“Sons of the Harpy” was a bleak affair, bookended by two turf battles in King’s Landing and Mereen, respectively. The first of these battles was orchestrated indirectly behind the scenes by Cersei, who used her influence to arm the Sparrows, the religious fanatics we’ve been meeting over the past few episodes. Their leader, the High Sparrow, played by Jonathan Pryce, seems like such a nice, peaceful man—but his fanatic followers are anything but. With weapons supplied by Cersei, they raid Littlefinger’s brothel, then take Loras Tyrell into custody as well.

Cersei’s endgame isn’t really clear here. She’s obviously targeting the Tyrells—earlier, she sent Lord Tyrell away to Braavos, and the fact that she sent Meryn Trant with him suggests that she might be staging an assassination. Loras’s imprisonment gets rid of yet another Tyrell, and drives a wedge between Tommen and Margaery as well when the young king proves to be completely ineffectual at securing his brother-in-law’s release. But Cersei’s unleashed a force she doesn’t understand and can’t control. When Tommen faces down the Sparrows, yells from the crowd of “abomination” and “bastard” show that the rumors of incest in the Lannister family have legs—and if the violent Sparrows decide that Cersei and Jaime’s sins are ones that deserve punishment, then she may regret arming these religious fanatics.

Up in Castle Black, Stannis is still hanging around, brooding over Jon Snow and wishing the kid would agree to come on his campaign to reclaim the North from the Boltons. Melisandre, seeing the king’s wish that Ned Stark’s bastard would join up with him, tries to convince Jon Snow one final time—or maybe she does it for her own reasons, I don’t know. In any case, her method of convincing is basically to show him her boobs. It was a bad, dumb scene—so obviously a play to cram some gratuitous nudity into the episode that it had me rolling my eyes. In any case, the scene gives Jon Snow yet another chance to be honorable and boring, citing his vows and his love for dead Ygritte as reasons why he can’t have sex with Melisandre, or vow allegiance to Stannis. (Though what the one has to do with the other isn’t entirely clear to me—part of what makes the scene so dumb.) The scene builds to a good punchline, though, when Melisandre turns before leaving to say, “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”

A more interesting scene, for me, was between Stannis and Shireen, when the young princess asks her father if he’s ashamed of her. As characters so often do in GoT, he takes this simple question as an invitation to tell the long story of how she got greyscale in the first place. Apparently, when she was a baby, Stannis had bought her a doll that she rubbed against her cheek, and maybe the doll carried the disease because she got greyscale immediately after. His advisors told him to get rid of her, but he called all the maesters together to heal her. “You are Princess Shireen of house Baratheon, and you are my daughter.” It’s a heartwarming scene that finally gives us some emotion from Stannis.

(But basically, not much is happening in Castle Black.)

Meanwhile, further to the South, Sansa’s returned to Winterfell and is visiting the family crypt. Littlefinger, ever the creeper, finds her down there. Together, the two stand in front of a statue of Sansa’s aunt, Lyanna Stark—and here the show takes an opportunity to review the backstory of what happened before even season 1 began. Lyanna was a sort of Helen of Troy, a beauty who started a war. Petyr laments the thousands who died because of her—but Sansa reminds him that Rhaegar Targaryen kidnapped and raped Lyanna. It’s a perfect distillation of the current difference in their perspectives: Littlefinger sees women as pawns in political schemes, but Sansa sees the human cost of being caught in men’s power plays, seeing as she’s a pawn in Littlefinger’s.

Littlefinger explains the endgame to Sansa: Stannis Baratheon will march against the Boltons, and he’ll probably win, at which point Sansa will be named wardeness of the North. It’s a hopeful outcome for Sansa—but Littlefinger doesn’t say what’s in it for him, nor does he really have a plan for what happens if Stannis loses and Sansa has to live out the rest of her life among the Boltons, the people who betrayed her family.

Much further to the South, Jaime and Bronn provide the only real fun and adventure in the episode on their merry adventure in Dorne. Well, their adventure isn’t merry, exactly, but their repartee provides the occasional reason to smile. We visited these two at the beginning of the episode, hiding in the hold of the boat to Dorne—and learned a bit about Jaime’s motivations in going to Dorne. It’s suggested that Jaime has to be the one to go to Dorne because he feels guilty for setting Tyrion free and getting their father killed. “He murdered my father, if I ever see him I’ll split him in two.” But one gets the sense that this is really more about making amends with Cersei.

In Dorne, Bronn and Jaime get in a scuffle with four Dornish riders. Lots of swordplay in this episode. But where this fight differs from the others is that it has a sense of surprise to it, both in Bronn’s surprise attack and in the way that Jaime uses his fake hand—albeit accidentally—to save his skin and put his sword through the other guy’s belly.

But the real action in Dorne is with Ellaria and Oberyn’s bastard children. This is one of those scenes that happens occasionally in GoT where people basically stand around and fire off expository dialogue at each other. Person 1: “[Name of character], you are [relationship to main storyline], and you [character motivation].” Person 2: “Yes, [Name of character], and you also [character motivation], in revenge for [thing that happened last season that the audience may have forgotten about].” Basically: the Sand Snakes (which I guess is the name for Ellaria and Oberyn’s bastard daughters) want to get revenge for Oberyn’s death, but Doran won’t go to war, so they’re going to kidnap Myrcella before Jaime can get to her. It’s not a great scene, but it’s as good as it can be given what it has to do: quickly introduce new characters and set up the conflict to come. I fully expect that these badass women on a mission of revenge will provide plenty of great scenes to make up for this one before the end of the season.

Across the Narrow Sea, Jorah Mormont is rowing Tyrion in the wrong direction—or so Tyrion thinks, until Jorah reveals that he’s not taking him to Cersei, he’s taking him to Danaerys. This seems a little convenient: has Dany ever expressed any interest in seeing Tyrion? What does Jorah stand to get out of this? But whatever. Meanwhile, in Mereen, the conflict in the city is heightening as the Sons of the Harpy set a trap for Dany’s Unsullied and Barristan Selmy. There’s not really much to the events in Mereen aside from the action—which mostly makes the Sons of the Harpy look really smart and the Unsullied look really dumb and incompetent. The one exception is Grey Worm, who kicks a ton of ass, and Selmy, an old man who nonetheless fells a bunch of his masked enemies. Both Grey Worm and Selmy eventually go down—it looks like Selmy’s dead (based on a surprisingly spoilery preview for next week’s episode), but Grey Worm might just be wounded.

Next week: we see what Dany does in retaliation for Barristan Selmy’s death, Sansa is in danger with Ramsay Bolton (duh), Jon Snow reminds everyone (again!) that winter is coming, and Tyrion sees dragons for the first time.