Game Of Thrones Battle Of The Bastards Was Supposed To Be More Brutal

Last weekend, during the Game of Thrones panel at San Diego Comic-Con, Battle of the Bastards director Miguel Sapochnik, who received an Emmy-nomination for his direction of the episode, revealed that the battle could have gone a bit differently.

When the rest of the Stark forces, led by Davos, come together on the battlefield, Ramsay executes his brilliant master plan, having the Bolton forces surround the Stark army. They form a wall of shields, lower their spears, and slowly moved forward, crushing and skewering Jon's men. Fortunately, when all seemed lost, Littlefinger and the Knights of the Vale arrived and came to the rescue. Thanks to Sansa, Ramsay's seemingly imminent victory quickly fell apart.

"Originally, we were going to have a lot of horses, like seven horses deep," Sapochnik told the crowd at SDCC (via cinemablend). "They were going to charge the horses and then actually surround the allied troops and crush them with horses. The problem is that if you run horses at people, they don't like it. The first time they were alright, but the second time they were like, 'I don't really want to run at these people, I'm not going.'"

Additionally, showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss earned Emmy nods for writing the episode, and Jon Snow himself, Kit Harington, used his "Battle of the Bastards" performance to get himself nominated in the Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series category.

Game of Thrones Season 7 will premiere on HBO in 2017.