“The Winds of Winter” is the second highest-rated TV episode of all time

Now that Game of Thrones Season 6 has come and gone, let’s do some number crunching. How well does the season stack up compared to past years of the show? Although their opinions are not sacrosanct, the fans who rate episodes on IMDb can provide us with an idea. Here are their ratings for every episode conveniently plotted out on a graph, courtesy of the wonderful Graph TV.

As you can see, Season 6 shares the same basic trajectory as Seasons 1-5: on average, the episodes tend to get better as they go along. However, the line for Season 6 was flattened a bit by Episodes 6, 7, and 8—”Blood of My Blood,” “The Broken Man,” and “No One”—all of which received lower-than-average ratings. The season maintained its ordinary upward trajectory in large part because of the popularity of the final two episodes: “Battle of the Bastards” and “The Winds of Winter.” Them excepted, the plot is actually more scattershot than usual.

And those final two episodes were very popular. “Battle of the Bastards” tied with Season 3’s “The Rains of Castamere” and Season 5’s “Hardhome”—at the moment, those are the only three episodes of the show to receive an average rating of 9.9/10. It should also be noted that, at the time of this writing, “Battle of the Bastards” has been voted on 124,756 times, making it easily the most often rated episode of the show thus far.

“The Winds of Winter” hasn’t been voted on as much as “Battle of the Bastards” (as of this writing, it’s received 81,949 votes, which is still a crap-ton), but its average rating is higher. “The Winds of Winter” is the only episode of the show to receive a perfect 10/10 rating. On IMDb, only one other episode of television has pulled that off: “Ozymandias,” the third-to-last episode of “Breaking Bad.”

For some reason, IMDb rates “Ozymandias” over “The Winds of Winter” when it populates a list of the highest-rated TV episodes on the site, despite the fact that they have the same rating and “Winds” has more votes. In any case, IMDb’s top 10 episodes look like this:

1. Breaking Bad, “Ozymandias”
2. Game of Thrones, “The Winds of Winter”
3. Game of Thrones, “Battle of the Bastards”
4. Six Feet Under, “Everyone’s Waiting”
5. Breaking Bad, “Face Off”
6. Suits, “Faith”
7. Breaking Bad, “Felina”
8. Game of Thrones, “Hardhome”
9. Person of Interest, “If-Then-Else”
10. Hannibal, “Mizumono”

“The Rains of Castamere” is sitting pretty at #13, by the way.

So that’s where Game of Thrones sits in the perception of fans (or at least the ones who rate episodes on IMDb) at the moment. There are two more seasons to go, so we’ll see what manages to break onto this list as the show picks up steam ahead of the endgame.