Game Of Thrones Season 6: 26 WTF Moments
Deaths, rebirths and door stops...
Even well beyond the end of season 6, its delicious flavour and its ghosts hang on the air, reminding fans of the wonderful twists and the stunning moments of spectacle that have made it - without question - the best season of Game Of Thrones to date.
We'll sit and rake over the Battle of The Bastards, remembering Ramsay's unfathomable moments of malevolence, Arya and Sansa's defiant revenge and the returns of the Hound, Blackfish and Benjen Stark as stand-out happy memories. And while there were low-points in the story (does anyone now care what Sam is doing?), they were few and far between.
But even with a phenomenal budget and the eye for quality that HBO typically pride themselves on, moments can creep in that make no sense, alongside stunning punctuations of violence or devastation that absolutely leave jaws hanging. Round these parts, we like to call them WTF moments, and they are the memorable currency that sit alongside the best and most epic moments of the show for as long as they endure.
Given the rollercoaster ride through Westeros offered in season 6, it should be no surprise that there are a lot of examples. Here are the season's biggest, most shocking and strangest WTF moments from Game Of Thrones' latest/greatest season...
26. The Dorne Murders
It's rare in TV that you ever get to see something effectively retconned right in front of you in a way that makes it VERY obvious that someone wasn't happy with the way a certain storyline was going. Game Of Thrones bucked that trend in an almighty fashion right from the off in episode one, excising the lame Dorne sub-plot because it served very little on-going purpose.
Hampered by having the snooze-fest Arya story, the misguided loose end of Dorne and the rising damp of Sam's trip to the library, something had to be done. They could have just wheeled Prince Doran off quietly into the Never, to join Gendry in the forgotten realms between the pages, but instead they murdered him, killed his supposedly superlative warrior guard (nice job, mate) and then stabbed his surviving son through the face.
They might as well have just had one of the writers break the fourth wall at that point and say "happy now?". Because we all were once the shock wore off.