This 'Game of Thrones' episode was the best TV episode of 2017, because it relied on its complex characters more than spectacle

HBO

• Season 7 of "Game of Thrones" was kind of a mess.
• But it wasn't all bad: "The Spoils of War" was one of the best television episodes of the year.
• The episode starts with some emotionally-packed character moments, including the reunion of the surviving Stark children.
• A lot of work went into making the battle at the end of the episode one of the best sequences in the show's history. Here, we take a look back at what made this episode so great.

There is no doubt that season seven of "Game of Thrones" was a messy season. The story accelerated at a confusing pace, Jon Snow traveled more than any full-time travel blogger would in their lifetime, and some of the major decisions characters made weren't believable.

But the fourth episode of season seven, "The Spoils of War," is one the best episode of the season, one of the best of the series, and one of our favorite television episodes of 2017. It stuck with us, even months after it aired.

The episode kept things simple, relying on the complex relationships between characters more than the game of thrones that most of them have been playing (or avoiding) for so long.

"The Spoils of War" begins with the reunion of the Stark sisters and ends with one of the most devastating battles in the show's history. It looks beautiful, but depicts hundreds of brutal deaths at the hands of one of its main characters, who is supposed to be one of the good guys.

The complicated way the battle was shot, with multiple perspectives from different characters on multiple sides of the battle, shows how devastating war is in real life and in the fictional world of Westeros. The excellent episode will make you laugh, cry, and pull your hair out.

So when reflecting on the best TV episodes of the year, we took a look back at "The Spoils of War" and the work that went into making it this good. Here's how they pulled it off.