It's a trend with Game of Thrones to make the ninth episode of the season as action packed and epic as possible, and it was no different this year. "Battle of the Bastards" was one of the biggest action set pieces in the show's history and it saw a lot of triumphs for characters who are used to getting dirt kicked in their faces. Jon Snow took the first step to avenging his family by taking back Winterfell, while Sansa finally put an end to Ramsay Bolton, the world's first serial killer. Not to mention all the dragon goodness over in Meereen. With all of that packed into one episode, it makes sense that fans loved it so much that they rated it as the best episode of the entire series.
On IMDb's list of Highest Rated TV Episodes, "Battle of the Bastards" is the highest ranked episode with a perfect 10 out of 10 score. While this is by no means an official ranking (we've covered similar rankings for The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones before), it's still not something to be completely ignored. The only other episode on the list with that high of a score is Breaking Bad's "Ozymandias", which comes in second to "Battle of the Bastards".
There are a few other Game of Thrones episodes on the list, but only two others made it into the top 10. The Season 3 soul crusher "The Rains of Castamere" comes in at number eight with "Hardhome" from Season 5 closely behind it at number nine. "The Rains of Catamere" is when the infamous Red Wedding happened and "Hardhome" featured Snow Snow battling the White Walkers and meeting the Night King. Both were the biggest episodes of their respective seasons, and the events of the Red Wedding owned social media for the rest of the week. I would argue that "Hardhome" is a better episode than "Battle of the Bastards" from a narrative standpoint, but there's no question that the fan-dubbed Bastard Bowl had some amazing stunt work.
Game of Thrones only has one episode in the top five and it's accompanied by two episodes of Breaking Bad. There's the previously mentioned "Ozymandias" at number two and in spot number three is "Felina", the final episode of the series. Coming in ranked number four is Person of Interest (which has a lot of episodes on this list) with "If-Then-Else." Rounding out the top five is 2005's Six Feet Under series finale, "Everyone's Waiting.
"Battle of the Bastards" may be the highest ranked episode of the season, but Season 6 isn't over yet. We still have the season finale to look forward to. The episode is called "The Winds of Winter" which is the title of the next book in the series, so stuff is probably going down. The High Sparrow is still running around in King's Landing and we'll probably need to check in with Arya, Brienne, and Jaime hanging with the Frey's. "The Winds of Winter" airs this Sunday at 10 p.m. on HBO.
