Game of Thrones: Ranking all of the penultimate episodes

#7 A Dance of Dragons

Season 5 is probably the worst season of Game of Thrones. Seven is also quite bad, but it didn’t have nearly as much problematic content or dud storylines as the fifth.

This episode isn’t terrible. It’s got some really compelling stuff, and the last 20 minutes or so are fantastic. It’s easy to forget that up until this point, we hadn’t really seen the dragons in their full glory.

Of course, they would end up becoming even bigger, badder, and more threatening than we see here, but this is the first time we saw Drogon do anything truly fearsome and terrifying. It’s a great scene, right up until Dany crawls up onto the dragon. The show has gotten pretty good at rendering dragon riding sequences, but at this point they didn’t really know what they were doing.

This might rank higher if not for all of the non-dragon material that comes before the final sequence. We had to check in with Dorne and Bravos, two of the worst threads in the history of the show, and the Wall doesn’t have a whole lot going on either. And of course, there’s Shireen…

I don’t blame the show for burning Shireen from a story perspective. It makes sense and works as the final nail in Stannis’ coffin. I just don’t love the execution.

Thankfully, we don’t have to actually see Shireen burning on the Pyre, but we do have to hear her terrified screams and cries for help. It’s unnecessarily brutal and scary. Especially since Shireen may have been the only truly wholesome character in the show’s history.

And of course,  “The Dance of Dragons” is overshadowed by Season 5, Episode 8 “Hardhome”, which is a top-five all-time GoT episode.