Game of Thrones Season 6 Episode 9 let’s have a look.
Meereen is under siege by the slavers.
Daenerys speaks with Tyrion and he says the city is doing quite well, apart for the whole
being bombarded with flaming rocks bit.
Dany is unimpressed and declares she will crucify the slavers, kill all their soldiers,
and destroy their cities, she is embracing the role of a violent vengeful dragon queen.
Tyrion plays the angel on her shoulder, suggesting that wiping out whole cities might not be
the right thing to do.
He reminds her of the madness and the cruelty of her father Aerys, and tells her about his
plan to destroy King’s Landing with wildfire.
This is an important warning for Dany – hopefully she’ll avoid becoming a terrible tyrant
like her father.
But this is also yet another hint that the wildfire beneath King’s Landing is still
down there, just waiting for a mad queen to set it off and burn the city…
So Dany and co go chat with the slavers.
They demand that Dany surrender, but they seem to have forgotten that Dany has a gigantic
bloody dragon, scratch that, three gigantic dragons, who fly in the sky and the CGI looks
sick.
Meanwhile, the Sons of the Harpy are up to their usual shenanigans, slaughtering civilians,
so Dany’s Dothraki with Daario ride in to sweep them away.
The whole thing with the Sons of the Harpy has been weird this season.
In Episode 1, there seemed to be a set-up for a mystery to uncover who their leader
is , but that never really went anywhere – apparently it’s just been the slavers funding them
all along, which hardly a surprise.
lf you wanna put on your tinfoil hat, it could be that Varys has secretly been behind the
Harpy all this time, as a way of pushing Dany to leave Meereen and go to Westeros sooner.
And it is curious that Varys has never once met Dany this whole season.
But it’s probably nothing.
So Dany’s dragons fly around and burn a slaver ship – they leave most of the ships
untouched, cause Dany wants to capture the slaver navy, not wipe it out – and this
is really first time we’ve seen adult dragons used in war, and they do look so destructive
and unstoppable – just imagine what these monsters would do to the armies of Westeros
– hopefully, we’ll soon see.
But yeah the slavers are basically screwed.
So Grey Worm lets their soldiers go free, but Missandei says that one of slavers must
die.
The two highborn guys gang up on the low-born, say to kill him, but in a kinda King Solomon
fashion, Grey Worm kills the upper two, and lets the lowborn, Yezzan, go to warn his slaver
friends of the power of Daenerys Targaryen.
Over in Westeros, outside Winterfell, the Starks confront the Boltons.
Ramsay brings Lords Umber and Karstark, while Jon brings Sansa and Davos and Tormund and
Lyanna, so it’s pretty clear who’s got the cooler squad.
The two sides threaten and taunt each other, it doesn’t really go anywhere, just setting
the stage for the fight that is to come.
Back at camp, the Starks strategise, and things don’t look good, they just don’t have
enough men, but they devise a plan as best they can.
Sansa gets mad at Jon for not asking her what to do, so he asks her what to do, and she
says she doesn’t know what to do.
But she does give him some really good advice, she says that Ramsay toys with people, baits
them and traps them, she warns him not to do what Ramsay wants him to do – which comes
up later on.
Then we see Davos talking with Tormund.
They find common ground in that they both served failed kings – Davos served King
Stannis, and Tormund served the King-Beyond-the-Wall Mance Rayder.
They figure Jon might be a better man to follow cause he’s not a king – funny thing is
that there’s lots of foreshadowing in the books and the show that Jon may become a king
– maybe sooner than we think.
But then Jon visits Melisandre.
They chat about her god, and while Mel’s pretty sure that god has as plan for us all,
she says it might not be a nice one.
There’s a sense of resignation here, a feeling that everything might go terribly wrong but
that there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.
Jon tells Mel not to bring him back if he dies in battle.
It would have been nice to have seen more of Mel this season.
Episode 1 had that revelation of her ancient age, it seemed to set up for some exploration
of her character, but we never really got any.
We do know, though, that she’ll have a role in Episode 10, because when Davos goes a walking,
he finds the wooden stag he carved for Shireen, the little girl who was burned by Mel last
season.
