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Game of Thrones

Earlier this year, we all had ourselves a hearty chuckle in the middle of the work day when Game of Thrones announced its season seven premiere date by having two HBO production assistants fire flamethrowers at a chunk of ice for roughly sixteen hours. Little did we know then that what we saw in those flames was our own future, that the entirety of season seven—all the death and deception, the intrigue and incest—was itself a mid-day wait until the Long Night finally arrived, and the largest chunk of ice in Westeros was blasted into a puddle on the ground. In stark contrast to last season’s rousing, hopeful conclusion, season seven came to a close on The Night King swooping down from the sky aboard the rapidly-decomposing Viserion—his blue eyes matching the flames spouting from his mouth—and crumbling The Wall in a cascade of ice and corpses, opening a hole large enough for the army of walkers, wights, giants, dragons, grumkins, snarks, and whatever other fresh hell you can think of into the land of the living for the first time in 800 years.

Folks, it’s official: Like a Targaryen dragon queen answering her nephew’s knock in the dead of night, Westeros is clearly about to be fucked.

That terrifying final scene of “The Dragon and the Wolf” (Game Of Thrones Season 7 Episode 7) only served to highlight the hour of perfectly petty squabbling that came before it; in a way, seeing The Night King finally bring down The Wall made Cersei Lannisters of us all. Because we know the dead are coming—we’ve seen proof up close and personal, trying to gnaw our faces off—but we’re still way too invested in these very human struggles happening south of The Wall, between characters we’re far more emotionally attached to than a blue-eyed force of nature coming to turn anyone with a pulse into walking skeletons that all somehow still have beards.

Never has this been more true than during this episode’s Dragonpit Summit—I’m coining that name before David Benioff and D.B. Weiss dub it something as lame as the goddamn Loot Train Attack—a pitch-perfect tornado of small but wonderful moments inside the largest assemblage of main cast members since the Starks and Lannisters eyed each other up in the Winterfell courtyard during the show’s pilot episode. Even better, each one of those moments was a distillation of seven seasons of character work, a bit of who these people have become boiled down to a particular look or phrase. Daenerys arriving just a few hot seconds late on the back of a monstrous dragon is the purest way of showing that this is a former lost little girl who has grown into a calculating influencer who knows how to game the PR machine like a fiddle; Taylor Swift watched Daenerys’ boss-as-hell entrance and feverishly jotted down “ride to the Grammys on a tank?” in a notebook.

But some of these moments were far smaller, and therefore more rewarding. I loved the straight-forward, no bullshit way Tyrion acknowledged how nice it was to see Bronn again, in the same way I appreciated how both never strayed from their current alliances in the process. Similarly, watching Sandor Clegane having to fight tooth and nail not to smirk while talking to Brienne about Arya is the closest that character has been to genuine warmth since his brother stuck his head in a fire. Speak of: This round of the CLEGANEBOWL was more like a CLEGANE SALAD MIXER, but try not to feel a jolt of genuine adrenaline after The Hound looks into the monstrous, undead eyes of The Mountain and says, “You know who is coming for you. You’ve always known.”

The most impressive melding of performance and physical storytelling comes after Jon finally gets to the point and displays his captured wight for the King’s Landing crew. Go back and look at the individual reactions, note how subtly on-point each response is. As Jaime, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau settles firmly somewhere between the brick wall stoicism of a soldier and the dramatic gulp of someone who has seen some truly terrifying shit in the past few weeks and didn’t believe it could get any worse. As Qyburn, Anton Lesser rides the line between scientifically intrigued and personally sexually aroused. But the scene MVP is Lena Headey; Cersei Lannister is a woman who watched from her bedroom window as the Sept of Baelor erupted in a fountain of fire and corpses, who sipped wine as she locked Ellaria Sand in a dungeon with her own poisoned daughter, who reacted to the news of her son’s suicide with the mild annoyance of someone discovering the refrigerator in the break room is out of soy milk. To see her go from cool and collected to recoiling in abstract horror—to show any weakness whatsoever around her enemies—is more jarring than seeing the wight itself.

