When it comes to the Big Four, the most obvious difference is directorial. “Blackwater” and “The Watchers on the Wall” were both helmed by Neil Marshall, the auteur of intelligent big-screen genre fare from The Descent to Centurion. As much a tactician as a technician, Marshall made his battles things of terrible beauty and precise calibration. He gave his attackers concrete goals – storm this wall, breach this gate – and based his battle choreography around them, making the spacial relationships and physical stakes involved in each physical clash easy for audiences to grasp. Nothing demonstrated Marshall’s clarity of action better than the stunning 360-degree swing around Castle Black during the fight for the Wall – shot in a single unedited take that revealed the location of every major character mid-battle, it involved moving the camera so quickly that the director worried someone might be struck in the head and killed. But his use of CGI is every bit as ambitious as his more practical effects; from the massive scythe and chain released from the Wall to sweep away its attackers to the enormous emerald-green wildfire explosion that sets Blackwater Bay alight – in terms of sheer scale, it’s still the show’s most jawdropping special effect – Marshall is a master of spectacle as well as mise-en-scène.

As the man behind the camera of “Hardhome” and “The Battle of the Bastards,” Miguel Sapochnik has taken a different approach. Some of this is no doubt necessitated by the scripts: Unlike Marshall’s battles, Sapochnik’s share screentime with other scenes throughout Westeros and the world beyond, with the nearly simultaneous fight for Meereen last night the most obvious example. But if “Blackwater” and “The Watchers on the Wall” are about control, their successors are chaos incarnate. In these episodes, it’s not a matter of one side attempting to dislodge the other from an entrenched position, with all the logistical challenges and physical beats that entails – it’s a Hobbesian struggle of all against all, a swirling morass of the living and the dead and the bloody blades that turn one into the other. Whether it’s the Watch and the Wildlings fleeing for their lives amid a swarm of zombies, or the forces of House Stark and House Bolton being sandwiched together in a solid mass of violence and vulnerability, these battles rely on being fundamentally incomprehensible in their fury.

I went in-depth on Game of Thrones’ four big battle episodes, “Blackwater,” “The Watchers on the Walls,” “Hardhome,” and “The Battle of the Bastards” – how they’re shot, how they work, what they mean – for Rolling Stone. If there’s been a driving force behind how I’ve written about visual art for 20 years now it’s my interest in how spectacle articulates meaning, so this one’s close to my heart, and I hope you enjoy it.