Friday, April 22, 2016

The First 50 Episodes Of "Game Of Thrones" Ranked From Worst To Best

Dragons and death are a plus; torture and tedium are not. UPDATED with Season 5 episodes. SPOILERS ahead!

"Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken"

Season 5, Episode 6
Directed by: Jeremy Podeswa
Written by: Bryan Cogman

When this ranking began at the end of Game of Thrones' third season, I started it by saying that the show is like drinking wine — even when it's not that good, it still does the trick.

Well, consider this episode to be a spoiled bottle — the wine's turned rancid, and it's unfit to drink under any circumstances. It would be bad enough that the episode ends with Ramsay Bolton raping Sansa Stark on their wedding night, while forcing his simpering minion Reek (né Theon Greyjoy) to watch. Regardless of how you may feel about GOT's use of rape as a storytelling trope, this scene — a major change from George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books — is also shockingly lazy. We already know Ramsay is a monster, that Sansa is a victim, and that Reek is a beaten dog — as others have noted, this scene does nothing to change or expand that understanding. Instead, like so many of the sequences involving Ramsay and Reek, the show seems to get a disquieting, dark kick out of the degradation Roose Bolton's bastard can inflict on others.

What makes "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken" the worst Game of Thrones episode of the series, however, is also just about everything else about it. The trial of Ser Loras Tyrell for "buggery" is such an obvious trap — of course the High Sparrow is going to scrounge up at least one of Loras' louche tricks — that it makes the Tyrells seem willfully stupid, when Margaery and especially the Queen of Thorns have heretofore proven to be anything but. And the fight between Jaime, Bronn, and the Sand Snakes comes off like a second-rate battle at a local Ren Faire, laughably unworthy of everyone involved.

Arya and Tyrion's storylines provide some tiny, fleeting glimmers of pleasure — the Hall of Faces! Tyrion pleading for his penis! — but they do nothing to save GOT's most aggressively unpleasant episode to date from itself. Thank the gods the season got so much better.

HBO

“Dark Wings, Dark Words”

Season 3, Episode 2
Directed by: Daniel Minahan
Written by: Vanessa Taylor

The previous episode on this ranking aside, the "bad" GOT episodes are usually the ones that are preoccupied with checking in with all the disparate characters scattered across Westeros and beyond the Narrow Sea, advancing each story barely an inch in the process. When the the show's critics call it a sprawling tangle of too many characters spread far too thin, these are episodes they're talking about.

The worst offender of this lot is the second episode of what was otherwise a sterling season. Over the course of an hour, we keep hopping from Sansa to Joffrey to Cersei to Margaery to Tyrion to Jon to Samwell to Bran to Theon to Robb to Catelyn to Arya to Brienne and Jaime, and there are exactly two mildly compelling scenes between them: Sansa's introduction to the Queen of Thorns (the perfectly cast Diana Rigg), and Catelyn's confession about her feelings toward Jon Snow. (Until they got caught, I found Brienne and Jaime's bantering to be mostly just annoying.)

But neither scene can make up for the grind of tiny setups, especially of my two least favorite GOT story lines ever. The first: the endless mystery of Bran's three-eyed crow and introduction of the obnoxiously cryptic Jojen. The second: the seemingly senseless captivity and torture of Theon. And so it plops with a thud at nearly the bottom of this list.

HBO