All eight seasons of Game of Thrones, ranked worst to best

Season 7

Like season 8, season 7 was a little shorter than usual, with much of it focused on setup. But that’s not to say it didn’t bring us fantastic moments, such as…

High point: Jaime Lannister charges at Daenerys

For seven seasons we’d been waiting to see Daenerys Targaryen use her dragons in battle, for them to become the instruments of destruction everyone assumed they would grow up to be. “The Spoils of War” finally made good on this promise. Seeing Drogon flying behind a thousand Dothraki screamers and torching the Lannister army to cinders was awesome to behold.

It was also horrifying, because we saw most of the battle not from the perspective of Daenerys perspective as she rained down fire from above but from the perspective of Jaime Lannister, who was just trying to stay alive. This was a brilliant choice from director Matt Shakman. So do we root for Daenerys, the conqueror queen we’ve grown to love, or for Jaime, the morally compromised knight who’s getting his ass handed to him?

These questions come to the fore at the end of the episode, when Jaime charges Daenerys in an attempt to kill her and end the slaughter. It’s a heart-in-the-throat moment that has the audience torn in a thousand different directions, and easily the high point of the seventh season.

Low point: Pretty much all of “Beyond the Wall”

The season’s other big battle sequence, the fight at the frozen lake, didn’t go over quite as well. The problem with this episode is framing. It mostly revolves around Jon Snow and several companions going beyond the Wall to capture a wight so they can prove to Cersei Lannsiter (and Daenerys, to a lesser extent) that the White Walkers are a threat to be taken seriously. But from the jump, the whole thing feels painfully contrived. There was no other way to do this? You couldn’t have flown over?

So the setup is fatally flawed right from the start, but the episode is plagued with little problems that add up to more. At one point, Jon takes down a White Walker and learns that, when a White Walker is killed, all the wights they raise die with them. That’s good to know, only it’s way too TV-convenient that only one wight remains in the vicinity afterward, helpfully playing into the reason Jon came here in the first place. There’s a bit involving Gendry, a marathon sprint, and a supersonic raven that defies the laws of time and space, and when Dany flies in on dragonback to rescue the gang, Jon stays on the ground for way too long for no reason we can see. And what was with Benjen refusing to get on the horse and escape with Jon when he clearly had plenty of time? The directing by Alan Taylor leaves big wide gaps. And let’s not even discuss how “Beyond the Wall” turns up the heat on a burgeoning Arya-Sansa conflict that needed to simmer a while longer if it was going to work.

Despite all this clumsiness, the episode’s biggest moment — the Night King killing the dragon Viserion — still lands, and Viserion’s resurrection at the end of the hour is chilling. But yeesh, this script needed a couple more rewrites.

Helen Sloan – HBO

MVP: Jaime Lannister

We already talked about how Jaime is at the center of the season’s best moment, but it’s just one of several. His quiet, deadly conversation with Olenna Tyrell at the end of “The Queen’s Justice” is a wicked delight, and his decision to finally leave Cersei in “The Dragon and the Wolf” is a long time coming. That last one is what gives Jaime the edge. He made some real personal breakthroughs this season, and as usual, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau sold every one.

Runner-up: Daenerys Targaryen

Season 7 paid off a lot of long-simmering storylines. Seeing Dany ride Drogon into battle was major, but so was seeing her set foot on Westerosi soil at the end of the premiere, something she’d been wanting to do since the very first season. So was seeing her meet Jon Snow, and ride into a summit meeting on a dragon (much to Cersei’s hilarious displeasure), and even fall in love…perhaps ill advisedly. Season 7 meant that Daenerys Targaryen was finally in Westeros, and things can never be the same.