Last night, Game of Thrones aired what might have been their best battle scenes to date, which is saying a lot—this is the show that lit TV screens aflame with "Blackwater" in 2012. But in "The Battle of the Bastards," the focus was less on the spectacle of wildfire explosions and more interested in the pure gruesomeness of medieval warfare. The main point of the battle scenes shot by director Miguel Sapochnik was to show just how much of a clusterfuck these sort of fights are, that most of your survival depends on luck, and that you're just as likely to be trampled to death by your own men as you are cut in half by the enemy. The ground-level perspective of the battle between Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton('s army) was immediate, thrilling, and suffocating.
After an hour of watching—and feeling the relief of the good guys prevailing—it was easy to immediately feel that this was a flawless episode of Game of Thrones. And in that same afterglow, it was hard to criticize any of the actions of our heroes, Jon Snow, Sansa Stark, even Daenerys Targaryen. But I've had some sleep since then, and there are a lot of questions that need answering. Namely, are these people very, very stupid? Do George R.R. Martin, Benioff and Weiss have us rooting for a bunch of idiots?
Let's go character by character (Arya "The Expert Assassin" Stark, you too will be judged) to find out.