Davos loved Shireen like a daughter, he’s gonna want justice for her, which means Mel
might face dire consequences.
Back in Meereen, Yara and Theon arrive to meet Daenerys.
It would have been cool to have gotten some shots of the ironborn actually sailing in,
in the midst of battle, as is happening in the books, but whatever, the Greyjoys are
now here, and we start with Tyrion attacking Theon for having been rude to him in Season
1, which is weird, cause it was actually mostly Tyrion being rude to Theon, so maybe Tyrion
just has a bad memory.
Dany complains about their respective shitty dads – Aerys for Dany, Tywin for Tyrion,
Balon for Yara and Theon – and there’s a strong feminist undertone here.
Between Dany and Yara and Ellaria and Sansa, women are now taking power in a usually male-dominated
Westeros.
Yara hits on Dany, which gives the shippers and fanficcers something to squee about.
And ultimately they agree to work together – Dany will help Yara take the Iron Islands,
and Yara will help Dany take Westeros . Dany’s one condition is that the ironborn stop raiding
and reaving and stealing shit from the other kingdoms, which is not a super realistic demand,
cause as Yara says, that’s the ironborn way of life, can they really be expected to
suddenly reinvent their whole culture?
Dany has the same problem with the Dothraki – when these guys war, they rape and pillage,
and Dany can’t reasonably expect that to quickly or easily change.
When Dany invades Westeros, she’s bringing foreign sellswords, she’s bringing Dothraki
screamers, she’s bringing ironborn reavers – and some, she assumes, are good people.
But if she’s expecting all of these groups to happily get along with the Westerosi after
she takes over she’s gonna have a bad time.
Back in Westeros, the Stark and Bolton armies face off.
Ramsay uses Rickon as bait to draw out Jon, and Jon, being a brave hero and a bloody idiot
who didn’t listen to Sansa, rides right into Ramsay’s trap, only for Rickon to get
hit at the last minute with an Olympic-level archery shot from Ramsay.
Rickon really didn’t do much this season, didn’t have a single line – just turned
up, looked sad then died, but there’s still a lot of hope that he’ll be awesome in the
books – he’s apparently hanging with Osha and Shaggy on an island of cannibals and unicorns.
But yeah now Jon’s stuck out in the open, so Ramsay activates his trap card, sending
his cavalry out to squash Jon – and giving us easily one of the coolest shots in the
series with Jon standing and facing the enemy, looking ready for a second death – but the
Stark forces ride up behind him and then we get this crazy intense combat scene, with
horses and soldiers and swords and blood and mud flying every which way.
It’s pretty stunning – the violence is brutal and chaotic and exciting and sickening
all at once.
Ramsay keeps firing arrows, Davos and Smalljon join in, and the bodies pile up, until Ramsay
surrounds the Stark forces with Bolton shields – he has sprung another trap.
As the Boltons close in, Wun Wun does a surprisingly poor job of breaking free, Tormund Mike Tysons
Smalljon, and things start getting a bit too cosy, with Jon almost crushed by the mass
of bodies in a shot reminiscent of Daenerys at the end of Season 3, but without the uncomfortable
racial imagery.
Then when all hope seems lost, the knights of the Vale ride in to save the day, like
the Rohirrim at Helm’s Deep, except instead of being led by Gandalf, they’re led by
Littlefinger, a decidedly less trustworthy ally.
Ramsay retreats to Winterfell, Jon gives chase, Wun Wun breaks the gate, and is killed by
an arrow from Ramsay.
Which is actually super tragic because as far as we know, Wun Wun is the last of his
species.
Along with the children of the forest, this is the second apparent extinction of the season,
the two native inhabitants of Westeros are now as far we know, totally gone.
There are bits about this in the books, it’s like a Lord of the Rings type deal with the
old races of magic and nature disappearing and being replaced by “the world that men
have made” . Here’s a sad little song sung by wildlings eulogising the giants.
So Jon punches Ramsay in the face twenty one times, and Ramsay somehow not only survives
but is left with a face that still looks like a face – just got some red paint on it,
which feels kinda silly, but regardless, the Starks now have Winterfell, which pleases
Mel because she foresaw this long ago . What Mel doesn’t know is that Davos is eyeing
her – he wants justice for Shireen.
