How Game of Thrones' The Winds of Winter ranks with the most explosive finales of all time

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This was published 7 years ago

How Game of Thrones' The Winds of Winter ranks with the most explosive finales of all time

By Michael Idato
Updated

When an ill wind blows through Westeros, it blows like a hurricane.

And while the hit HBO series Game of Thrones has never been afraid of putting its biggest and boldest characters to the sword - the Red Wedding anyone? - the show's season six finale may have set a new record.

The Winds of Winter - the 10th episode of the show's sixth season - finished with a big bang of epic, and unnatural proportions, seemingly knocking off a slew of the show's key characters in a dazzling, magical green inferno.

Even by television's sometimes excessive standards, it was big.

But where does it rank in the top five, bloodiest, most shocking TV season finales of all time?

Let's start with number five.

5. Felina, Breaking Bad (season five, episode 16)


This was the breathtaking finish to one of the finest television dramas ever written, with a concluding episode written and directed by the show's creator and showrunner, Vince Gilligan.

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It finished with a shocking scene in which the show's protagonist Walter White (Bryan Cranston) tackled his friend Jesse (Aaron Paul) to the ground and set off a remote-controlled machine gun which massacred the drug gang who had pressed Jesse into working for them.

Both Walt and Jesse were injured in the hail of bullets, and while Jesse walked away, the wounds seemed - intentionally - to have claimed Walt's life.

This wasn't the first time TV had employed the "hail of bullets" scenario for a scorched earth-style TV cliffhanger. Which brings us to number four.

4. Royal Wedding, Dynasty (season five, episode 29)

In what now might be seen as a chilling prelude to #Brexit, this gargantuan soap opera set up a storyline in which the oil rich Carrington family's youngest daughter Amanda (Catherine Oxenberg) was to be married off to the prince of a small European country, Moldavia.

Whether it was an EU member at this time, is still unclear.

This was as much about politics as it was post-Charles-and-Diana romantic euphoria, and the malcontents in Moldavia's government were unhappy about their king handing over the country's oil reserves to an American soap opera.

But the Moldavians weren't going to risk it on a referendum. They wanted something more decisive.

Cue a revolution, in which armed gunmen stormed the wedding and opened fire on the congregation, just as the hapless Prince Michael and the dizzyingly English Amanda Carrington exchanged vows.

Back in the 1980s, however, the courage to kill off your main characters was thinner on the ground than it seems to be in the present day, and when the series resumed for its sixth season, only two lesser characters had bitten the dust, Ali Macgraw's Lady Ashley and Billy Campbell's Luke Fuller.

Dynasty did have a make-good moment, however, when it span-off Dynasty II: The Colbys, and in that series, had Amanda's older sister, Fallon (Emma Samms), kidnapped by a UFO. While not a shocking cliffhanger per se, it's certainly one of the most unusual.

Of course, you don't always need to fire a thousand bullets to make your point with an impactful cliffhanger. Sometimes all takes is one. Which brings us to number three.

3. A House Divided, Dallas (season three, episode 25)


This cliffhanger - better known in the annals of television history as "Who shot J.R.?" - remains the most talked about, and in many ways was the first large-scale cliffhanger for television which brought the world to a juddering halt.

In the pre-internet era, that was no small achievement.

It was, of course, preceded with one of those episodes in which - conveniently - almost every member of the show's cast of characters made an explicit or implied threat against the life of the show's resident bad guy J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman).

And in order to protect the outcome of what was already on the way to becoming the most talked about television show in the world, the producers filmed several outcomes, in which different members of the Ewing family were exposed as J.R.'s assailant.

In the end, it was poor Kristin (Mary Crosby), the sister of J.R.'s long-suffering wife Sue Ellen (Linda Grey) who was copped for the crime and, later, met her own grisly end in the pool at the Ewing family's Southfork ranch.

And it was a bit of a cheat - that is, though the pressing question was who had shot J.R. Ewing, he did not actually die - which brings us to number two.

2. What Kind Of Day Has It Been, The West Wing (season one, episode 22)

It usually takes a television series a few years to rustle up the courage to start firing bullets willy nilly into the cast, but The West Wing ponied up at the end of its first season with a gripping finale.

That saw fictional President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) leaving an event on foot, heading to his motorcade, under the watchful eye of Agent Gina Toscano (Jorja Fox).

But the motorcade is targeted by unseen gunmen and sprayed with a hail of bullets, sending the president, and the show's key players, including C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney) and Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff), to the ground.

As the hail of bullets continues, and the scene erupts into chaos, the audience get a fade to black, leaving everyone's lives hanging in the balance. Did they survive? Take a guess. (See Royal Wedding, Dynasty, above.)

What made that cliffhanger so brilliant, however, was that the stakes seemed impossibly high. Which brings us to the most shocking season finale of all time.

1. The Winds of Winter, Game of Thrones (season six, episode 10)

Warning: mild spoilers below.

So, we start here with the standard having already been set high in the episode Red Wedding, a massacre enacted as payback in the feud between the rival ruling houses of Westeros.

In King's Landing, Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) set off a magical wildfire beneath the Sept of Baelor, setting up a dramatic political twist in the line of succession - such as it is - in Westeros. And Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) took steps to get some payback for the events of the Red Wedding.

As television cliffhangers go, this was a whopper, made more uncertain by the fact that unlike many earlier television series, where writers were unwilling to skewer their stars, Game of Thrones prides itself on sending its biggest names to an early grave.

The episode won near universal acclaim, though HitFix's Alan Sepinwall - one of America's most respected television critics - said it was at times a very frustrating season of Game of Thrones.

"[It featured] more filler episodes than you would expect this late in the saga, and at times being less than graceful in revealing that certain storylines existed only to keep the important characters safe while others fought and died," he said.

That said, he added, "I feel like The Winds of Winter was the series' single best episode."

Foxtel has revealed that the season finale of Game of Thrones was the most watched Australian subscription show ever.

A total audience of 737,000 tuned in to watch the dramatic season six finale.

And the online pirates appear to have levelled off, even though filesharing site TorrentFreak says over one million people downloaded the final episode via BitTorrent eight hours after it aired.

- with AAP

What do you think was the most explosive season finale in television history? Tell us in the comments below.

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