Game of Thrones, all is forgiven. Well, I guess not all—there’s still a lot of stuff I’m mad at you about, and one good episode isn’t going to change that. But today, one week after I went on a tirade against a show that seemed to have gotten lazy, the series partially redeemed itself and, in the words of a friend on Twitter, leapt back on the rails by delivering one of the best episodes in recent memory.

Most of the talk online will probably center around the epic battle scene the episode delivered in its final 15 minutes, and justly so. (More on that later.) But this episode was something different from the very beginning; starting with the first scene, it felt more interesting and vibrantly alive than GoT has in ages. Characters moved forward, changed in small but important ways, and action seemed to happen against the backdrop of an actual world, teeming with life and humanity.

Things started off with Tyrion and Jorah facing off against Dany in her throne room, where she was ostensibly considering whether or not to kill both of them. Tyrion and Dany are among the series’ most beloved characters, and their first real interaction onscreen didn’t disappoint. One of the show’s most reliable pleasures has been watching Tyrion survey a situation, think about the angles, and then speak his mind—this is what happened when, as his first bit of advising to the Mother of Dragons, he told her what he thought she should do with Mormont: don’t kill him, since “killing those who are devoted to you won’t inspire devotion,” but don’t keep him around either, since he’s proven himself a traitor. Jorah is banished, and rather going straight to a maester to find a cure for his greyscale, he went back to the fighting pits for another shot at impressing the queen he loves.

Tyrion, on the other hand, buys himself some more time to impress Dany—and impress her he does. In their next scene together, these two discover one major thing they have in common: they’re both the children of terrible fathers who made, also, terrible rulers. Aerys Targaryen was a mad king whose brutal rule inspired a rebellion; Tywin Lannister was a schemer who cared more for his family’s power than for the peace and well-being of his subjects, and whose conniving ultimately got him murdered on the shitter by his own son. Dany and Tyrion know who their fathers were, know their flaws—the question is, can they, together, find a different way to rule? Can they be “the right kind of terrible, the kind that keeps people from being even more terrible”? Tyrion, for his part, thinks that together they have the best chance of doing the most good in Slaver’s Bay, but Dany wants to go home. When Tyrion tells her that she’ll need some alliances with the powerful families to take Westeros, Dany gives one of those analogies for the world of Westeros that the show has become so famous for (it’s a game, it’s a ladder…); today Westeros is a wheel, with one family, one spoke, always on top. And Dany doesn’t want to stop the wheel. She wants to break the wheel. A little on the nose, but coming at the end of a delightfully talky scene, I can forgive it.

Meanwhile, in King’s Landing, things are looking increasingly desperate for Cersei. I’ve been critical of this plotline, and I still think it’s a little sloppy. How the Sparrows have managed to take the entire city, how many of them there are, and why no one in the ruling classes seems to be taking any action to take power—or their beloved family members—back are all things that the writers need to establish a little better. And this episode didn’t actually move things forward much in King’s Landing, instead marking time until the trial, or the inevitable confrontation, or whatever. But if all the episode could do was mark time, then at least it marked time in an intelligent, interesting way, by showing us the events in the city solely through Cersei’s eyes, in her dungeon: offered a drink of water in exchange for a confession she refuses to give, visited by one of her minions and told that her own son is too weak, to ineffectual, to visit her.

The rest of the action came from the Stark kids. (We were, blessedly, spared another dopey scene in Dorne.) Arya’s education in being no one continues as she lives into a false identity and is given the mission to spy on, and presumably kill, a crooked merchant. Sansa, meanwhile, has another confrontation with Theon, wherein she discovers what was done to him to make him Reek, and gets another important bit of information as well: Theon didn’t kill Bran and Rickon, after. What she can do with that information remains to be seen. What’s certain, though, is that Sansa won’t be bowed by her mistreatment at Ramsay’s hands: she’s still a vital and strong character, and whether she manages to kill Ramsay herself or convince Theon to do it by waking him to himself, she’ll be someone who attempts to make her own fate in whatever circumstances she finds herself.