The whole episode, really, was top to bottom a showcase for Headey; in two scenes in particular, she worked with her scene partner to create tension like this show hasn’t seen in several seasons. The first, across from Peter Dinklage, was more fiery than the entirety of “The Spoils of War.” I just wrote a week ago about how Game of Thrones doesn’t kill main characters anymore, but the sheer amount of gritted-jaw intensity brewed up here between Cersei and Tyrion had me convinced Daenerys’ Hand had walked bravely and stupidly into his own murder. Even after Gregor Clegane re-sheathed his sword, I was shouting at Tyrion not to drink that wine, or turn his back on The Mountain, or even, like, sit too close to an open window.

It’s the same case in the taught conversation between Jaime and his sister that ends with this particular incestual love affair coming to a sloppy close (only room for one, I suppose). If the past few seasons of Game of Thrones have had a paramount disappointment, it was the writers losing the thread of Jaime Lannister’s redemption arc that began so sturdy in a steamy season 3 bath. Here, that thread is tantalizingly picked back up with Jaime finally voicing the words he could have said to anything his sister told him all his life: “I don’t believe you.”

Of course, that’s a fitting parting phrase, because Cersei’s promise of truth and compromise was a straight up lie. No, she does not plan to fight alongside Daenerys and Jon in the war against the dead. She plans to buy a mercenary army called The Golden Company and wait out The Great War somewhere far warmer than Winterfell. In short, Cersei Lannister is a liar, Cersei Lannister is no help to anyone, and Jon Snow practically said as much: “When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything,” he tells Tyrion. “Then there are no more answers, only better and better lies, and lies won’t help us in this fight.”

Which is interesting, because if “The Dragon and the Wolf” was about anything deeper than a couple CGI dragons and a shot of Kit Harington’s bare ass, it was the importance of the truth, how things like facts and words and promises are what keep us together, what keep us alive in times of madness. It’s why it was the perfect moment for Littlefinger—basically a walking, sentient falsehood with a pencil thin mustache—to meet his bloody end. It was a fitting death, too; wrapped up in just one lie too many, a lie that couldn’t bear the weight of three Stark siblings familiar with deceit working together as one. In the end, Petyr Baelish’s outer layer of lies he’s been wearing since he first held a knife to Ned Stark’s neck fell off him like ill-fitting clothes and what was left was a crying man on his knees.

It’s also why it was key, if not deeply uncomfortable, to have the reveal of Jon’s true parentage—and his real name, Aegon Targaryen, after The Conqueror himself—juxtaposed with Jon and Daenerys’ literal boat rocking. Because that one, singular truth is going to change everything. The war for the Iron Throne gets reshuffled. Jon’s relationship to everyone he ever called “family” will be altered drastically. (That includes Theon, whose absolution arc here, minus an out-of-place dick joke or two, was thrilling to watch.) Even Dany’s partnership with Tyrion seems set to implode; it’s hard to tell if Tyrion was lurking moodily in the shadows because he secretly fell in love with his queen—same as every other man who served her before—or because the raucous sound of love-making is keeping everyone on the ship awake, but either way, those walls aren’t sound-proof, and the look on Tyrion’s face speaks volumes.

And how beautifully, wonderfully perfect it is that the we end with Sam Tarly and Bran Stark, of all people, as the only two people in all of Westeros and beyond who know this secret; the last man left alive who believes in the power of words over war and the only boy in Westeros who can objectively see the truth in all things. The snow is falling and a dragon-riding demon is leading an army of the dead against the living, but a bookworm and a cripple are about to change the world. Funny old life.

Vinnie Mancuso writes about TV for a living, somehow, for Decider, The A.V. Club, Collider, and the Observer. You can also find his pop culture opinions on Twitter (@VinnieMancuso1) or being shouted out a Jersey City window between 4 and 6 a.m.