Game Of Thrones: Every Penultimate Episode Ranked From Worst To Best

On a pure film-making level, The Bells is amazing. It's masterfully directed by Miguel Sapochnik - with fantastic action sequences and the P.O.V. scenes of the horrors of a massacre - and beautifully shot. It's a visual feast, and it delievers just what you would expect of a penultimate episode. Plus, we finally got Cleganebowl at long last, which was satisfying.

From a writing and storytelling level, however, the final penultimate episode is an absolute fail.

Not only does it betray Jaime's redemption arc by having him go back for Cersei, but the fact that they died embracing each other as lovers was wholly unsatisfying. You can counter-argue all you want, but Jaime deserved a heroic death - against his maniacal sister - and Cersei deserved far worse.

Meanwhile, Jon is horribly sidelined, Grey Worm follows Daenerys's lead and goes all-out murderer, Euron is still an insufferable villain (I heard he's great in the books, but that clearly didn't translate into the show), and the constant toying of Arya's fate just gets tiresome.

And then there's Daenerys. Look, the signs were always there that she would go mad, but the way it's executed just doesn't work. Yes, she was power-hungry, and yes, she was ruthless, but the Daenerys we know would never have pulled a complete 180 out of nowhere and start slaughtering innocent civilians for no good reason. Her transformation is a victim of rushed storytelling and bad writing.