But this episode really belonged to the North. In Castle Black, Sam reassures Olly that Jon’s doing the right thing by telling him, “Sometimes, a man has to make hard choices, choices that look wrong to others, but that he knows are right.” Olly asks, “You believe that?” Sam does—but I wonder what Olly’s real takeaway from the lesson is. Olly’s suffered a terrible trauma, seeing his family killed in a raid led by Tormund Giantsbane. So when he walks away from Sam, deep in thought, is he reconciling himself to Jon’s alliance with the Wildlings, or his he making his own hard choice that will look wrong to others, but that feels right in his own heart—a decision to take his vengeance? We’ll see, I suppose.

In Hardhome, the Wildling stronghold that gives the episode its name, Jon is reaping the consequences of his own hard choice, trying to convince a people whose identity consists in their unwillingness to yield that their best chance of survival lies in alliance with their greatest enemies. Some of the Wildlings pledge to join him, others (Thenns, of course) refuse—but it’s all prelude to the episode’s, and perhaps the season’s, great setpiece: the attack of the White Walkers.

And what a setpiece it is. The scene delivers the kind of pulse-pounding, bloody action GoT has become known for—and yet, to begin with, it’s actually a wonderful bit of filmmaking from a different genre completely: horror. The scene begins with a change in the air, the coming of a white mist, and it’s then that the Wildlings realize that trouble is coming and lock the gates. Some are left behind on the wrong side of the wall, clamoring against the wooden door. But then, they’re enveloped by mist and their feet, visible under the door, just disappear. I’ve no idea what happened there, but the imagining is worse than the seeing—a wise choice for a show that far to often shows us everything, even those things we don’t want or need to see. Then, of course, the White Walkers fling themselves against the wall, and all hell breaks loose.

Action scenes on film and TV are often criticized, these days, for being deliberately confusing, constructed of shaky images and a barrage of cuts that convey a feeling of peril and chaos without combining into sense. Last night’s action was sometimes guilty of these sins—it wasn’t always clear who was doing what, where different characters were, or the spatial relationships of the combatants. But I think this was a deliberate choice. The shots of the White Walkers clamoring through tiny holes in the wall, often canted, weren’t so much action shots as they were horror shots; zombies haven’t been this terrifying since 28 Days Later. When the action needed to be comprehensible, it was. And the scene managed to fit in at least one wordless revelation: dragonglass isn’t the only thing that can kill White Walkers. Valyrian steel can, too.

There are at least a few images from the scene that deserve special mention. A battalion of White Walkers flinging themselves off a cliff and landing on the ground like a flock of dead birds, only to stand again and fling themselves against Jon and his men. The image of one of the Ice Kings (I’m sure this guy has a name, but I lack the energy to wiki it; readers, chime in below in the comments) lifting his arms to add the dead Wildlings to his ranks. And Jon Snow’s boat slipping silently away, one commander looking at another across the water. Perhaps the boldest choice of all was to cut to black in silence, and to let that silence, filled with the chilling sounds of the wind over the Shivering Sea, linger on through the credits.

What a great scene. What a great episode. I’m excited about Game of Thrones again.

Last night’s episode of Game of Thrones was titled “Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken.” These words apparently refer to House Martell—but as I process what I saw last night, I can’t help but wonder if the showrunners meant for us to apply them to Sansa Stark, who was raped by her new husband Ramsay Bolton in the final scene of the episode. Is Sansa truly unbent, unbowed, unbroken? Would it be naive and callous to think so? Rape is treated so casually in the world of Game of Thrones that last season the show portrayed a rape it didn’t even acknowledge as a rape, so for this season to portray the actual emotional consequences of Sansa’s rape—to show her as neither unbroken nor irreparably broken, but somewhere between—might count, I suppose, as an improvement.

Such are the nauseating calculations one has to make when watching Game of Thrones—well, at least this rape scene wasn’t as bad as the last one. On Twitter, some are understandably upset at the show for writing into the plot yet another rape that wasn’t in the books. They’re only half right: it’s true that Ramsay didn’t rape Sansa in the books, but Ramsay didn’t marry Sansa in the books either. Instead, he married her childhood friend Jeyne Poole, who was posing as Arya Stark, and the wedding night was even worse than the one we saw in the show. Instead of simply making Theon watch, I’m told he was actually forced to participate in sexually assaulting Jeyne before Ramsay raped her. So I guess we can feel lucky, or something, that we weren’t forced to watch Sansa be subjected to that?

