The Worst Game Of Thrones Episodes According To IMDb

Game of Thrones' sixth season was a complicated one. On one hand, it delivered massively on the potential of certain storylines. Bran lost the protection of the Three-Eyed Raven, Summer, the Children of the Forest, and even dear, devoted Hodor, forcing him to assume the role his psychic dreams had been preparing him for. Daenerys broke free from the hopeless tangle of Meereenese politics in true Targaryen fashion: She escaped on a dragon, burned down a building full of men seeking to control her, and emerged unscathed, to the awed stares of thousands. Arya realized she didn't actually want to throw away her life and legacy — but also that she had no problem directing her Faceless Man skills in self-interested directions.

So "Blood of my Blood" isn't terrible. It's just housekeeping, setting the characters' affairs in order after the events of "The Door" and preparing for the literally explosive season finale, "The Winds of Winter." Perhaps the most compelling sequence takes place at Horn Hill, where audiences get to see Sam Tarly take a thrilling stand against his bigoted father, steal the family's ancestral sword, and take off into the night. Unfortunately, what surrounds him is significantly less rousing. Margaery attempts to circumvent the High Sparrow's control over her fate. Arya does not kill someone she was sent to kill. Daenerys cements the Dothraki's favor. It's all good, but it's not great.

Much like "The Red Woman," "The Wars to Come" struggles under the weight of opening a season. Notably, it begins with a rare flashback in which a young Cersei is confronted with a prophecy that does not foretell the glittering future she's been promised. This was a clever innovation, stranding audiences in unfamiliar and intriguing territory before being safely herded back into the known confines for Westeros under Lannister rule.

Unfortunately, what follows is fairly humdrum. Tyrion arrives in Pentos after crossing the Narrow Sea in a filthy, fouled crate. Daenerys faces the fact that her dragons are out of commission, as Drogon is missing and Rhaegal and Viserion have been confined to the catacombs beneath the Great Pyramid. The first stirrings of the Sparrows arrive in the form of Lancel, now contrite over his affair with Cersei and his hand in Robert Baratheon's death. The episode does manage to end with a bang — or, more literally, a merciful arrow shot by Jon Snow into Mance Rayder's burning body — but it comes after an eternity of largely uninspiring set-up. The title says it all, really: The wars that will make for pulse-pounding entertainment are nigh, but not yet present.

Some episodes fail because they reach too far. Some fail because they don't reach far enough. And some, occasionally, fall on their face from doing a little of both. "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken" is one such episode. On one hand, you have a morass of Dornish subterfuge, a region the series never managed to make all that interesting, a couple of middling King's Landing scenes tracking the rise of the Sparrows, yet more Faceless Man training that somehow makes shape-shifting assassins yawn-worthy, and the slow, plodding trek that was Tyrion and Jorah's journey to Meereen. None of it is execrable, but none of it thrills.

Then there are the scenes in Winterfell. Ramsay Bolton, at the peak of his cruelty, marries Sansa, gloats over his victory, then rapes her. Many viewers found this exploitative, and beyond that, simply useless as a storytelling device. We'd already seen Sansa victimized countless times, often by powerful men. We'd already learned that Ramsay was sadistic. We already understood the terrible ravages of power in a world where bloodlines make the law — and especially the havoc men within it wreak upon the women in their thrall. What did such a brutal scene prove? Nothing, beyond Game of Thrones' willingness to shock, which had been well established for years. This episode managed to be distasteful, dull, and boring — not a hat trick any show should aim for.

At last, by the eighth season opener, everyone had made it to Westeros. There were the assembled fleets, forces, and dragons, all ready to turn back the tide of the White Walkers, figure out what the heck was going on with Jon's parentage, and plot to take down Cersei once and for all. Tyrion, Daenerys, Jon Snow, Sansa, Brienne, Arya, and all the rest were finally in the same room! Jon rode a dragon! Jaime and Bran locked eyes for the first time since the former shoved the latter out a window! It was climactic on its own, and promised greater stories still to come.

Yet it wasn't all good. Euron Greyjoy was, frustratingly, still taking up screen time, despite the fact that he was only ever a third-rate Ramsay knockoff. Bronn was sent on a new quest to kill Jaime and Tyrion that viewers knew wouldn't be carried out. Jon and Daenerys' romance, already rushed, was forced to bear the weight of the Starks' disapproval and still attempt to come off as star-crossed and world-shaking. It was all too much with too little room, which, in retrospect, seems absurd: This was, after all, an episode that came after seven seasons of material. And yet, as "Winterfell" set the board for the final season, much of its positioning seemed arbitrary and strange. This was the beginning of an ending few found satisfying, and it showed.

Remember when Daenerys Stormborn, breaker of chains and burner of bad guys, was a hero? It's not hard to recall, given how much time the show dedicated to showing her righting wrongs and blazing trails. Remember when she offered water to a dying man? Remember when she pelted a slaver city with the broken collars of a thousand freed men and women? Remember when she put her grand ambitions on pause to take responsibility for the changes she'd wrought in Slaver's Bay?

You probably do, but Game of Thrones sure hoped you hadn't by the time "The Bells" rolled around. They had decided to make Daenerys an unhinged mass murderer, and nothing, not even their own writing, was going to stand in their way. It's not that Dany deserved a triumphant ending, or even that she was a perfect character, but frenzied bloodlust was at stark odds with how she'd been written for seven previous seasons. Maybe if she'd underestimated her complicity with evil, as with Mirri Maz Duur, or realized too late the costs of upending a system in one fell, fiery swoop, viewers would have bought a fall from grace. But that's not what happened. Daenerys, the only character of her stature to show consistent regard for the common people, decided to roast them alive because Game of Thrones needed her to.

Game of Thrones ended much the way it began: a story about nobly-born people negotiating power. This is not a criticism in and of itself, as some of the best stories are about failure and inertia. But there needs to be anything resembling internal logic for this sort of finale to work, and that was thin on the ground in "The Iron Throne."

Certain characters, by the show's own brutal moral calculus, should have faced the consequences of their actions — but, well, they ended up being fan favorites, so Tyrion landed on his feet despite being an absolutely terrible advisor for years. Other characters, like Daenerys, were branded as ruthless despots for engaging in the sort of tactics previously accepted by the show as intense, but understandable. Any sense of balance was completely gone, to the point that Tyrion, a literal prisoner on trial, was allowed to invent a new system of government, choose a new absolute monarch, and assume one of the most important posts in the land while still in chains. What did it all matter? What was it all for? What was the show ultimately about? Is hereditary oligarchy with an elected monarch actually better than plain old hereditary monarchy? In the end, not even Game of Thrones seemed to have any answers to those crucial queries.