Early season “Where are they now?” catch-ups and mid-season “We need to fill out an hour before next week’s gigantic massacre” installments also have their work cut out for them.

Open up your third eye and you’ll start to recognize certain patterns: The presence of a stinker story line (see the Sand Snakes, “Where are my dragons?”) can cost an episode dearly. Below you’ll find a full list of all 73 episodes of Game of Thrones, ranked in ascending order of quality. So, for one last time, I’ve strapped on my maester’s chain and done my best to figure it all out, once and for all. Is an early episode that establishes the down-to-earth setting superior to a later one that injects high-fantasy magic and mayhem? Does a mid-season placeholder episode fare better than a fast-moving one that includes a real clunker of a scene? Are episode-long battles better than intimate character portraits, and if so, which episode-long battle is best? How do the blockbusters of the shortened last two seasons measure up to the slower pace of what came before? Is Shocking Death A more of a mindblower than Shocking Death B? (Or C, or D, or E?) “ The Sopranos in Middle-earth,” remember? From those beginnings sprouted a pop-culture phenomenon - and the most ambitious, expensive, divisive, and popular show in HBO history.Īll of which makes ranking the show’s episodes a proposition as tricky as taming a dragon. Game over! Now that we’ve finally learned the fate of Westeros and all of its surviving inhabitants, it’s kind of funny to recall that, once upon a time, this was a comparatively cozy little show about two rival families jockeying for power. Photo-Illustration: Maya Robinson/Vulture and Photos by HBO

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