The Top 10 Greatest Moments From ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 4
You don't become the most popular show in the history of HBO without making a few enemies, breaking a few hearts, chaining a few dragons, and emptying a few crossbows. During its fourth season, Game of Thrones played on viewer emotions — awe, love, lust, disgust, rage, fear, and whatever you call that feeling you get when you see someone crush a human head with their hands — the way children pick colors from a Crayola 64 pack.
'Game of Thrones' Season Finale Recap: Suffer the Children
The resulting rainbow is precisely what makes the show so compulsively watchable. From intimate character moments to sweeping spectacle, here are our picks for the 10 moments that made this a standout season of the finest fantasy on TV. By Sean T. Collins
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Arya Teams Up With the Hound (Episode One: ‘Two Swords’)
Image Credit: Helen Sloan/Courtesy of HBO In the midst of a brawl with Lannister thugs, Sandor "The Hound" Clegane got an unlikely assist from his young hostage Arya Stark, who exacted a very personal revenge against a soldier who'd killed one of her few friends. The sequence, from the dialogue's Tarantinoesque blend of absurdity and menace to the concluding shot of the duo riding off into the distance, showcased some of 'Game of Thrones' finest knock-down, drag-out filmmaking. It closed the premiere with a flourish, started the season with a bang, gave the proceedings some welcome shading — and, surprisingly, left us cheering for the transformation of a little girl into a cold-blooded killer. And given their partnership's gutwrenching dissolution in the season's finale ("Kill me! Kill me! Kill me!"), this first-episode scene's triumph is now laced with a sense of tragedy.
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The Purple Wedding (Episode Two: ‘The Lion and the Rose’)
Image Credit: Courtesy of HBO Of course murder is wrong. But if the countless ecstatic YouTube reaction videos and all-caps response tweets are any indication, there's not a jury on Earth that would convict the killer of the most hated king in Westeros. Played to insufferable perfection by Jack Gleason, a publicity-shy language scholar who's already retired from acting at the tender age of 22, King Joffrey Baratheon was the best villain currently on television. Poisoning him to death in just the second episode of the season only confirmed GoT's anything-goes, nobody-is-safe reputation.
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Jamie, Cersei and ‘That Scene’ (Episode Three: ‘Breaker of Chains’)
Image Credit: Neil Davidson/Courtesy of HBO On this much everyone seems to agree: In both the show and the books on which it is based, Jaime and Cersei Lannister's encounter by the body of their murdered son Joffrey is disturbing. But as written by showrunners David Benioff & Dan Weiss, played by actors Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and directed by Alex Graves, the sequence certainly appeared that what we were witnessing was not merely inappropriate, incestuous, and rooted in psychologically troubling sexual power dynamics — but an outright sexual assault. As such, the scene touched off a perfect storm of overlapping controversies: the show's treatment of women, sex, and sexual violence; the role of rape culture in prestige television generally; the filmmakers' and actors' intent versus the scene's execution; whether depiction equals, if not some sort of tacit endorsement, then at least exploitation; the nature of adaptation in the face of a fervent fan culture that values fidelity to the source material. None of those debates have been settled.
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The Trial of Tyrion Lannister (Episode Six: ‘The Laws of Gods and Men’)
Image Credit: Helen Sloan/Courtesy of HBO Offered the chance to dodge the executioner's sword if only he'd cop to a crime he didn't commit and live out his life on the Wall, Tyrion is triggered into self-destructive rage by the coerced testimony of his estranged prostitute ex, Shae. The resulting soliloquy vented decades of resentment and hatred for his family and the society they dominate like an inactive volcano suddenly smothering a city in ash. For Tyrion Lannister, it was the speech of a lifetime. For Peter Dinklage, it was an Emmy reel.