Ugh. Real talk: Ramsay Bolton is a sadistic fuck, Sansa’s married to him, and for the show to stay true to the character and to the situation, Sansa had to learn about his true nature eventually. That doesn’t necessarily mean that this particular scene had to exist, of course. But it does exist, and it’s the least-bad version of the scene that I can imagine: not lingering voyeuristically on images of Ramsay’s violation, instead focusing on Theon, wearing the vicarious agony of Sansa’s ordeal on his face. Whether this scene turns out to be completely gratuitous to the show’s plot and character development remains to be seen; in any case, it was certainly upsetting, and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who was finally done with the show because of it.

On to other plot strands. The episode actually began with Arya, washing a dead body with something approaching tenderness. In a show where the casual destruction of bodies is so pervasive, it was almost jarring to see Arya treat the body of a dead person with as much reverence as she did. But then, after she was done, the body was simply carted out of the room to who-knows-where—and Arya, attempting to follow, was again denied. I’ve been growing a little tired of the faceless men’s Zen koan style of education, all this business of serving and becoming no one before Arya can truly learn what it is she’s come to learn. Even so, there was a satisfaction in discovering that what Arya was meant to learn was not to become nobody, but to lie about who she was while keeping her desire for vengeance; not to serve the dead but to become more callous toward them, to create more dead by pushing the poison water on a sick girl. (Still: it’s no “wax on, wax off.”)

In Dorne, meanwhile, Jaime and Bronn have reached their destination, but instead of finding Myrcella Lannister in peril, they find her kissing a cute boy, her intended. She doesn’t need or desire rescue as much as Jaime had expected. Not, at least, until the Sand Snakes come to capture her, and Jaime and Bronn fight back. The scene almost seemed to belong to another show—between Bronn’s one-liners, Jaime’s Errol-Flynn charm, and the Sand Snake’s dexterity and use of interesting weapons (one wields a whip), it’s pure swashbuckling fun. But the scene also felt different in a bad way, not up to Game of Thrones’ usual standards. The ease with which Jaime and Bronn snuck into the palace (or the Water Gardens or whatever) was almost comical, as were the sudden abundance of guards showing up at the exact right moment. I’ve got no idea what happens next with both Jaime and the Sand Snakes in custody, but I’m confident we haven’t seen the last of any of them.

If Jaime’s not having much luck in Dorne, Cersei at least is seeing her plans work out better in King’s Landing—though to what end, I’m not sure. At an inquest into the sodomy accusations against Loras, the High Sparrow succeeds in marshaling enough evidence to justify further imprisonment and a real trial. He also ships off Margaery to jail for assumed perjury in the inquest. And Cersei and Tommen just let it happen. Cersei has certainly demonstrated her power to make the lives of those she doesn’t like difficult, but as I said last week, I don’t understand her endgame. Like Petyr Baelish, she’s a sly political manipulator, but unlike Littlefinger she operates too often from a place of emotion rather than cold, calculating reason. Judging by the look on her face, seeing Margaery carted off to prison may have pleased Cersei, but it’s not in her best interest for either Loras or Margaery to be ultimately convicted. As Lady Olenna made abundantly clear, the Tyrell alliance is an important one for the Lannisters. Cersei should be courting friends and avoiding war, not the other way around.

By episode’s end, though, it’s Tyrion who finds himself in the direst straits of the three Lannisters. Captured by slavers, he’s kept alive only as long as it will take them to find a “cock merchant” (such people, apparently, exist and make a good living in Essos) who can visually confirm that he’s a dwarf and thus validate the value of his…well, you get the idea. Jorah, meanwhile, is headed for the fighting pits of Mereen, where he can either get back in Dany’s good graces, or go down fighting like dear old Dad (he just learned of the elder Mormont’s death from Tyrion, who let it slip not knowing that Jorah didn’t know).

The episode, as I’ve said, was called “Unbent, Unbroken, Unbowed,” but I wish it had been titled “The Game of Faces.” There’s a part early in the episode where Arya says “I don’t want to play anymore!” and her cruel master replies, “One never stops playing the game of faces.” Then she’s led into a vast hall (the House of Black and White must be built like a TARDIS because it’s HUGE inside!) where a bunch of human faces—the faces, presumably, of the dead—are displayed on the walls and columns.

