<em>Game of Thrones</em>: To the Reckless Go the Spoils
Every week for the sixth season of Game of Thrones, Christopher Orr, Spencer Kornhaber, and Lenika Cruz will be discussing new episodes of the HBO drama. Because no screeners are being made available to critics in advance this year, we'll be posting our thoughts in installments.
Spencer Kornhaber: Go ahead, bask in relief at Winterfell returned to the Starks, Ramsay cast to the kennel, Daenerys slaying slavers, and all of Game of Thrones’s most compelling characters still breathing despite the demise of few-to-no-liners like Rickon and the giant Wun Wun. But don’t let the endorphins distract you from the grand lesson of this episode, which is that Jon Snow really and truly knows nothing.
The safest-seeming prediction for how the Battle of the Bastards would go was that the Stark coalition would fight to the verge of defeat before Littlefinger’s army would save them, allowing Sansa a moment of revenge on Ramsay Bolton. The one big counterargument was that such an outcome seemed, well, too predictable. Tonight, Melisandre was even heard equivocating like a Thrones blogger writing a preview post, telling Jon that he could die again. But as is typical lately, the show chose the most obvious route—then executed it with cinematic verve and just enough suspense.
That suspense largely relied on Jon making like a typical Stark man by putting emotional displays of honor over practical concerns. A lot of planning went into this battle, involving chips on tables and furrowed brows and synonyms for “flanking.” The result was a big, clear strategy for how to reverse the odds: Let the Boltons make the first attack. Sansa pleaded with Jon to be aware that