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A Loaf of Wolf Bread (Episode Seven: ‘Mockingbird’)
Image Credit: Helen Sloan/courtesy of HBO Here are the words of House Hot Pie: "You cannot give up on the gravy." Once Arya Stark's rotund running buddy, the young baker's apprentice from Flea Bottom is now a cook at an inn where Brienne of Tarth stops on her search for the Stark sisters. His impassioned insistence that good food is to be sought and savored even in dark times, and his gift of a beautifully made loaf of bread in the shape of a wolf — entrusted to Brienne in case she ever finds Arya — were precisely the kind of quiet, understated moments the show needed to demonstrate why all the cruelty and killing are so tragically misguided. In a season full of sweeping battles and grand gestures, Hot Pie's small act of kindness stood out all the more.
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Daenerys and Daario (Episode Seven: ‘Mockingbird’)
Image Credit: Macall B. Polay/courtesy of HBO A sex scene in which it's the man who strips for the woman, there's no threat of violence or exchange of money, and both parties are doing it simply because they're hot for each other? What show is this, and what did it do to Game of Thrones? Seriously, this series gets a lot of shit for its handling of sex and nudity, but the scene in which the Dragon Queen orders the cocky sellsword to strip and fuck for her pleasure was one of several this season (see also Margaery's late-night visit to Tommen and Melisandre's exhibitionistic bath scene with Stannis's wife Selyse) that had a genuine, playful erotic charge.
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The Red Viper’s ‘Crushing’ Defeat (Episode Eight: ‘The Mountain and the Viper’)
Image Credit: Macall B. Polay/courtesy of HBO Just when you thought it was safe to taunt an eight-foot-tall killing machine…. Despite his almost overpowering swag level, Prince Oberyn Martell of Dorne had proven to be a pretty good guy; in fact, thanks to his righteous quest for vengeance and his willingness to put his life on the line for unjustly accused Tyrion Lannister, he just might have been the most decent fellow in King's Landing. That didn't stop Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane from gouging out his eyes and crushing his head, the sounds and visuals as excruciatingly explicit as anything that's ever aired on TV. The twist was shocking enough; the gory spectacle made it impossible to shake.
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The Death of Ygritte (Episode Nine: ‘The Watchers on the Wall’)
Image Credit: Helen Sloan/courtesy of HBO As Joffrey and Oberyn could tell you from this season alone, when Game of Thrones characters die, open-casket funerals are almost never an option. But when it came time for fire-haired wildling Ygritte to utter her last "You know nothing, Jon Snow," the show tossed its template for death scenes — gruesome and unceremonious across the board — right off of the Wall. Dying in the arms of the man she loved and hated, the two of them having one last heartbreaking exchange before death and slo-mo overtake them: sweet, sad, and extremely effective.
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The Skeleton Attack (Episode 10: “The Children”)
Image Credit: Helen Sloan/courtesy of HBO Like the superheroes of a post-Christopher Nolan world, fantasy in the era of Game of Thrones could too easily become a genre where "dark and realistic" is automatically equated with quality. Thank goodness this show realizes that when you make an epic fantasy, you sometimes need to hack "realistic" to pieces with a small army of sword-wielding reanimated skeletons. The final obstacle in Bran Stark's vision quest, the skeletons — like the giants, the mammoth, the 50-foot ice scythe, the dragons, the direwolves, the White Walkers, and the Wall itself — was a reminder that fantasy can speak to us with pure spectacle, the way great music conveys something that just reading a song's lyric sheet can't touch.
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The Murder of Shae (Episode 10: ‘The Children’)
Image Credit: Helen Sloan/courtesy of HBO Yes, Tyrion Lannister kills his all-powerful father Tywin mere minutes later. (Meanwhile, earlier in the episode, Brienne of Tarth and Sandor "The Hound" Clegane pour a lifetime as outcasts into one final throwdown, and only one is left standing.) But the most emotionally resonant act of violence in the Season Four finale was also the most intimate, and the ugliest. Creeping into his former quarters in the Tower of the Hand, Tyrion discovers his estranged ex-girlfriend/key trial witness Shae has taken up with his hated father. There's a flash of recognition. There's a struggle. Then Tyrion strangles the woman he once loved to death. "I'm sorry," he says afterwards, crying. Sorry for whom or what? In the face of that act, hew knows the answers don't matter. Having previously partially redeemed some of its biggest villains, Game of Thrones has now damned one of its most beloved heroes. That's a move as bold as any Red Wedding or Ned beheading.