Game of Thrones: Which season of the show was the worst? (all spoilers are a go)

[DestinyArrives]

Season 8 singlehandedly destroyed the Game of Thrones franchise from the minds of millions of people. It's that bad. Episode 2 of Season 8 gave so much promise for the future and it went alllllll downhill.

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I had chills at the end of episode 2. Then 3 came and I was like eh, maybe the rest of the season will be better. 4 showed up to completely spoil the parade, as well as 5 and 6. I was not happy about the ending. Funny enough, when I go to stores and find Game of Thrones Risk and Chess, I don't see Bran being a character option. Yet, he sits on the throne.

 

[Farmboy]

It's 8, for all the reasons mentioned. Just want to say that 6 is actually pretty good. Better than 5 and close to 1-4. It has The Door, the Battle of the Bastards, the pretty cool Arya vs Waif chase and Cersei's revenge. It's probably where I'll end future rewatches.

 

[Conditional-Pancakes]

GoT began its noticeable decline in quality with season 5, and continued being increasingly worse with season 6 and season 7.

Then season 8 happened, which is just irremediably awful. Season 8 is the worst by far.

The only thing I liked throughout all 8 seasons is the character of Arya. Arya is great.

 

[Sean C.]

Dany's heel turn was not explained or setup well but I think the heel turn is what George wanted and a lot of people were never going to be okay with it.

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The big difference in reception between a lot of the shitty writing in Season 8 versus the shitty writing in previous seasons relates to what you talk about here, namely, that for much of Seasons 6 and 7 especially D&D were delivering shittily-written fanservice; and while the writing quality wasn't there, huge swathes of the audience were willing to overlook that because it was usually in the service of scenes or images that fans wanted to see. The Battle of the Bastards and the whole Northern plot in seasons 5-6 leading up to it is extremely stupid, on the same level as anything in Season 8, but people wanted to see Ramsay die and they liked the idea of Sansa becoming a badass, so it didn't matter that none of it made any sense. Whereas Dany turning bad is something most of the audience does not want -- and some would never have been fine with however well it was written -- and to lead an audience somewhere they don't want to go requires really good writing, which D&D were certainly not capable of.

 

[Sheldon]

Season 8 is the most destructive, irredeemable and offensive.

But the decline in quality starts a little earlier than Season 5, with 4x10, an episode overstuffed with pay-offs that don't quite land as big as they should because one or two too many short-cuts were taken in the set-ups.

 

[Cascadero]

Has to be season 8. Once the show could not longer closely follow the books the decline did set in but there were some really fantastic episodes in between still.

 

[TheXbox]

Season 8 is the most destructive, irredeemable and offensive.

But the decline in quality starts a little earlier than Season 5, with 4x10, an episode overstuffed with pay-offs that don't quite land as big as they should because one or two too many short-cuts were taken in the set-up.

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I prefer to mark the inflection point at 4x03. For one, it has the awful rape scene with Jaime and Cersei (never revisited, the idiot director didn't realize it was a rape), and it also follows the incredible Purple Wedding episode, the last script to be penned by George RR Martin. Thus, the show falls off immediately after George bows out.

 

[kaiush]

Show fell apart after Oberyn's skull did.

 

[Tochtli79]

Season 5 is really awful but it's saved by not being the end of the series and 6 and 7 kind of being good again. Season 8 was really awful and was also the end of the show so there's no upside.

 

[Sheldon]

I prefer to mark the inflection point at 4x03. For one, it has the awful rape scene with Jaime and Cersei (never revisited, the idiot director didn't realize it was a rape), and it also follows the incredible Purple Wedding episode, the last script to be penned by George RR Martin. Thus, the show falls off immediately after George bows out.

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If we marked the decline by when the show decided to make scenes more rapey than the decline starts in episode 1 with Dany's wedding. Though the congruence with GRRM's last writing credit is very appealing.

 

[WeAreStarStuff]

 

[Turin]

1>3>4>2>>>>>>>5=6>7>8

Admittedly, 2's somewhat overrated and it has to be acknowledged that 4 began the the slow agonizing suffocation of Jaime's character arc.

