The penultimate episode (The Bells) of world’s most popular television drama, Game of Thrones aired on 13 May 2019. Yes, unlike its other episodes, this episode miserably failed to live up to the expectation of Game of Thrones fans.
In the fifth episode of the last season of GoT, the makers have suddenly changed the Dragon Queen, Daenerys Targaryen’s image into a mad queen and shown her cold-heartedly killing thousands of innocent people of King’s Landing despite they surrendered themselves.
It seems that the latest episode of the final season of Game of Thrones hasn’t quite delivered for fans as they took to the microblogging site to express their anger and rage against the makers. According to review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, ‘The Bells’ is the lowest-rated episode in the show’s history to date, with a 50% score at the time of writing.
Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff wrote, “If you think about most of what happened for more than a couple of seconds, it starts to implode. It’s better in theory than it is in execution, and it’s full of moments that are supposed to pay off years of the series, but fall extremely flat.”
The site’s critical consensus, based on 31 reviews, reads, “Death, destruction, and the deterioration of Daenerys’ sanity make The Bells an episode for the ages; but too much plot in too little time muddles the story and may leave some viewers — and maybe Cersei — feeling its conclusions are a little unearned.”
“In general, this episode was beautifully executed and really well-acted, with a lot of clean action and intelligent cross-cutting between set pieces. But it felt so hollow to me, the narratives stakes entirely obliterated, once Daenerys made her move,” The Atlantic’s David Sims wrote.
“It is now mathematically impossible for the season to be anything but the lowest-scoring season of the series,” Rotten Tomatoes said in an analysis.
The bar keeps lowering this season, on a weekly basis. Episode one, Winterfell, has a 92% score; episode 2, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms scored 88% score; episode three, The Long Night has scored 75%, which was eclipsed by The Last of the Starks’ 57% score, and then by The Bells.