The 5 Worst Episodes Of Game Of Thrones, Ranked

Let's be honest: not every "Game of Thrones" episode is a winner. Sure, the show's first four seasons are basically unimpeachable — and I think a strong argument can be made that, in the aftermath of a particularly bleak fifth entry, season 6 is actually really good — but the drop-off in quality when you get into the show's (frequently derided) later seasons is quite apparent, resulting in some really rough episodes. So, which ones are the absolute worst of the worst?

Because I can't nominate "all of season 7 and 8" for this dubious honor, I made some tough decisions and chose the five absolute crappiest "Game of Thrones" episodes, though there were some contenders I couldn't include here. Basically anything involving the Dorne plotline could have qualified, or anything involving the faceless assassin school in Braavos that beats the spirit out of Maisie Williams' Arya Stark. But installments like "No One" or "Mother's Mercy" simply couldn't compare to the total stinkers I'm about to discuss. 

"Game of Thrones" may have ended back in 2019, but people still want to talk about the show's lowest moments ... so I'm here to relive some of them. Here are the five worst-ever episodes of "Game of Thrones," ranked from least awful to unforgivably terrible.

The season 7 episode "Beyond the Wall" is a perfect example of how, in the later seasons of "Game of Thrones," every single character develops a fatal case of the stupids. In the prior episode, "Eastwatch" — which almost made this list! — a bunch of the show's best fighters, including Jon Snow (Kit Harington), Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen), Tormund Giantsbane (Kristofer Hivju), and Gendry Baratheon (Joe Dempsie), decide to travel north of the Wall and capture a single wight. Why? They want to show Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), the ruling queen of Westeros who hates all of them, that the wights, the White Walkers, and their shared creator the Night King are real.

This idea sucks for about a million reasons, but here are a select few. Wights don't travel on their own, so this mission is doomed to fail. Not only do wights not travel on their own, but running afoul of the much more powerful White Walkers will put all of their lives in serious peril. Also, Cersei doesn't give a flying fart about the good of the realm, so showing her a wight is going to do diddly squat. (Later, when she lays eyes on the wight, she's freaked out ... but not freaked out enough to, you know, stop her war against her brother Tyrion and his queen Daenerys Targaryen, played by Peter Dinklage and Emilia Clarke.) 

The group of dumb boys get their wight but also end up trapped on an ice floe surrounded by a massive army of wights. Gendry, who is now able to cross the space-time continuum, runs all the way back to Eastwatch and sends a raven that travels thousands more miles to alert Daenerys. She shows up with her dragons and watches as one of them is killed by the Night King himself. Absolute clunker of an episode, and you'll spend most of it yelling at the screen telling the characters to knock it off (like I did).

The season 5 episode "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken" really goes out of its way to showcase one of "Game of Thrones'" worst narrative impulses: using sexual assault as storytelling. It was bad when the show wrote a scene not found in the source material where Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) rapes his twin sister — with whom he has a sexual relationship that's typically consensual — next to their son's dead body in season 4. It remained bad when, a season later, Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) experienced horrifying sexual violence at the hands of Iwan Rheon's vile Ramsay Bolton. 

"Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken" concludes its runtime with Sansa and Ramsay's wedding night. As Ramsay brutalizes his new bride, we watch this horror unfold through the perspective of his captive Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), a man so psychologically broken that he only responds to the name "Reek." Centering Sansa's assault around Theon's pain only makes a bad situation worse, easily earning this episode a place in the "Game of Thrones" hall of shame.

The rest of "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken" isn't as absolutely disturbing as the final scene, but the other story beats range from "bad" to "extremely boring." Jorah and Tyrion are still separated from the entire rest of the cast and get captured by slavers who have a really long discussion about Tyrion's bathing suit area. Whatever Arya is doing in Braavos is boring and uneventful, and Jaime and Bronn (Jerome Flynn) are still stuck in the narrative void known as Dorne. Skip this one for so many reasons.

