Game of Thrones season 7 is in the books, and it’s time to reflect. It was the best of seasons, it was the worst of seasons, and although mileage is sure to vary, this is how I thought the latest year of the show shook down.
Without further ado, here are the seven episodes of Game of Thrones season 7, ranked from worst to best:
7. “Beyond the Wall”
At this point, it’s pretty much a cliche to poke holes in the plot of “Beyond the Wall.” But if the shoe fits…
The thrust of this episode involves Jon and company heading north of the Wall to capture a wight so they can bring it to King’s Landing. Unfortunately, their adventure is plagued by one contrivance after another. An example: Jon takes down a White Walker, which results in all the wights that White Walker raised being deactivated. Okay, neat. But it just so happens that all but one of the wights in the area are stricken useless, conveniently playing in to the reason Jon is here in the first place. C’mon, now.
Another one: while Jon and the gang wait on an island in the middle of a frozen lake, surrounded by wights, Gendry Waters runs from wherever they are to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, sends a letter to Daenerys on Dragonstone, and waits while Dany changes into a stunning white ensemble and wings it all the way north of the Wall, where she arrives just in the nick of time to save the still-stranded group from death by zombies. Another: rather than getting on Dany’s dragon, Jon slashes at wights and gets knocked into the freezing water. Later, he pulls himself out despite wearing heavy gear and having to clamor over treacherous, slippery ice. Naturally, Benjen Stark is on hand to lend him a horse, but can’t come with because there’s “no time”…and then we have a few long lingering shots of Jon riding away while Benjen stares down the approaching horde. Again: c’mon, now.
In isolation, these and other eye-rolling moments could be waved away as nitpicks, but it’s how they come together that sinks the episode. Worst of all is that the whole thing is built on one huge, baffling leap of logic: that Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, and Tyrion Lannister would all agree, knowing what they know, that heading north of the Wall on the slim hope of fetching back a wight on the even slimmer hope of convincing Cersei Lannister to help them is a good idea. No amount of spectacular special effects (and they are spectacular) or charmingly written conversations (and they are charming) can make up for the fact that, as a story, “Beyond the Wall” is extremely shaky.
Suspension of disbelief is required in a show about dragons, but fantasy elements are no excuse for sloppy plotting and a disregard for the rules, both those the show has set up for itself and those that apply to any story about people, places and things. Looking back, it seems clear that the showrunners had some endpoints in mind — namely killing Viserion and resurrecting him as a Zombie Dragon, which is still chilling despite everything — and were willing to twist the story out of shape to make it happen.
The same goes for the plot at Winterfell, which sees the feud between Arya and Sansa ratchet up several notches. The problem here isn’t that there’s no reason for the sisters to be at odds — true, they never had a great relationship as children; and true, Arya is known to be vengeful against people she thinks have betrayed her family. The problem is that their conflict goes from 0 to 60 with only the barest tap of the gas pedal. Arya may be intense, but she isn’t stupid, and it’s very hard to believe she would go after Sansa this hard on the strength of a years-old letter when she’s more than capable of understanding the circumstances under which it was written, to say nothing of advancing slowly on her sister with a dagger. It’s a show’s job to sell a plot twist or a character arc. No one was buying here.
More than any other episode this year, “Beyond the Wall” was a victim of the season’s accelerated pace, something we heard a lot about before the premiere. Pretty much everything needed more setup, more support, more buttressing. It’s a mess.
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.
5. “Stormborn”
Okay, here we go. “Stormborn” is pretty solid wall to wall — there are nits to pick, but nothing damning.
The episode features a few fun tête-à-têtes on Dragonstone, where Daenerys gets face time with characters like Varys, Melisandre, and Lady Olenna Tyrell. This is our introduction to the new Daenerys, a woman who’s taken the lessons she’s learned on Essos and bent them to the task of conquering Westeros. She’s tough — her threat to burn Varys alive if he betrays her is pretty clear-cut — but she still has her good sense, and is smart enough to lean on Tyrion when it comes to winning other houses over to her side…for however long that lasts.
Also, it’s a kick to see so many disparate characters coming together for a strategy session. Worlds shrinking and all that.