And there’s a really cool way this could go down – it may be that Mel will be put
to death for the murder of Shireen, so Jon might execute Mel, and if he does, his sword
may be set alight with Mel’s inner fire, transforming it into Lightbringer , the flaming
sword of Azor Ahai, the hero prophesied to save the world from the white walkers.
This might not be likely, at least in the show, but it would be pretty sick.
The Starks have recovered Rickon’s body – even though those cavalry charges should
have reduced it to bloody slurry – and Jon says he’ll bury the body in the Winterfell
crypts – and this is exciting cause there’s heaps of mystery and foreshadowing surrounding
the crypts – Ned and Bran and Rickon and especially Jon all have dreams of the crypts
, fans believe there’s some secret deep inside relating to R=L=J – so probably with
the help of Bran’s visions, next episode, we’re almost certainly finally gonna get
confirmation of Jon’s true parentage.
Then we have the final scene of the episode, with Sansa killing Ramsay by feeding him to
very dogs that he used to kill others.
You could call that poetic justice.
But in a weird way, Ramsay wins here.
Before he dies, Ramsay tells Sansa that he’s part of her now, and some people think that
means Sansa’s pregnant or something, but what this really means is that Ramsay changed
Sansa from someone gentle and compassionate to someone sadistic and cruel like him, because
it is sadistic to have someone eaten alive by dogs and to enjoy it, to watch it, and
smile at someone else’s horrific suffering…
That’s not the Stark way, that not what Ned would have done, clean and honourable
and respectful.
Feeding someone to dogs, and watching it for pleasure is exactly sort of thing Ramsay would
do.
By inflicting this revenge, Sansa has stooped down to his level, she has allowed herself
to be consumed by the same bloodthirst that she hates in Ramsay, she killed him but she
allowed his cruelty to become part of her .
So who rules the north now?
With Rickon dead, and Bran still believed dead, and Jon still believed a bastard, Sansa
should now be the head of House Stark.
But Littlefinger is the one with the power here, right?
He controls the biggest army, and we know that he wants to rule the north.
Last season, he makes a deal with Cersei to name him Warden of the North if he takes Winterfell.
So maybe Littlefinger will take Winterfell from the Starks and rule the north himself.
Or maybe he’ll wanna marry Sansa, join his power to hers and rule the north together.
Maybe that was Sansa’s plan all along, maybe that’s why she didn’t tell Jon about the
knights of the Vale.
Cause if she just told Jon she had army coming, he wouldn’t have had to rush into that losing
battle, he could have just waited for the knights of the Vale and saved thousands of
northern lives.
Maybe Sansa wanted this, maybe she planned to let the armies of the north destroy each
other, so she and Littlefinger could mop up and be sure to have Winterfell to themselves.
And maybe Sansa still hasn’t forgiven Littlefinger for giving her to Ramsay, and for being a
manipulative scheming creep generally, and will kill him after taking power, leaving
her in control, with all the power, as Warden, even Queen in the north.
Of course, it’s not clear if Jon will be cool with all this.
And given all the hints about him and kingship, given the probable revelations about his parentage
next episode, it may be that he’ll make some claim as King in the North – or even
of Westeros.
So this could go a bunch of ways – with Littlefinger, Sansa and Jon all vying for
power.
The situation in Meereen of course is clearer.
With her defeat of the slavers, Dany’s power is now unquestioned.
She’s got her three dragons, her Dothraki, her Unsullied, Second Sons, her ironborn with
all their ships – Dany now has what she needs to sail west to Westeros.
The only likely complications left ia Euron.
But yeah this episode was pretty awesome, it really plays to the strengths of the show.
Cause the show is sometimes bad with plot and character, but it what does really well
is spectacle.
These shots of dragons above Meereen, and the Battle of Winterfell, are stunning, and
something you can never get from a book.
So for all the show’s shortcomings, it is still great TV and we are really lucky to
get to see this story in both mediums.
So that’s nine episodes down, one to go.
Thank you all for watching so far and special thanks to all the Patrons supporting this
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Cheers.