Ranking the episodes of Game of Thrones Season 6

2. “Battle of the Bastards”

In the age of peak TV, it’s difficult for a show to leave a mark. How can any show, no matter how skillfully crafted, hope to match the intensity of the final few episodes of AMC’s Breaking Bad, for example, or the complexity of HBO’s The Wire? If showrunners want their work to be remembered, they have to go big. “Battle of the Bastards” goes huge, and stands out even at a time when an abundance of quality programming threatens to overwhelm audiences.

The episode offers things you can’t get elsewhere on TV. No other show has the resources to follow a character through the thick of battle in a long, unbroken shot as horses crash into each other around him. No other show can afford to render dragons so convincing you’d swear you could reach out and touch them as they swoop through the sky. “Battle of the Bastards” has great ambitions and the manpower to realize them.

But for all the spectacle, writers Benioff and Weiss and director Miguel Sapochnik put the story first. The most powerful sequence in “Battle of the Bastards” is a comparatively simple one: the moment when Jon Snow’s own men nearly trample him to death as they retreat from Ramsay Bolton’s army. As Jon fights to stay alive, the scope of the episode narrows. It becomes about one man’s desire to live through this hell on earth, even if what awaits him is more of the same. The episode’s ambition isn’t limited to depicting the chaos of a medieval battle. It successfully marries a personal story of rebirth with an epic story about warring clans. It’s an enormous accomplishment.

Ramsay’s death scene is one for the books, too. Love him or hate him (probably hate him), Ramsay Bolton was an effectively menacing villain. “Battle of the Bastards” shows him at his twisted best, playing sick mind games with Jon just as he played them with Theon and Sansa. The difference is that Jon didn’t have any experience with that sort of enemy, and it nearly cost him everything.

In the end, Sansa gets the last word when she feeds Ramsay to his own hungry hounds. As when Arya kills Meryn Trant in Season 5, we’re happy Sansa gets her revenge, but also a little afraid of her capacity for brutality. Still, it’s a big moment for her, as is her last-minute appearance with Littlefinger’s army, which pulls Jon’s butt out of the fire right before all is lost. “Battle of the Bastards” is as much Sansa’s story as Jon’s.

Lest we forget, this episode also features the Battle of Meereen, where Daenerys defends her city from the slavers. The whole thing looks spectacular, and there’s some quality dialogue between Tyrion and Dany, but it can’t help but pale a little in comparison to the fight for Winterfell. That’s part of the charm of the episode: it goes so big that even something as spectacular as the Battle of Meereen feels diminished.