I'm done pretending 6 isn't as bad as 5(which was like their final, clumsy, needlessly cruel, botched attempt at a great show). 6 is like a proto S7 and I fucking loathed S7. 6 is also where it finally sunk in that there was never gonna be a sincere attempt by D&D to even try with Jon Snow.

 

[Solo]

8 is obviously the worst, but the cracks where there as far back as 4.

 

[Ocean Bones]

In terms of badness 8>7>6>5

But yeah, as good as parts of season 4 are, that is the season where you start to see that D&D aren't George.

 

[EricTheGamerman]

Obviously Season 8, but it gets extra awful points for being a rushed mess of a conclusion that exists solely because the two showrunners were gigantic assholes looking to move on to different careers and refused to let anyone else take over. They turned one of the most beloved adaptations of a book series into a mockery over night and that slide really started in Season 5 when it became apparent they couldn't adapt anything that wasn't written for them by Martin and furthermore couldn't figure out how to make storylines work when they did remove elements that were written by him. I don't loathe that responsibility given Martin's 4th and 5th books become admittedly much more bloated and harder to adapt given all the world building with no clear end point, but they obviously just didn't care and rushed to the end point regardless of everything else.

 

[iksenpets]

6>>>>>>>5>>>>>>7>8

Seasons 7 and 8 made me feel bad in retrospect for being so harsh on 5, a season chock full of botched executions that at least had a coherent outline to it, unlike the mess of 7 and 8.

 

[Wafflinson]

I enjoyed every season until the last one. Even the last one had a few great moments.

.... those last episodes were RUSHED though.

Like, I don't really have any problems with what they did. It was that those events were not earned that threw me off.

 

[Wubby]

Between Season 8 and the Star Wars sequel trilogy I'm just massively disappointed with this current generation of filmmakers.

 

[AncientReptileBrain]

i voted 5 and then remembered how jamie and cersei ended in 8 and i guess it has to be 8

 

[Br3wnor]

Season 5 is worse than Season 8. It gets passed over but there is a lot of dumb shit in that season. All the Dorne stuff is just awful. Arya's plot line and the High Sparrow stuff are okay but they drag. There are a couple of bright moments. I enjoyed Hardhome and the latter half of the season is somewhat better. But generally speaking it's an enormous dip from S4.

They are both bad seasons but Season 8 can be a fun kind of stupid, Season 5 is a boring and cringe-worthy kind of stupid.

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I agree that season 5 is bad but you still had hope for the rest of the series. Season 8 is one of the worst endings of any big show ever and completely ruins the entire series so I don't think you can say 5 is worse.

 

[dragonbane]

5 was kinda eh, but I liked 6 again due the bombast. 7 was pretty shit and 8 was awful. Voted 8. 3/8 bad seasons for me.

 

[noquarter]

It's season 8 by a long shot. Smart characters become dumb. They had to kill off characters they didn't know what to do with. Some characters survive when they should blatantly be dead (see: most of the cast during the Long Night battle episode). Entire character motivations change in the span of a scene. D&D forget how to count and apparently Dani's army multiplies when it gets wet. Character arcs built up over multiple seasons amount to nothing (Arya).

Like, 7 was shit and 5 & 6 had plenty of problems, but they could have made up for a lot of that if the payoff had been worth it. But they fucked up everything and none of the character conclusions were worthwhile or satisfying. Not only did they not stick the landing, but the plane crashed into a gas station on the side of a mountain and caused a rockslide which destroyed a dam which was at the bottom.

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This pretty much how i feel. 5 was slow and boring, but i wouldnt have minded if there was payoff. 7 was sloppy, but i expected the payoff in 8 to excuse it.

Season 8 just amounted to them making a list of some plotlines they wanted to make sure they cleared up and then have them wrote 20-30 minutes worth of material to clean them up. They didnt really care about any of the material that had built up to that point, so characters changed just to end plotlines. It also doesnt help that a lot of it was also done really poorly.

Personally, out of all the bullshit, i really found the end of the whitewalkers really fucking insulting. There was so much that they could have done with them and they pretty much turned it into a royal rumble with a surprise guest showing up at the last minute to win. They put so little effort into trying to explain any of the backstory or anything. They also kind of fucked up Arya's journey by making her whole journey only to appear and kill them out of nowhere.