One never stops playing the game of faces. It’s as true in the rest of Westeros as it is in the House of Black and White—just as often true that the one who wins is the one who’s learned, as Arya is learning, to die. Those who allow their faces to betray their true motives, like Cersei, say, or Ramsay, seem destined to lose; those who’ve learned to use their faces to mask emotion rather than betray it, like Sansa, may suffer now but seem likely to win in the long run, biding their time, waiting for their opportunity to strike.

The best player of the game of faces is probably Petyr Baelish, who revealed new levels of duplicity in a conference with Cersei. On the surface, Littlefinger appears to have betrayed Sansa yet again—except he’s so good at hiding his real motivations that it’s likely he’s lying to Cersei, too. What Littlefinger has gotten for himself is the opportunity to march the Lords of the Vale on Winterfell unmolested by either Bolton’s men, who think he’s coming to assist them against Stannis, or the Lannisters, who think he’s allied with them. In reality, Littlefinger will probably do what Littlefinger does: arrive at the scene of battle, quickly discern the lay of the land, then take the side of whoever seems most likely to win. Whatever his allegiances, we now have three parties set to fight over Winterfell: the Boltons, who hold it, Stannis Baratheon, who wants to take it, and Littlefinger, who’s a wild card. Whenever they arrive, we’re set for an epic battle. For Sansa’s sake, I hope it’s soon.

“A good mother never gives up on her children,” Daenerys said last night. “She disciplines them if she must. But she never gives up on them.”

Then she pushes one of the masters of Mereen in front of her dragons, who proceed to light the guy on fire, rip him in half, and eat him before he’s finished screaming.

Yikes. Thanks for making Mother’s Day extra horrifying, Game of Thrones! It was hardly the cheeriest way to end a day dedicated to appreciating moms, to brunch and flowers and mimosas—but the ways in which motherhood, and parenthood in general, were played out in the episode were anything but accidental. In the world of Ice and Fire, politics is family, and family is politics. Last night was full of children both literal and figurative testing their status with a parent—and parents, like Dany, negotiating the difference between discipline, tough love, and outright violence as they tried to get their kids to shape up and fly right.

Daenerys Targaryen’s relationship with motherhood is complicated: her only baby, so far, was stillborn, but she’s become known as the “Mother of Dragons,” and in her role as the Breaker of Chains in Slaver’s Bay, she’s “Mhysa,” or mother, to the people that she’s freed. But being the queen of a city torn apart by years of violence and injustice—being the mother of Mereen—is no easy task. Last week, the Sons of the Harpy (yet another familial metaphor) wounded Grey Worm and killed Ser Barristan the Bold. Now, this week, Dany became her angriest, most ass-kicking self again: the avenging mother of dragons.

But is the avenging approach the right one for Dany? The right one for Mereen? Before he died, Ser Barristan was advising mercy; Daario Naharis, meanwhile, thinks she should just kill all the former masters and leave the former slaves to make their own city out of what remains. (It’s a tempting proposition, if nothing else, from a story standpoint; the faster Dany can move on from Mereen the faster she can bring everything she’s learned to the struggle for the Iron Throne in Westeros.) Instead, she listens to Missandei, who for some unaccountable reason still has faith in Dany’s skills as a ruler and tells her to listen to her own heart or something. What Dany ultimately decides to do is take on another familial role: not wife, but mother, to an advisor and the head of an old Mereen family who the Internet tells me is named Hizdahr zo Loraq. Considering she was threatening to feed him to a dragon the last time she saw him, this is sure to be a good and supportive marriage strengthened by bonds of mutual trust, respect, and—BAAAHAHAHA just kidding it’ll be a train wreck.

In the North, where Sam is reading up on Dany’s exploits, Jon Snow is another young leader working through the responsibilities of authority through a parent-child relationship of sorts—except that in this case, Jon’s both the parent and the child. Faced with a difficult decision, Jon’s advised by Maester Aemon to kill the boy. Only then, he says, can the man emerge. Given that the episode’s called “Kill the Boy,” it’s not too much of a stretch to say that this is an important scene. Aemon, you’ll remember, is a Targaryen himself, and as such he has more than a few reasons to be intimately familiar with the various symbolic deaths of leadership. His kinswoman is experiencing those deaths across the Narrow Sea in Essos; and now so is Jon, giving up any chance he might have had of popularity to try to make an alliance with the Wildlings.

