Game Of Thrones: 10 Most Overrated Episodes

Just over ten years ago the first episode of Game Of Thrones aired. It was an event that changed the course of television pop culture.

At first you only heard rumours, your mum was posting about it on social media, and eventually it consumed the world with a religious fever, the repercussions of which are still being felt.

Suddenly it was cool to like fantasy. You could finally wear your nerdom as a badge of honour. But, despite the many moments of triumph during the show's airtime, towards the end it felt like the writers had given up. All of the things you loved about the show were thrown to the side; the lacing of plots within plots, the clever scheming, characters reacting logically to their situations. All that changed when David Benioff and D. B. Weiss ran out of source material.

From around season five, plot logic came second to spectacle. With the backing of all the gold in Casterly Rock, the writers relied on bloated budgets rather than taking time to submit a second draft of a script. Why bother being clever when you can throw a dragon or a battle into every other episode?

What better way to exercise our bitterness then by cathartically dumping on all those episodes that should have been great, but ending up burning us worse than Drogon burnt that farmer's child in Meereen.

It seemed like a tasteless stab at irony to call an episode that featured the rape of a main character Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken. In a way, that final scene with Ramsay did add to his notoriety, but at this point he had already castrated Theon, murdered a baby and skinned several people alive. The scene was overkill.

Besides containing one of the more controversial moments of the entire series, the rest of the episode was empty. Season five was where everything started getting a bit too convoluted. It felt like there was too many characters, all of whom had too little to do.

Jorah and Tyrion spent most of their on screen time running around Essos, having some genuinely funny interactions but doing nothing to move the plot forward.

There were more tedious back and fourths with Arya and the Waif, further solidifying that plot line as one of the most mundane and disappointing. Jaqen H'ghar seemed wasted as a character; for someone who was introduced with so much mystery surrounding him, he became dull and uninteresting.

After Oberyn Martell was introduced and quickly killed in season four, the writers were left with the sink hole that was the Dornish narrative. So, because Jaime and Bronn had nothing to do this season, they were sent to get caught up in that badly handled plot line. This episode was tedium personified.