There’s strategizing happening all over the place. At Winterfell, Jon decides to head south and leaves Sansa in charge, which is fine…except that he makes the announcement to a roomful of lords without telling Sansa beforehand, which results in all kinds of acrimony. And he does this after pretty much the exact same thing happened the week before. Basically, we’re left with two options: either Jon and Sansa are dumber than we thought, or the writers gave them an attack of the stupids for the sake of drama. The scenes still work, but the contrivance rankles.
Several of the scenes in “Stormborn” have flashes of that. Cersei rallies several lords to her side, which is good…but would she have been able to flip Randyll Tarly that easily? Sam shears Jorah of his greyscale, which is admirable (and memorably gross)…but would he have been able to learn that skill that quickly?
I know I’m nitpicking here; these things stretch rather than break suspension of disbelief. Still, it’s hard not to wonder what could have been if these storylines had a little more room to breathe.
But “Stormborn” delivers where it matters, which is why it’s hard to sweat the smaller stuff. Do we wonder how, towards the end of the hour, Euron Greyjoy is able to ambush his niece Yara’s fleet without her knowing? Sure. But the resulting battle at sea is high-octane stuff, and the final moment — where Theon, surrounded by devastation, regresses back to Reek and abandons his sister — is note-perfect.
The best scenes of the episode belong to Arya. Her reunion with Hot Pit is sweet and funny and sad, while her reunion with Nymeria the direwolf is damn-near heartbreaking. After having her cooped up in the House of Black and White for a couple years, it was liberating to have her back in the mix in Westeros.
4. “Dragonstone”
Game of Thrones season 7 came bounding out of the gate with a rock-solid premiere that managed to be very entertaining despite being largely about setup. It helps that the first scene features Arya Stark, wearing Walder Frey’s face, poisoning a roomful of people involved in the Red Wedding. It’s wildly melodramatic, ghoulishly macabre, unabashedly crowd-pleasing and a lot of fun. “Leave one wolf alive and the sheep are never safe.” That’s just a good line, people.
In fact, before the Arya-Sansa drama started up at Winterfell, Arya was a highlight of the season. The scene where she jokes around with Ed Sheeran’s Lannister battalion is fun, too; it shows us an Arya capable of just…relaxing. Now that Arya had returned home, it was important to remind viewers that the girl she used to be — gregarious, precocious, fun — was still in there, despite everything she’d endured.
The other big sequence also happens in the Riverlands. The Hound, traveling north with the Brotherhood Without Banners, stumbles on the bodies of the farmer and the farmer’s daughter he robbed back in season 4. Overcome by guilt, he buries them in the cold earth. It’s such an unexpected turn from the Hound — and yet, when we consider what he’s been through since Arya left him for dead years before, it makes perfect sense. Rory McCann sells it with tender vulnerability masked by a world-weary grimace. The Hound is one of the most quietly fascinating characters on the show, and scenes like this are a big part of the reason why.
And of course there’s the final scene, where Daenerys and her crew arrive on Dragonstone, which becomes their new home base. The show takes its time here, lingering on small moments like Daenerys running her hands through the sand on the beach so we feel how important this homecoming is to her. And the fact that Dragonstone itself looks amazeballs-bonkers-beautiful is a nice bonus.
Beyond that, “Dragonstone” moves a lot of pieces into place. We get an interesting (if disgusting) introduction to Sam’s dreary new life at the Citadel, some backroom back-and-forth between the major players at Winterfell, and the whir of the engines as Cersei’s war machine purrs to life. Of those scenes, the most enjoyable is probably the last, if for no other reason than because Pilou Asbæk, back for his second season as Euron Greyjoy, puts a new spring in his step.
3. “The Dragon and the Wolf”
The final episode of season 7 is one of its strongest, and a nice bounce back after a couple of iffy hours. Unlike “Eastwatch” and “Beyond the Wall,” “The Dragon and the Wolf” is interested in detail and minutia. The first chunk is dominated by a huge gathering of characters at the Dragonpit in King’s Landing, and director Jeremy Podeswa takes his time drawing out the small, intimate moments they share. Dany’s fashionably late arrival on Drogon is the scene-stealer, but it holds no less weight than a cathartic walk-and-talk between Brienne and the Hound, a reunion of the Heroes of Blackwater Bay, and a series of furtive glances between Jaime, Cersei and Brienne.
