In total, Game of Thrones will be finishing up with its eighth season, which is scheduled for sometime in either 2018 or 2019. Meanwhile, the seventh season is starting up on July 16 of 2017, meaning that there is no better time than now to examine previous seasons.
Here are the seasons of Game of Thrones from the best to the worst:
1. Season 1
Season 1 might not have been the most spectacular, but it provided a strong start as well as a strong foundation on which to build the rest of the series. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that Season 1 was the most faithful to the books, so much so that even the show-original scenes were often beneficial rather than detrimental to the overall narrative.
2. Season 3
The Red Wedding remains one of the most memorable scenes that can be found on the TV screen, serving as a reminder that virtue is no guarantee of victory in something as high-stakes as a continent-spanning civil war. Combined with Daenerys’s campaign in Slaver’s Bay, the result is one of the most exciting seasons of the series, though the whole is dragged down by gratuitous scenes of Ramsay torturing Theon. Yes, a good argument can be made that he had it coming, but there is no real point to the sheer number of torture scenes from a storytelling perspective other than shock value.
3. Season 4
Many of the viewers who were upset by the Red Wedding received some satisfaction from the Purple Wedding, which was followed by an emotional roller-coaster when Tyrion stood trial for the crime of regicide. For the most part, Season 4 was excellent but marred by the conclusion, which went out of its way to white-wash Tyrion as much as possible instead of the books’ much stronger choice to send him spiraling into a near-suicidal depression through the combination of patricide, his newfound hatred for his beloved brother, and the crushing revelation that his one-time wife had indeed loved him for who he was instead of having been a hired prostitute.
4. Season 2
For the most part, Season 2 was alright, though mistakes were made that went on to have enormous consequences for two characters of importance. First, the books made it clear that neither Stannis nor Renly were suitable to rule at that point in time, as shown by Stannis’s narrow-mindedness and Renly’s disregard for the basic institutions that ensured order in medieval society. The difference between the two is that Stannis was convinced to become a better man following his catastrophic loss at Blackwater Bay, though not without considerable effort from Davos. Likewise, Daenerys shows the first signs of erratic behavior in this season that were not present in the books, which don’t make her seem strong so much as unhinged.
5. Season 6
Had it followed from stronger precedents, Season 6 might have been one of the best in the series. Instead, its most spectacular moments were undermined by the poor storytelling choices that had been made in previous seasons, with the result that it made for alright TV that could have been so much better in a classic example of wasted potential.
6. Season 5
There can be no doubt that Season 5 is the worst season of Game of Thrones for a number of reasons, but for the sake of brevity, this article will focus on two of them. First, Dorne was hollowed out for the purpose of turning it into an exotic setting for an extended Jaime original that served no purpose for anyone. For proof, look at the removal of Dorne’s central character Arianne, whose tragic misunderstanding with her father resulted in the inevitable entry of her homeland into the war, as well as the complete mischaracterization of Ellaria Sand, who had the strength of character to argue for peace in the books in spite of her immense loss because she understood that war would lead to more horror for her people.
Second, Sansa was plopped in the place of her one-time friend Jeyne Poole so that she could be turned into a plot device for the purpose of motivating Theon because the show-makers thought that no one would care about the suffering of a relative unknown. The fact that Sansa’s story was subordinated to that of someone else’s story was bad enough, but putting her in Jeyne Poole’s place actually undermined Theon at the same time because the entire point in the books was that he was willing to overcome his fear because he sympathized with someone else’s suffering even though she mattered to none of the grand lords and ladies around them, which made it one of the most interesting existential victories in the books.
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