And the most dramatic moment of Game of Thrones Season 6 is…

…Hodor sacrificing himself so Bran and Meera can escape the Night King and his army. Was there ever any doubt?

These are the results of a poll we ran two Fridays ago. We’ll be running a lot of these kinds of polls over the next several weeks as look back over Game of Thrones Season 6 in detail, although we took a detour last week to discuss the news about the Season 7 delay.

But back to the results, voters chose the finale of “The Door” by a decent margin. Commenter Peter summed up why the scene was so powerful:

"Hands down Hodor’s death. One of the most dramatic, emotional, and surprising moments of the show overall…and central to the storyline. Brilliantly conceived by GRRM, brilliantly written by D&D, and brilliantly executed by the actors. That was the only moment in all 6 seasons where I almost cried."

Commenter fin pointed out that part of the reason why Hodor’s death hit so hard was that it was unexpected. “For as much anticipation the ToJ created, I really don’t think it was that dramatic; for most of the fans of the show it just confirmed a widely held belief,” fin wrote. I tend to agree. As much as fans like to make predictions about the show, very few of us saw the Hodor moment coming, and that made it all the sweeter.

Happily, Season 6 was full of weighty moments, and Hodor’s death scene had some competition in the form of Jon’s resurrection, finding out about Jon’s parentage, highlights from the Battle of the Bastards, Cersei blowing up the Sept of Baelor, and more. It was a jam-packed season, as commenter Veronica illustrates:

"Hot dog! I forgot all about those scenes. Yeah it’s tempting to think about the big scenes. But the quieter and more subtle moments hit it for me. My favourite scene this season was the first chat between Jon and Sansa discussing how far they’ve come, leaving childhood and naivety behind. Yep such is life."

My favorite small scene may have been Jaime and Brienne silently waving goodbye to each other after the conquest of Riverrun—a lovely moment.

Also, several commenters pointed out that I left off the moment when Jon and Sansa reunite, which…yeah, that was my bad. I’m sorry—there was a lot to get through! For the sake of completeness, here’s a new version of the poll with that moment included, together with a few others commenters suggested.

It’ll be interesting to see if the results change for Round 2.

This Friday, we’ll be talking about the funniest moments from Season 6. Feel free to leave your nominations in the comments!