It might take a bit of explaining, but we think the average citizen of Westeros would actually do pretty well on the internet. “Oh,” they’d say, after the week or two of screaming at the constant psychic damage of online overstimulation had started to subside. “It’s a highly tribal culture of people building an identity out of a vague connection to distant, unknowable forces that they nevertheless feel an unearned loyalty and affection for, interspersed with gratuitous nudity? Yeah, we’ve got that at home.”
This thought brought to you by a new Forbes article trying to explain some odd behavior happening in IMDB’s ranking mechanisms for episodes of television of late. See, for the last 13 years, there’s been one solid contender sitting at the top of the user-voted list, with a basically perfect 10.0 out of 10.0 score: “Ozymandias,” the series finale of Breaking Bad. Over the last week, though, that average score has suddenly begun to drop—to the point that “Ozymandias” has actually slipped down to ninth place on the overall list.
In Forbes‘ reckoning, this is not because a large number of people had a sudden epiphany about how hinging your big finale on a man building a jury-rigged machine gun turret in his car’s trunk is actually kind of goofy as hell, but because of beef with HBO’s A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms. See, that show’s recent fifth episode, “In The Name Of The Mother,” has been very well received, to the point that it was threatening to unseat “Ozymandias” from its top spot on the ranking list. (We gave it a B+, but reasonable minds are, of course, allowed to disagree, without it turning into some sort of self-destructive grudge match. Right?) None of this is exactly trackable, but Forbes suggests that Breaking Bad fans responded to this rapid ascent by review-bombing the newer show in order to keep “Ozymandias” on its throne, at which point A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms fans began retaliating, and, boy howdy, we sure wish we had some art about the self-destructive nature of pride or the folly of dragging people into ultimately pointless wars to point people toward in moments like this, huh?
Anyway, congratulations to the real victor in this bloody little fight: “Everyone’s Waiting,” the final episode of Six Feet Under—which we’ve always considered the Littlefinger of heartbreaking TV finales, in any case—which is now IMDB’s top-rated episode. Chaos is a ladder, Six Feet Under! Climb it to the stars!
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