“Beyond the Wall” leaned on spectacle, which is fine so long as that spectacle is built on a solid foundation. It wasn’t, and the episode was a failure. “The Dragon and the Wolf” leans on character, and is far more successful. The electrifying back and forth between Cersei and Tyrion around the middle of the episode, which finds both Lena Headey and Peter Dinklage at the top of their game, is worth the price of admission by itself.
The episode even manages to pull a fairly satisfying resolution out of the muddled conflict between Arya and Sansa. I would have enjoyed the scene in the Winterfell Great Hall more if it had been built up more carefully, but seeing Sansa, Arya, and Bran unite to take down Littlefinger is still a treat. Let’s hope that, with this conflict resolved, the siblings can start fresh next year.
“The Dragon and the Wolf” also pulls off a couple of big moments towards the end. First, there’s the revelation that Jon and Dany are related, something we find out while they have sex for the first time. The show treats both halves of this scene with the appropriate gravity, but combining them gives them a potency they wouldn’t have by themselves. The guy and the girl finally get together just as we learn they can’t stay that way. The final scene is entertaining, too — it would have been hard to mess up an ice monster riding a zombie dragon and burning down a huge wall. It’s pure spectacle and it works.
And between that, we get excellent character-driven scenes like the one where Jaime finally walks out on Cersei and the one where Theon resolves to rescue Yara. “The Dragon and the Wolf” takes full advantage of the show’s deep bench of characters and superb cast, slowing the pace down so we can fully appreciate where they are and how their journeys are changing. If this is a template for what episodes will be like in season 8, we have a lot to look forward to.
2. “The Queen’s Justice”
“The Queen’s Justice” didn’t generate the hype of some of the other episodes this season. It didn’t have the splashy set pieces of “The Spoils of War” and “Beyond the Wall” or the epic sprawl of “The Dragon and the Wolf.” But in its own quiet way, this was the episode of the year. It made good on meetings viewers had been looking forward to for ages, sent a fan favorite character off in style, and did it all while coloring comfortably within the lines of the Game of Thrones playbook.
We have to start with the meeting between Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen, something fans had been fantasizing about for literally decades. The temptation in scenes like this is to underline how important they are with swelling music, flashy camerawork, or flowery dialogue. As when Tyrion and Dany met back in season 5, the show didn’t fall into this trap. It stayed true to Jon and Dany’s characters, presenting them as two stubborn leaders struggling to see each other’s points of view while their advisors try to keep things from spinning out of control. It’s got drama, it’s got tension, it’s got humor (Davos’ shortcomings as a Hype Man may be the laugh-out-loud moment of the season). It works on a political level, an interpersonal level, and maybe even a romantic level. It’s a splendid payoff to a story that’s been building for a very long time.
Over in King’s Landing, the Lannister twins are also in fine form, particularly Cersei, who has a scene-stealing turn as a ferocious black widow in a dungeon under the Red Keep. Lena Headey has always been excellent, but Cersei’s queenship gave her new meat to sink her teeth into, and she goes for it.
Sansa has a solid week, too; we see her competently run Winterfell and reunite with Bran. Their reunion isn’t as moving as the one between Sansa and Jon in season 6, but considering where Bran’s head is at these days, there’s no way it could have been. Love him or hate him, this episode sets up the new, detached Bran very well. And if Sansa had any doubts about his abilities, they were dispelled in the Winterfell godswood when he reveals intimate knowledge of the most horrible night of the life — It’s an effectively creepy moment.
So the episode is packed with good scenes, but it saves the best for last. Tyrion has devised a plan whereby the Unsullied will storm and take Casterly Rock, which they do. The twist: Jaime saw this coming, abandoned the Lannister stronghold (which, unbeknownst to Tyrion, wasn’t as valuable as it once was), and sacked Highgarden, which was plump with cash. It’s a fun surprise and a credible way to turn the tables on Daenerys, who at first seemed like she was going to roll over the Seven Kingdoms unopposed.
