Game of Thrones: New analysis finds which episodes are deadliest

With the power of science and math, a new analysis has figured out which episodes of each Game of Thrones season are most likely to kill characters off.

By now, you’ve probably seen that video claiming that Game of Thrones has killed over 150,000 characters in its 60 episodes so far. Now, we’re going to guess that the number is going to jump even higher in season 7. Why else would the trailers emphasize war so much? No, there’s going to be some dying going on. That’s not really a bold prediction. 

But io9 found a new analysis breaking down the first six seasons by the numbers. While io9 chose to focus on screen time, Looker also analyzed when deaths of characters that we actually care about are more likely to occur by episode counts. In fact, there’s even a trend.

Basically, in recent seasons, the season finale and the midpoint of the season are likely to be deadliest. Now, Looker was operating on the idea of the regular 10-episode season, since the analysis focused primarily on the already extent seasons of the show.

Of course, season 7 doesn’t actually have 10 episodes. There are seven instead. But you can’t neatly divide seven by two. That means that episodes 3 and 4 could sort of split the mid-season death duties in season 7, and then episode 7 just makes up for the three missing episodes and kills as many characters as it can get away with.

And then season 8 will just throw all the patterns out the window.

Could season 7 already start to defy this pattern, though? We don’t think episode 1 will ramp things up too much or start with a bang. That comes from season 6, where we had to wait until episode 2 for Jon Snow to do what we all figured what he would and come back to life.

Just as a guess, episode 1 might end on a big moment as a sort of “welcome back”. After all, Thrones has an hour to play with in the season 7 premiere. It could be a nice callback to season 1, where Jaime Lannister pushed Bran Stark out of a window right before the credits rolled.

Additionally, Looker found that the show has been a lot more willing to kill its named characters (something it emphasizes, probably so as not to have to make the estimates that the video does) in the previous three seasons. Now, this makes sense on a practical level. The show has expanded widely in seasons 4, 5, and 6, meaning that there are more people who can die. Besides, it also has multiple assassins among its named characters now.

Next: Will Jon Snow survive season 7?

Keep an eye on those patterns as we get closer to Game of Thrones season 7’s premiere on July 16.