities. Because how would that be different that of her father's crazed plans for King's Landing. People live in those cities. People die, for her own vindictive catharsis. She has to be reminded that she does not understand the lives of the people she rules. She's not meant to. She's meant to rule and make their experiences better. That must be the only reason for killing, for war. It offers a sense of hope that Danaerys is finally beginning to curb back her own fire. She must, for when she returns to Westeros, it must be as a ruler with a purpose, who does not see other people dying as abstract, as Tyrion explains to the Masters. A reason to have people fight and die for her, the knowledge that she will never fully understand the root of their sacrifice, and a purpose to make it better, to make those causes less necessary. If she can be a good leader, then the horrors of battle are less likely to repeat, at least with the frequency they are repeating now.

With that backdrop, 'Bastards' frames the Battle of Winterfell as more of a gruesome, terrible stopgap. A plug on the atrocities people like Ramsay have laid across the land. They fight not knowing the impending coming of a ruler who is growing a distaste for the fighting, and despises the games of people like Ramsay and the Slaves Masters. Which leaves that final shot strangely troubling. Sansa will likely be a ruler in some form. But, despite her proclamation that Ramsay's words, house, and name will be forgotten, the show makes us ponder if that's true. When he says 'I'm a part of you now,' are those words truly meaningless? Or has he made a potential monster of a different sort? Jon stopped himself just short of killing solely out of vengeful fury. Sansa didn't. She watched a man get mauled alive, and walked away smiling. She has been tapped into her primitive nature of revenge. Thus, 'Bastards' ends with a question of which rulers will make for a better world, and which will simply devour those who wronged them. Will Sansa find hope and reason again, or has Ramsay mauled her soul? Has he won a game in his own twisted way? His name will be forgotten, but will his work?

Together, this makes 'Bastards,' in all its fury, merely an inhaled breath, a gust of wind before the great winter. Never had opposing sides been so starkly contrasted, the light on Jon's side against the corrupted blackness of Ramsay. It continues a trend of this season where glimmers of hope and good people are shining through the grim dying of morality and abhorrent acts. And it leaves a vague sense that we're still not quite sure who'll be on which side yet. Who will try to make battle, and war, have meaning, as a goal to some better place. And will use it for their games. The good side won here. But the war, and the Long Night, is soon to come. Luckily, Jon still breathes, and Danaerys is almost ready.

Grade: A

After the Review (since everyone has a post-show show now)

-Davos be throwin' Melisandre shade like 'Ima pop a cap in your ass.'

-Tormund doesn’t do battle terminology. He just shows up on the battlefield and is like ‘Pfff… ‘nother day.’

-Those two slave masters were fucking idiots. They really believed that Danaerys will let the ones who give their friend up actually live? You called him 'lowborn,' as a reason to kill him!! I can't even...

-The whole time leading up to the battle, the absurd comedic part of my brain imagined New Girl's Outside Dave smacking a baseball bat with a single proclamation: 'It's time.'

#TV #Review #GameofThrones