There really wasmt anything from Season 8 that i think they did well.

 

[Jebral]

I've got to say season 5. They took the thinnest of thin resemblances with a Feast for Crows and a Dance with Dragons and forged a mess out of that by forgoing any expansion at that point. It's when they took out the hatchet and started streamlining. Nothing from those two books was portrayed in a satisfying manner, then in further seasons due to the streamlining they effectively couldn't adapt anything that would come from the books, as they'd cut too many, or perhaps the wrong people. Season 5 was the awful hinge.

I still find it funny that tv Dorne was received so badly that they literally murdered the plot asap next season.

 

[Deleted member 8468]

I understand the complaints against the later seasons, but I was fully with the show until season 8. It was just awful, every decision, the writing (although it did still look nice), it just didn't feel like the same series at all. A real shame, since it's one of those endings that's soured the whole show for me.

 

[canseesea]

Season 5 was largely terrible, but some of it was almost alright. Season 8 was just awful start to finish. Season 7 was maybe even worse than 8, but it gets less blame since they still could have salvaged things. Season 6 was the best of the second half I guess, but the end was also the single biggest signifier that nothing anybody did would matter any more.

 

[bye]

7 has literally zero redeeming qualities (maybe loot train). 8 had a great episode in 2 and at least pulled off some good spectacle.

 

[Ocarina_117]

I just don't get people who say seasons 5 and 6 are the best of the series.

Going off my twitter and social groups, it seems to be the general consensus.

It's because if seasons 5 and 6 we got seasons 7 and 8.

Fuck, I'm still so pissed off about this series.

 

[Turin]

I just don't get people who say seasons 5 and 6 are the best of the series.

Going off my twitter and social groups, it seems to be the general consensus.

It's because if seasons 5 and 6 we got seasons 7 and 8.

Fuck, I'm still so pissed off about this series.

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Really?! That's honestly kind of astonishing 👀

I mean, Hardhome was hype as fuck and actually worked well in and of itself. I'll give em that

 

[firehawk12]

In order of worst, it's like 8 > 7 > 5 > 6. 8 being on the poll tilts the results. lol

 

[Neece]

8 still has episode 3 and 4 which were amazing. it went to shit afterwards.

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Wasn't episode 4 when Dany kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet?

 

[Ocarina_117]

Really?! That's honestly kind of astonishing 👀

I mean, Hardhome was hype as fuck and actually worked well in and of itself. I'll give em that

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Even on here and the old place you had people saying negative reactions to seasons 5 and 6 (even 7) were just book readers being over critical.

People were conditioned to think it was the best thing on TV, and it was a cultural phenomenon. I doubt many thought critically about what they were watching beyond the spectacle

 

[InstigateAndInquire]

S8 but there were signs of the show dropping quality as far back as Season 3 imo. They dragged out Sansa's and Margaery's weddings throughout that season and pushed Margaery's into Season 4. It created some really weird pacing and filler for the Kings Landing storyline. You had Theon, who came off a good 2nd season conquering Winterfell, in an unknown torture chamber all season and the Red Wedding - while visually shocking - had none of the accompanying side characters that got slaughtered in the book and was telegraphed since S3E1 that "something bad" was going to happen to Robb & co.

I remember speculating in places that S3E10 would have the Purple Wedding lol. But yeah the pacing dipped starting in Season 3.

 

[Disclaimer]

It's legitimately difficult to decide. After season 4, they were all horribly written, punctuated by truly offensively bad moments.

Season 5 had Sansa handed off to Ramsay like so much meat (in a political play by Littlefinger that made less than zero sense), robbed of any agency and empowerment they'd bait and switched us with by her Season 4 Maleficent exit, instead having her fill the role of Jeyne Poole, a character with one of Martin's crueler and grosser fates.

It also had Barristan's laughable death, for which the actor wrote a harsh letter to the showrunners because they were such disrespectfully poor adapters.

I've done my best to block out the minutiae of the TV series' latter half, tbh, so I'm just going to stop here and vote for S5 rather than suffer remembrance.

 

[TolerLive]

I'm still so disappointed. What a cornerstone of pop-culture. Riding the GoT hype for all those years was amazing. And it just crashed and burned..

