George R.R. Martin’s Favorite ‘Game of Thrones’ Episode He Wrote

George R.R. Martin didn’t just write the books behind Game of Thrones: he also wrote four episodes of the HBO series, one in each of its first four seasons.

They are “The Pointy End” in season 1, “Blackwater” in season 2, “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” in season 3 and “The Lion and the Rose” in season 4, and if you’ve ever wondered which one their author likes best, he has answered the question himself, on the record, more than once.

The most direct answer is on his own blog. In August 2023, Vanity Fair put “Blackwater” on a list of perfect TV episodes, and Martin responded on Not a Blog on August 29: “I scripted four. And yes, ‘Blackwater’ is my own favorite of those, although I thought ‘The Lion and the Rose’ turned out very well too, and I have a soft spot for that one.”

He had already said as much to journalist James Hibberd for Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, the 2020 oral history of the show, calling the season 2 episode “one of my favorite episodes of the show. Certainly my favorite of the four I wrote.”

“Blackwater” is the ninth episode of season 2, and it first aired on May 27, 2012. It covers a single night, the Battle of the Blackwater, in which Stannis Baratheon attacks King’s Landing by water and Tyrion Lannister, the acting Hand of the King, has to hold the city with a cowardly boy king and a shipload of wildfire.

It was the first episode of the series to stay in one location for the entire hour, and it is still near the top of most fans’ lists —it scores a 9.7 on IMDb, for instance.

Behind the Scenes of “Blackwater”

What makes Martin’s pick interesting is that it’s the episode where he had to take the biggest knife to his own book. “We had to scale down ‘Blackwater’ considerably from the book,” he told Hibberd. “They told me right at the start that the bridge of boats would be impossible.”

In A Clash of Kings, a giant chain is raised across the river to trap Stannis’s fleet, the burning ships lock together into a makeshift bridge and the defenders fling wildfire at the attackers with trebuchets. None of that reached the screen.

Even the scaled-down version was expensive by 2012 standards. According to Slate, an average episode of the show cost about $6 million, and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss went to HBO for more on a conference call Benioff remembered as “awkward.” Weiss said they asked for $2.5 million and “got $2 million-something,” which put the episode at around $8 million.

Then, about a week before filming, the director dropped out because of a personal emergency. Benioff and Weiss went down the list of who was available and landed on Neil Marshall, the British director of Dog Soldiers and Centurion who had never directed television.

Martin had already cut material at the previous director’s urging, and he gives Marshall the credit for what happened next: “Neil Marshall reversed everything the previous director said. Marshall was like, ‘Put in more.’ He put so much back that I’d previously taken out and even added some stuff I hadn’t thought of. He was the hero of that episode.”

The awards bear him out. “Blackwater” won Emmys for sound editing and sound mixing in 2012, and the following year it won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, beating three Doctor Who episodes and an episode of Fringe at the science fiction world’s biggest prize, with Martin credited as writer and Marshall as director.

As for what Martin himself remembers best, it isn’t the budget fight or the missing chain: “When the wildfire explodes,” he said, “it’s glorious.”