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

The comedown from the Battle of Winterfell unfolds in a bleak, boring, and frankly stupid way in the fourth episode of the final season of "Game of Thrones," titled "The Last of the Starks." With Jorah and a handful of other apparently disposable characters dead after the battle, where Arya kills the Night King and destroys his army — which is also a stupid narrative choice because Arya has no connection to the Night King in the story and it really should have been Jon, but I digress — the remaining series regulars pick up the pieces, and the show makes the baffling decision to leave potentially crucial moments on the cutting room floor. (One egregious example? Jon tells Arya and Sansa that he's not a Stark bastard after all but is actually of Targaryen heritage and the heir to the Iron Throne. He does this off-screen!) 

What we do see just flat-out sucks. Bronn shows up out of absolutely nowhere and is ready to kill his longtime friends and allies Tyrion and Jaime on Cersei's orders, demanding that they promise him a title in exchange for their lives. Daenerys suffers two losses — the death of another dragon and the beheading of her best friend Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel) at Cersei's command — just so the show can turn her into the legitimate descendant of her father, the so-called "Mad King," in the following episode. (More on that in a second.) Jaime undoes multiple seasons of character growth by abandoning his new paramour Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) to crawl back to his sister-lover Cersei. This episode stinks, and it was, sadly, a harbinger of doom for the two episodes that followed (and closed out the series).

God. The really, really irritating thing about Daenerys' descent into madness — which, in the show's penultimate episode "The Bells," drives her to commit mass murder in King's Landing on her sole remaining dragon because she hears bells ringing — is that it could have been done properly if showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss hadn't been in such a rush to finish "Game of Thrones" and go make their "Star Wars" project that got canceled anyway. Basically, after suffering two major personal losses in the previous episode, Daenerys goes "mad" on fast-forward. When she heads to King's Landing, the city rings its bells in surrender since she has a giant Westerosi nuclear weapon in the form of her fire-breathing beast Drogon. (What the bells "mean" in "Game of Thrones" changes often and rarely makes any sense.) Daenerys, who is mad and sad, kills a ton of innocent civilians anyway.

In the behind-the-scenes video that aired after "The Bells," Weiss says that just the mere sight of the Red Keep turns Daenerys into Hitler but with dragons: "It's in that moment, on the walls of King's Landing, where she's looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to make it personal." With very little due respect to Weiss, this is a criminally stupid explanation. 

The worst episode of "Game of Thrones" is its series final "The Iron Throne," and it's not particularly close. This finale was so egregiously bad that it basically undid the show's cultural goodwill overnight; after being the center of the pop culture universe for a decade, everyone suddenly stopped talking about "Game of Thrones" unless it was to say something like, "Wow, that finale sucked." 

In the aftermath of Daenerys' mass murder, a few of her loyal followers, including Tyrion and Jon, are understandably a bit upset with their queen. Tyrion quits his gig as her Hand and Jon takes things one step further by killing his aunt/lover when she indicates that she'll do whatever it takes to retain power. A council of the show's remaining characters decide that Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead-Wright), a character so narratively useless that he doesn't even appear in the show's fifth season, should be King of Westeros because he has the "best story" (what?!), despite the fact that he doesn't and he's also an omniscient being called the Three-Eyed Raven who should probably be ineligible for the job. (Speaking of people getting jobs they shouldn't, Bronn, who freely admits earlier in the series that he doesn't know how loans work, becomes Bran's Master of Coin. Okay!) Jon returns to the Night's Watch, which no longer exists, and everyone else scatters for the sake of a tidy resolution to the show, not for reasons that make any sense (can't Bran just tell Arya what's "west of Westeros?").

We all know the finale of "Game of Thrones" is a pile of crap, so here's a personal anecdote. When Sam Tarly, played by John Bradley, announced that he wrote a book of Westerosi history and called it "A Song of Ice and Fire," I got up and left my apartment full of people watching the episode — because I was overcome with white-hot rage and needed to separate myself from civilized society. I hate this episode, and if you're reading this, you probably do too.