We rank the episodes of Game of Thrones season 7 from worst to best

6. “Eastwatch”

Like “Beyond the Wall,” “Eastwatch” suffered from the season’s rapid pace, although everything more-or-less holds together if you squint a little.

There are some straight-up terrific scenes, too, like the opening where Daenerys burns Randyll and Dickon Tarly for refusing to bend the knee. This sequence continues the moral murkiness from “The Spoils of War” the week before. Randyll Tarly is a terrible person, but Dickon isn’t, and both of them go out bravely, refusing to serve their foe. Daenerys is one of the heroes of this story, and it’s easy to understand why she does what she does, but still…seeing her torch a big lug like Dickon, an affable guy who ended up on the wrong side of the conflict, makes you stop and think.

Game of Thrones is at its best when it embraces the complexity of its characters, and Daenerys comes off as very complex here. Ditto Tyrion, who has the same misgivings we do.

Kudos are also in order for the gorgeous sequence where Drogon gets right up in Jon Snow’s face and the sequence where Bran sends a conspiracy of ravens beyond the Wall — way to marry excellent special effects and effective storytelling, show.

Beyond that, most of “Eastwatch” is concerned with setup, and a lot of it moves too quickly. For example, it was satisfying to see Sam use his newly formed backbone and hightail it out of the Citadel once it became clear the top brass wasn’t going to help Jon fight the White Walkers, but I wish we’d spent a little more time there so we understood what it meant to him to leave. Similarly, it was a thrill to see Tyrion and Jaime in the same room again, and lord knows Peter Dinklage and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau act their asses off, but the script rushes over what should have been a full-bodied reunion full of grace notes in favor of forwarding the plot.

And what plot are we forwarding? It falls to “Eastwatch” to set up both the wight hunt and the Arya-Sansa conflict at Winterfell, plots that would take center stage in “Beyond the Wall.” I already explained why I don’t think either of those plots worked. To be fair, neither falls apart in “Eastwatch,” but you can sense doom on the horizon, because few of the dominoes the show sets up here seem properly aligned. I started to get a bad feeling about this when Jon and his rag-tag band of brothers walked out of the tunnel at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, shoulder to shoulder, silhouetted against the falling snow.

So…Game of Thrones is just doing The Wild Bunch now? I’d rather it do Game of Thrones.

But on the plus side, Eastwatch itself looked great. Tormund and The Big Woman forever.