Also the supposed extra that released the spoilers for this ep, like before the season started, was mostly dead on. I think it had everything outside of the ramsey/hounds thing.

guy who directed also did Hardhome, and he's doing ep 10 too.

I liked seeing Sansa's dark side here, relishing Ramsay's death and sacrificing Rickon because he was an obstacle to her rulership of Winterfell. It should be fun seeing her and Littlefinger maneuver against each other.

I don't think she was meant to have sacrificed Rickon. She was being pragmatic and she knows more than Jon what a **** Ramsey is. There is absolutely no way Rickon was going to survive and she realised that.

Actually they did a pretty poor job if they were really trying to recreate Cannae. The plan was there, but they started with a forest to their backs with no room to fall back. The forest could even have been a good tactic to neutralize the Bolton cavalry, but they didn't talk about this at all.

I really liked the Rickon thing. Just slitting his throat wouldn't have been very Ramsay and it proves Sansa's point that Jon doesn't know the first thing about Ramsay. Goading him into attacking and letting there not-so-well-thought-out battle plan not even start seemed like a classic Ramsay play.

The way the Bolton phalanx slowed things down irritated me a little at first, as they could have defeated Jon's force very quickly. However, playing with your prey also seems like something Ramsay would enjoy, so I think it's fine.

The only thing I really didn't like about the battle was that there was no Northern Conspiracy. Letting Ramsay murder a small boy (or teenager on TV) just doesn't seem like something a lot of northerners would be cool with.

The extra diving into the dragon was pretty bad. How hard is it to have everyone jump in the correct direction?

That scene with Dany/Tyrion/Greyjoys was great until whats her face offers her hand out and there's 500 million cuts of nods, smiles and handshaking. Wow I hate that #supernit


Fight was awful, full of every cliche ever. Ghost is still alive right? After maybe the battle of winterfell should involve more... winterfell. Whole thing just makes no sense. Umber actually with the Boltons... ugh. Rickon... lol

The director did do a few cool scenes though, I'll give him that but some of the scenes were just awful too: thrust the spears, don't just hold them out.


Really can't wait for this in the books going to be 100000x better.

Great episode, all of Mereen was good, Yara scene was excellent, excellent Ramsay death, LF boss, double envelopment excellent, etc. etc.

I can accept the last minute cavalry thing as an homage to both LOTR and the Battle of Blackwater and whatnot, but what was the ****ing point of the Apocalypto callback? No other way you could get moron Jon Snow to the middle of the field? How about you have the crosses with burning dip****s, wheel out a cross in front of your archers, tie Rickon to it, start cutting and/or set it on fire, same ****ing result except a trillion times cooler.

9/10.

They did end up doing the battle of Cannae except Jon talked about it and Ramsay did it (far smaller numbers, battle of Cannae had like 60k Romans in the center).

None of this explains why Sansa kept the entire Vale operation hidden from Jon, from initial reject to request to "hold up I may a massive army willing to help us, maybe let's not run to our deaths here".

Yeah she didn't know 100% if they were showing up but any sane people would realize that even a 20% chance of them showing up meant that they should pause their plans.

LOL Starks has been a common theme in this show. Starks are dumb and do dumb things (Sansa hiding info / Jon with the rage charge / Rickon with the straight line run / Bran with the ruining everything / Arya with the stroll on the pier the day after she leaves the secret order of assassins / Ned with the entire season 1)

Random thoughts...

People saying Rickon should have run left and right I don't think understand what Ramsay was doing. He was just randomly firing arrows near Rickon at first because he wasn't guaranteed a hit.

He waited until Rickon was lining up with Jon because Jons horse was going in a straight line and that was the first time he could perfectly predict Rickon's movements.

The scene in the battle where Tormund, Jon and Davos look around at each other seemed identical to:

And yeah I'll give this episode a + mark. It had a lot to live up to, being the second last episode and having the highest budget, and a lot of it was cheesy as ****... like wtf at Ramsay's Winterfell defence, but it made me feel something, which was the point.

Also I actually liked Ramsay's death. Despite being a Ramsay fanboy, I'm a bigger Sansa fanboy and I liked what it did for her a lot.

Gradually coming back to Sansa wins.

From the beginning of the battle, I figured Littlefinger was coming to save the day. But by the time it happened, I wasn't sure I wanted it. Bolton had so outclassed Snow in battle strategy that it seemed undeserved.

And for Dany to ride her dragon down into range of arrows seemed stupid. They have scales for armor but she doesn't.

Yeah LF coming was always the level 0 play

one of the best battlescenes ever made for tv.
i really liked the hectic and chaos going on.
maybe for a tv series what the d-day scene in private ryan was for a motion picture.

From trailers it looks like we might be finishing the season with Bran. That's an awful lot of bodies outside Winterfell =)

Name change to Tormund showstealer.

I loved how it happened though. He basically had thousands of people die just so he could be their savior. It's like varys said, he'd let the world burn just to be the king of ashes.

You seem fun at parties

It's a bit hard to buy Jon Snow of all people letting someone else feed his captive to starving dogs rather than hanging him or beheading him.

Noticed a little mistake upon rewatch:

Sansa rides away from the meeting before the battle just before Ramsey says he hasn't fed his dogs for 7 days. But then she quotes that directly later in the episode.... Oops !

Thought it was pretty bad. Rickon + dogs were good, battle was really bad. Seriously, lol Sansa, lol Jon, lol timing, lol tactics. Opening with cavalry charge...

Obv this is the best case scenario for LF and he should aim for this, but it doesn't explain choices made by other characters.

Maybe we should party together sometime.

You giving Robb a free pass?