What Jon’s trying to do here is not that dissimilar from Dany’s struggle in Mereen: he’s faced with forging bonds of peace between groups of people torn apart by years of violence and oppression. The men of the Night’s Watch all know people who’ve been killed by the Wildlings—one boy in particular, one of Jon’s supporters, saw his family killed by the Wildlings. But as Jon points out, the Night’s Watch have killed the Wildlings, too. An alliance is necessary if they have any chance of turning back the White Walkers. Jon needs to get the men he leads to give up their hatred of each other to see the bigger picture and unite against a greater threat. That’s no easy feat.

The third major setting for last night’s episode was Winterfell. It’s among the first places we were ever introduced to in Game of Thrones, but it’s changed over the years and the seasons, as Sansa points out: the place is familiar, but the people are strange.

Are they ever. Held by the Boltons, Winterfell is hardly the safe place Sansa knew it to be when she was a girl. She learns this firsthand when she meets Myranda, Ramsay Snow’s girlfriend and sometimes partner in sadism. At first, Myranda seems to be a friendly presence, complimenting Sansa’s dress and speaking kindly of her mother’s memory. (More mothers…) Sansa’s learned enough to be suspicious of Myranda, though, and the reasons for her suspicion are confirmed when Myranda points her to the creepy kennels, where she discovers a face from the past: Theon.

What a cruel scene it was. For Sansa to see a familiar face from her childhood might be a good, comforting thing—but seeing Theon was almost certainly anything but comforting, both because of what he’s become due to his torture at her future husband’s hands, and because of what Sansa still thinks that Theon did to her youngest brothers. Theon didn’t really kill them, but Sansa doesn’t know that. Roose and Ramsay do, though, which is what makes the scene at dinner so fascinating and awful.

It’s worth going through the dinner scene in a bit of detail. First, Ramsay stood and toasted his and Sansa’s pending marriage; Sansa pointedly didn’t drink to his empty sentiment. Next, Roose and his wife revealed that they’re expecting a child, and that the Maester thinks it’s a boy. Ramsay immediately sees his status as a favored Bolton son begin to slip away, and so he proceeds to do what Ramsay does best: make everyone else in the room miserable. He drags out Theon/Reek to pour some wine, then forces him to apologize to Sansa for killing her brothers. That Roose lets this charade take place says something interesting about him, I think—he’s not as obviously sadistic as his bastard son, but the look on his face suggests, I think, that he’s getting a kind of perverse enjoyment out of Sansa’s discomfort, and Theon’s.

Roose later tells Ramsay that he made a fool of himself at dinner, but I get the feeling that his heart’s not really in the scolding. Ramsay is his father’s son: born after Roose raped his mother, the wife of a man he’d just executed. When the mother brought Ramsay to her rapist, Roose decided to keep him because “I could see that you were my son.” The only difference between father and son is that Roose is a little smarter—he could easily put an end to Ramsay’s shenanigans if he wanted to, but he keeps the sick bastard around because his love for violence serves Roose’s ends, and the older man gets some pleasure out of observing his son’s sadism besides.

Yuck. I’m definitely cheering for both of these men to die—the only thing I’m not sure of is who I’d rather see do it. Stannis? He’s marching south from the Wall, so he’s the most likely to be the one to do it. But personally, I’m rooting for Jon Snow, or even better, Sansa herself, to be the one who holds the knife. Or maybe Theon. If he could be the one to finally kill his torturer, there would be a kind of catharsis there—if us if not for Theon.

Next week: back to King’s Landing, and to Arya!

Odds and Ends:

• Tyrion and Jorah Mormont’s adventures in Valyria and their run-in with the stone men was good stuff, even if it was mostly filler until they get where they’re going. Mysterious fallen societies are always interesting, and the stone men give a bit more emotional resonance to everyone’s fear of the dragonscale disease.

• Grey Worm loves Missandei! I wish these two could be the stars in a story that really deserved them, rather than occasional walk-ons in Dany’s story.