 

[Conditional-Pancakes]

I'm still so disappointed. What a cornerstone of pop-culture. Riding the GoT hype for all those years was amazing. And it just crashed and burned..

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Yeah, I feel the same...

 

[Gotchaforce]

5 for me. The ending of 4 had me excited for Aria's adventures across the sea. Instead she spent most the season doing chores. In all media I lower my expectations for endings, so I didn't hate the final season as much.

 

[Ocarina_117]

Remember when people on this forum dismissed critique of the show as "you just want more travel scenes"

 

[Weebos]

I dropped the show mid season 5, so I would vote for that one, though I am not surprised it got worse.

 

[TheWorthyEdge]

I tapped out of the show after Season 4 and it's the best decision I ever made.

It was still good then, but it was starting to run out of material and I was not impressed by the original stuff D&D were already coming up with.

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I stopped halfway through Season 5 because I knew it didn't get any better. Season 4 is a masterpiece.

 

[anamika]

I stopped halfway through Season 5 because I knew it didn't get any better. Season 4 is a masterpiece.

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You missed one of the best episodes of the series - Hardhome. I would say that season 5's Hardhome was better than Season 8's Long Night battle against the White Walkers.

In fact Hardhome was even better than season 6's battle of the bastards. It did not have terrible writing like Sansa not telling anyone about the Vale army, leading to thousands unnecessarily dying, no one taking her to task for it, her getting away with her idiotic decisions because of plot armor but other characters constantly telling us how smart she was.

 

[Thorzilla]

Anything from 6-8 but 8 was abyssmal.

I really enjoyed every season up to that point but the entire series took a 180º turn with so many dumb choices.

 

[4 Get!]

Between Season 8 and the Star Wars sequel trilogy I'm just massively disappointed with this current generation of filmmakers.

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I was going to make the same comparison, but then I remembered that the reason Star Wars Sequel Trilogy was so bad was because there was no grand vision behind it. It was the product of 2 different film-making teams not communicating, and thus you had a lot of plot flip-flops and character rewrites.

D&D never let anyone else take the reigns after season 5, so they steered this ship off of the steep cliff themselves. To me that's much worse.

 

[Kevers]

Bad pussy season was the season it started winning Emmys.

 

[Jubern]

Definitely 5, because it was utterly mediocre.

8 was really bad but very entertaining, it was great spectacle and gave me much more enjoyment despite being trash in the grand scheme of things.

 

[toastyToast]

If you turn your brain off and forget what lead to that point, the episode in Winterfell prior to the battle was pretty solid.

Everything else in season 8 was trash though, including the battle of Winterfell. Not gonna blame the director I doubt what actually happened was his idea. The hilariously bad tactics and horrible plot armour destroyed any kind of intensity this episode would have otherwise had. Why they kept putting important characters in situations they would clearly survive was too damn much at that point.

 

[Apathy]

8 destroyed the show to the point where people basically just forgot about it as soon as it was done. You'd think a show with a huge fanbase would still garner positive stories and whatnot, but man, it feels like we were all just going through the motions until 8 finished and we all just gave up even remembering it

 

[GameAddict411]

Season 7 and 8 were terrible with the latter being just a different tier of shit.

 

[Cup O' Tea?]

The slide definitely began in S5 but the show still had some redeemable qualities at that point. The worst seasons are S7 & S8 which I view as equals in terms of ineptitude.

 

[AWizardDidIt]

It's 8 and it's not even close. Later series Game of Thrones is supremely hit or miss but season 8 has exactly one decent episode among its 6 and it retroactively undoes the character arcs of basically everyone on the show. Literally no single character ends in a satisfactory place that feels true to them besides maybe Arya and Sansa (and even they got there badly). Season 8 is so bad that, despite being my favorite show for several years, I will probably never watch another episode of GoT ever again. Even the good episodes are like ash in my mouth, knowing where those characters end up.

 

[Pyramid Head]

5. The show still had potential at the end of season 4. 5 is where the show writers saw it was their chance to shine and treat us all to their superior ideas and writing.
By the time season 8 rolled around, I already knew it was going to be shit. I had no expectations whatsoever.