5 Big Questions raised by episode 9 'Battle of the Bastards' 

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The \'Battle of the Bastards\' might have left us reeling, but the latest 

outing also left us with plenty of questions.

We\'re not just talking about \'How did they pull off those battle scenes on a TV budget?\' either, because this game-changing episode may have altered the Seven Kingdoms forever...

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Seeing Theon and Tyrion recalling their encounter from way back in season one was fun, but it paled into insignificance in the face of Daenerys and Yara\'s first meeting. The chemistry between the Mother of Dragons and the feisty heir to the Iron Islands was

The warm, almost flirty demeanour that Daenerys can\'t help but adopt is a relatively new angle for Emilia Clarke to play, and she absolutely lapped up the change of pace, making Daenerys more fun than she\'s been in a long time.

Gemma Whelan, meanwhile, has rapidly become one of the series\' MVPs since Yara returned to regular screen time, and it\'ll be fun to see how their sparky relationship develops next year. While it\'s unlikely to be romantic (although not impossible), you get the sense that these two strong women could become extremely good friends.

Hands up who feared the worst when Davos said he was going for a walk, on the eve of battle, far away from the camp? He might as well have said he was just one day from retirement.

Thankfully, it turns out that nothing sinister happened to our favourite former smuggler, but he

 discover evidence of what happened to Shireen, stumbling upon the toy stag he once gave her for luck, charred and burned. (How did it not get engulfed in flame and frazzled to a crisp? File under "ignore that".)

It\'s a hell of a stretch to imagine that Davos would just happen to chance upon the exact site of that fire, but we\'ll go with it, because the Onion Knight staring daggers at Melisandre at the episode\'s end sets things up nicely for what comes next.

Melisandre has been depicted as more sympathetic this season, but her sins might be about to catch up with her.

3. Why didn\'t Sansa tell Jon about the knights of the Vale?

This one really didn\'t make sense. Why would Sansa not tell her brother about the fact she\'d requested assistance from Littlefinger?

She and Jon were at odds about when to attack Ramsay, and how many men they\'d need to gather first, but surely Sansa wouldn\'t keep her appeal for help a secret just so she could look smug when they arrived to save the day?

We\'re going to give Sansa the benefit of the doubt and suggest that the writers just dropped the ball a little on this one. It was perhaps supposed to be an example of how Sansa is now independent and able to scheme and plot on her own, having learnt from the best in Littlefinger, but it rather backfired.

Keeping secrets from Jon makes her look petty – not to mention renders her the cause of a lot of unnecessary deaths. Even if she didn\'t know for certain Littlefinger would turn up, she could at least have let Jon know it was a possibility.

Checklist: she\'s got her dragons flying free and relatively under her control; she\'s got one of the smartest men in Westeros by her side; she\'s got a loyal army of the Unsullied; she\'s got the combined might of the Dothraki hordes on board.

Oh, and she has Daario and his Second Sons to back them up, and now she has the dual navies of the Slaver\'s Bay Masters and the Iron Fleet of the Greyjoys to get her across the ocean.

 – Dany\'s going to set sail for home now, right? No more distractions, no more detours, no more sudden changes of priority.

Westeros is tearing itself apart, and winter is coming. The world needs the Mother of Dragons right now. The glorious panic that her return would cause would be fun to witness in every location, but at this point, she might genuinely be Westeros\' only hope of ever seeing another summer.

First there was Joffrey, and then there was Ramsay. There have been plenty of villains over the course of

\' six seasons (Walder Frey, Craster, Locke), but Joff and Ramsay are the two that stand out as the Big Bads.

Ramsay\'s gone now, so who\'s left? The High Sparrow? Sure he\'s antagonistic, but he\'s ultimately a holy man, not an evil one. And the only people that really suffer from him are Cersei and Margaery – two ladies you\'d be hard-pressed to call \'good guys\' anyway.

Euron Greyjoy? He\'s had two scenes, and we barely know him.

Lots of this series has felt like it\'s setting the board for the show\'s final run, and with that in mind, it perhaps makes sense that our big villains have mostly been dispatched.

, and with Dany and her dragons finally (we hope) on their way to Westeros, the almighty elemental battle between good and evil, light and dark, fire and ice is likely to be the show\'s endgame.

The Night King and his army of the dead vs the tattered and broken realms of men – plus three dragons. Who\'s your money on?

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