Let’s start with a warning. If you haven’t seen all seasons of Game of Thrones, this post might contain spoilers.
To everybody else the following graphic shouldn’t be much of a surprise. The ratings across the seasons are pretty similar up until the last one.
Sources: Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realized something went majorly wrong in the last season. But let’s address the first anomaly (drop) in season five.
It’s from the episode: “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken”. The rape of Sansa was criticized for being an unnecessary display of sexual violence, alongside the poor Sand Snakes plotline. To make things worse in the last season the writers implied that Sana’s rape is one of the things that made her a strong leader.
Sansa tells The Hound that without Joffrey, Ramsay and Little Finger, she would’ve “stayed a little bird” all her life after he tells her none of it would’ve happened if she left Kings Landing with him.
I can see how this story line got the writers a lot of criticism from fans all around the world.
Game Of Thrones: Ratings Across The Seasons:
Now let’s focus on the last season. “Game of Thrones” has received the most ratings of any TV show on IMDB, with more than 2.7 million across its eight seasons. The finale, “The Iron Throne” episode has received an average rating of from roughly users. To put things into perspective: The average rating for previous seasons was 9.1.
So what went sooo horrible wrong, that the viewers cut the average rating in half? There are many reasons, but the main complain was that many viewers felt this season was rushed.
Game of Thrones deserved more than eight seasons and squeezing everything in like this makes me question the writing. It feels rushed, inconsistent and not up to standard relative to previous seasons. A lot of character development thrown out the window.
— ines helene (@inihelene) 6. May 2019
Of course these ratings on IMDb and Rotten Tomato do not constitute a representative sample of television-watching Americans or even of all “Game of Thrones” fans. People who rate episodes of television shows are usually more engaged, be it in positive way, or a negative one.
But the pattern shown in the graph is quite consistent with the aggregate views of critics, who have been more positive about earlier seasons.
Dan Weiss, one of the producers tries to calm the waves by saying in an interview: “We also know no matter what we do, even if it’s the optimal version, that a certain number of people will hate the best of all possible versions.”
It’s certainly true, that it’s impossible to make everybody happy, but we feel like it was definitively possible to make more people happy!
How did you feel about the last season? Let us know in the comments!
[…] If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure you do now! Talking about things you should have seen Game of Thrones is also one of […]
Similarly, “Scrubs,” a medical comedy starring Zach Braff, lost most of its main cast in its final season. User scores dropped drastically. Users’ ratings for other shows with much-discussed endings have been a mixed bag. The ending for “Lost,” which many viewers felt left more questions than answers, had an average score of 8.3 — not appreciably different from fans’ ratings of other “Lost” episodes. “The Sopranos,” which ended by unexpectedly cutting to black, stunning many viewers, had a 9.1, consistent with fans’ assessments of previous episodes.