Television Review: Oathbreaker (Game of Thrones, S6x03, 2016)

Oathbreaker (S6x03)

Airdate: 8 May 2016

Written by: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss
Directed by: Daniel Sackheim

Running Time: 52 minutes

With the third episode of its sixth season, Game of Thrones returns, at least temporarily, to its regular narrative routine. After the shocking reveals of the first two episodes, Oathbreaker opts for a more measured, chess-piece-moving approach. It forgoes the practice of shock for shock’s sake that had begun to feel like a crutch, instead settling into a slightly slower, more deliberate pace across the vast canvas of Westeros and beyond. This is an episode of consequences and set-up, dealing with the fallout of one major event while carefully positioning characters for the conflicts to come. It is a competent, often engaging instalment, yet one that ultimately feels like a necessary, if unspectacular, piece of connective tissue.

The episode begins with a cold, business-like efficiency that sets its tone. In a structural choice that prioritises resolution over mystery, it opens with the storyline that might logically have closed the previous episode: the immediate aftermath of Jon Snow’s return from the dead. Ser Davos is relieved, Melisandre is existentially shaken—her faith validated yet confronted with Jon’s grim, nihilistic report of an afterlife containing “nothing.” The show smartly sidesteps prolonged mystical wonder, focusing instead on Jon’s visceral, lived experience. His priority is the world of the living, specifically the men who murdered him. The subsequent hanging of Alliser Thorne, Olly, and the other conspirators is handled with a stark, unmelodramatic brutality. Director Daniel Sackheim presents the distorted, grimacing faces of the hanged not for cheap shock, but as a harsh, visceral piece of Castle Black business. Jon’s disgust is palpable; his decision to discard his Lord Commander’s cloak, declare “my watch is ended,” and walk away feels less like triumphant liberation and more like a weary, necessary abdication. It’s a key plot movement, but the episode treats it as procedural, denying it a triumphant musical swell.

This business-like approach extends to what could have been the season’s most devastating plot development. In Winterfell, Ramsay Bolton, consolidating power after patricide, is met by Lord Smalljon Umber. In a significant departure from George R.R. Martin’s source material, where the Umbers remained staunch Stark loyalists and Smalljon died heroically at the Red Wedding, the show presents him as a pragmatic turncoat. Fearful of the wildling army Jon has unleashed, he betrays the Starks, offering Ramsay the ultimate bargaining chip: Osha and Rickon Stark. The transaction is chilling in its lack of ceremony. There are no grand speeches about loyalty or honour, just a brutal calculus of power and survival. It’s a simplification of Northern politics that serves the show’s streamlined narrative, even if it rankles purists by rewriting a character’s honourable end into opportunistic treachery.

In King’s Landing, the machinations are quieter but no less significant. Cersei, realising she and the Tyrells share the common enemy of the Sparrows, attempts to reforge their alliance. Yet Lady Olenna, wiser and more vindictive, mirrors Kevan Lannister’s boycott of the Small Council, leaving Cersei isolated. Meanwhile, King Tommen’s feeble attempt to command the High Sparrow—to allow his mother to visit Myrcella’s tomb—backfires spectacularly. The High Sparrow masterfully manipulates the weak-willed boy, using faux humility and twisted theology to begin turning him into a weapon against his own family.

The episode’s relatively leisurely pace allows for moments of quieter character work. Samwell Tarly’s voyage to Oldtown with Gilly and her son provides a respite. His anxious explanation that the Citadel forbids women, and his hope that his mother might shelter them, is a small, human-scale dilemma amidst the grand politics. Similarly, in Essos, the plot advances without major surprises. Daenerys, hauled before the dosh khaleen in Vaes Dothrak, is stripped of her grand titles and reminded she is just another widowed khaleesi. In Meereen, Varys—his King’s Landing network of “little birds” now pilfered by Qyburn—demonstrates his enduring skill, brutally extracting information about the masters funding the Sons of the Harpy. In Braavos, Arya Stark is rewarded for learning to fight blind by having her sight restored by Jaqen H’ghar, a milestone that feels earned but predictable.

It is this unhurried pace that permits the episode’s centrepiece: another of Bran’s visions, guided by the Three-Eyed Raven. The journey to the Tower of Joy is not just fan service; it is vital historical exposition. We witness the skirmish that ended Robert’s Rebellion, with a young Ned Stark (Robert Aramayo) facing the legendary Kingsguard. The combat is superbly choreographed, particularly the fluid, two-sword style of Ser Arthur Dayne. The revelation is twofold and brilliantly executed: first, that the noble Ser Arthur was not bested in fair fight but was stabbed in the back by a wounded Howland Reed; second, and more tantalisingly, the scream of a woman from the tower—almost certainly Lyanna Stark. Brynden Rivers’s abrupt termination of the vision, denying Bran (and the audience) confirmation, is a classic Thrones move, trading a shocking reveal for deepening mystery. This sequence is the episode’s high point, a perfectly realised blend of action, myth-busting, and narrative promise.

Yet, for all these competent moves, Oathbreaker is not a particularly memorable episode. Its business-like nature verges on perfunctory. It simplifies complex plots—leaving the fates of other Castle Black conspirators curiously unaddressed—and makes bold, sometimes jarring, departures from the source material, as with Smalljon Umber. Jon Snow’s resurrection, so heavily hyped, feels anti-climactic. Despite Sackheim’s clear visual nod to Renaissance depictions of Christ in Jon’s nude, vulnerable awakening, the moment is drained of awe by its swift movement into pragmatic aftermath. The hanging, while visceral, feels like an expected conclusion rather than a gripping dramatic beat.

Daniel Sackheim’s direction is assured, finding a crisp, unflinching rhythm. The Tower of Joy sequence alone is a testament to the show’s production values when focused on meaningful history. However, direction cannot compensate for a script that is primarily moving pieces into place. In the end, * Oathbreaker* is a better, more coherent episode than the two that preceded it in Season Six. It re-engages with the patient, geopolitical storytelling that once defined the series. But as a merely solid piece of television, it ultimately fails to reach the exhilarating heights of narrative ambition and shocking, yet earned, payoff that made Game of Thrones a cultural phenomenon in its first five seasons.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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