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  ===Critical reception===
  "Blackwater" received critical acclaim and is generally cited as one of the best in the series. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes surveyed 13 reviews of the episode and judged 100% of them to be positive, with an average score of 9.3 out of 10. The website's critical consensus reading, "GoT delivers a thrilling tour de force in 'Blackwater,' an epic hour of blockbuster television full of spectacular battle sequences and equally powerful drama." Many reviewers used superlatives: for ''Time''s reviewer, the episode was "possibly the best hour of TV" of the year, for ''Rolling Stone'' it was "the show's best episode yet", and ''Entertainment Weekly'' described it as "arguably the best battle sequence ever produced for television", surpassing those in HBO's World War II series ''Band of Brothers'' and ''The Pacific''.
  IGN's Matt Fowler gave the episode a perfect 10 out of 10, calling it a masterpiece. Alan Sepinwall, who reviewed the episode for HitFix, called it "an epic battle, and an intimate hour" and continued "but what ultimately made Blackwater so impressive wasn't the scope, but the focus." Ed Cumming's review for ''The Daily Telegraph'' praised the episode as "an emerald inferno, as lethal as it was beautiful to watch."
  Commentators praised the battle's emotional impact and epic scale. Although much reduced compared to its description in ''A Clash of Kings'', it still went beyond anything attempted by any other regular series, according to Emily VanDerWerff in ''The A.V. Club''. Lena Headey's performance as the increasingly cynical, drunk, and desperate Queen Regent Cersei was particularly noted. Sean Collins of ''Rolling Stone'' commented that the episode "gave actress Lena Headey her finest hour on the show so far." Sarah Hughes writing for ''The Guardian'' described the performances of both Headey and costar Peter Dinklage as "wonderful", going on to say of Headey's Cersei that she "displayed a terrifying strength" and that her final scene with Tommen was "gut-wrenching." The episode also received praise for its unsentimental depiction of warfare as a harrowing and costly enterprise, interpreted also as a critique of "the sorts of political systems that perpetuate it".
  The episode's director Neil Marshall called the fan and critical reaction to the episode "overwhelming...I've never seen anything like it for a TV episode."