The final scene, where Jaime confronts Lady Olenna and executes her with poison, is a scorcher. Olenna is beaten, but before she goes, she turns the tables one last time, revealing to Jaime that it was she — not Tyrion — who killed Joffrey. Suddenly, it becomes clear how much of the pain and loss the Lannisters have gone through in the last few years was self-inflicted. Even in death, Olenna came out ahead. (Also, maybe this will be the scene that finally convinces the Emmy voters to give Diana Rigg a statue for her work as Olenna? Here’s hoping.)
“The Queen’s Justice” isn’t perfect. Like other episodes this season, the accelerated pace means that it sometimes takes plot shortcuts. Euron’s ability to warp around the world so he can torch the Unsullied ships is a head-scratcher, and we can’t help but wonder why the Tyrell army didn’t put up a better fight at Highgarden. But like “Stormborn,” “The Queen’s Justice” delivers where it matters, and it delivers hard.
1. “The Spoils of War”
For the bulk of its short run-time, “The Spoils of War” is simply a solid episode of Game of Thrones. Cersei makes inroads at the Iron Bank, Jon and Dany get closer, and Arya returns to Winterfell. That’s all fine, particularly the Winterfell material. Like Bran’s arrival at the Stark family castle the episode before, Arya’s return seems somehow muted. Knowing where this story will go in the next few weeks, that was likely deliberate. But just watching her sit in the Winterfell courtyard, scanning her childhood home and seeing how it’s changed, is a quietly bittersweet way to pay off her six-year journey. She’s back, but she’s not the same and neither is the North.
Later, Arya’s sparring session with Brienne gives us a more straight-forward reason to cheer her return. Does their duel feel like fan service? Maybe a little, but it makes sense within the narrative, and it’s a blast to watch them do what they do and love every minute of it. Praise is also in order for Bran’s scene with Littlefinger and Meera Reed, which is one part badass and one part heartrending.
But “The Spoils of War” isn’t ranked this high because of the Stark family reunion. It’s not ranked this high because of the Jon-Dany scene in the caves on Dragonstone, which is well-done even if the cave paintings look a little hokey. It’s ranked this high because, at episode’s end, Dany mounts Drogon and leads her Dothraki calvary into battle against the Lannister forces and it’s everything I possibly could have wanted it to be.
Let’s start with the spectacle of it. It’s spectacular. Even before the dragon gets involved, it’s spectacular. May I remind you this episode involves a Dothraki rider standing up on his horse and jumping over the Lannister infantry line so he can wreck shit from the inside? Only a fool would meet the Dothraki in an open field, etc, etc. Thank god for fools.
But the main draw here is Drogon. Like other episodes this season, “The Spoils of War” gives us climaxes that in some cases we didn’t even know were building. Even though it was never specifically foreshadowed, we’ve been waiting to see a fully-grown dragon tear up an enemy army since the three of them hatched back in season 1. It finally happened here, and it was worth the wait.
But what’s surprising about the Loot Train Attack, and what sets it apart from other epic battles the show has done, is how it plays with perspective. Seeing Drogon in action is glorious…if you’re on Daenerys’ side. But for much of the battle, we’re not. We spend most of our time with Jaime and Bronn, who are desperately trying to stay alive as Drogon turns their fellow soldiers to dust. To them, Daenerys isn’t a liberator; she’s a tyrant riding an atom bomb, which is why the final moment of the episode lands so well. Jaime, determined to kill Daenerys before she can do any more damage, charges at her as she tries to pull a bolt out of Drogon’s side. Tyrion, who has ties to both Dany and Jaime, watches from afar, scared for both of them. In this moment, he’s a stand-in for the audience, who aren’t sure where their loyalties lie and can only watch as the train rolls off the rails. The show avoids a crash by having Bronn tackle Jaime into the water right before Drogon sends a spout of flame his way. Still…phew, what a sequence.
At its heart, Game of Thrones has always been about how, in war, there is no right or wrong side — it all depends on who you are and where you’re at. “It’s tempting to see your enemies as evil,” Jorah once told Daenerys, “but there’s good and evil on both sides of every war ever fought.” The Loot Train Attack takes that idea, spends several million dollars turning it into an action set-piece, and lets it loose.
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