In the North, Stannis, the Night’s Watch, and the wildlings need to sort out their relationships to one another—and, beyond that, their postures toward the new Warden of the North, the cold-blooded Roose Bolton, and his demonic son, Ramsay. In Braavos, Arya begins her training to become—well, we’ll see what she becomes. Daenerys, as noted, still has her hands full in the ex-slaver city of Meereen. Brienne and Pod continue their odd-couple bickering as they search Westeros for the missing Stark girls. And Littlefinger is hatching a brand-new plot, with Sansa at the center of it.

As for Bran Stark? He has the season off. Having reached the three-eyed raven at the end of last season, he's going to be further discovering his warg-ish abilities off-screen, returning next year for season six. It’s a sensible move by Benioff and Weiss, even if there’s a danger that Isaac Hempstead-Wright, who plays Bran, will look 30 by the time we next see him. (Would that the showrunners had done likewise with Theon in season three; in the books, his torture and mutilation at the hands of Ramsay—easily Benioff and Weiss’s biggest mistake to date—were only heard about secondhand.)

The season starts relatively slowly, but the first four episodes gradually accelerate, each one perhaps a little bit better than the one before it. There’s no early shocker on a par with the Purple Wedding, but the body count, unsurprisingly, is still higher than zero. Benioff and Weiss have promised that they will be killing off characters who did not die in the books—an experiment that began last season with the death-by-wight of Jojen Reed—which should keep even the most avid book reader on the edge of his or her seat. And while the showrunners have also overtly sexualized a few characters’ relationships (again, unsurprisingly), so far the show seems mostly to be avoiding its worst carnal excesses.

As always, the ongoing machinations in King’s Landing are a particular pleasure. And things in the North are getting more interesting as well, thanks in no small part to Stephen Dillane, who has grown nicely into the role of Stannis. If anyone can offer the show a little Tywin-like gravitas this season, it will likely be him. Benioff and Weiss have also been kind enough to write fan-favorite Bronn—who’s essentially out of the books by this point—into one of their new subplots. (Though she hasn’t yet appeared there’s the promise of more of Diana Rigg’s Lady Olenna as well.) And it’s extremely nice to see Sansa—finally!—have something more to do than be passively victimized, even if I have some misgivings about the storyline Benioff and Weiss have cooked up for her.

I’m a touch nervous about the goings-on in Dorne as well. In the books (at least so far) the Sand Snakes have played only a peripheral role, but Benioff and Weiss seem to be setting them up as a trio of female action heroes, a kind of Deadly Viper Assassination Squad for the sword-and-sorcery crowd. Indeed, most of the early signs suggest that the showrunners’ new material will take Game of Thrones in a more cinematic, less literary direction, in which outsized daring is substituted for the quiet cunning that characterized Martin’s work. The scale of the show has certainly never been grander, with beautiful introductions of cities on both sides of the Narrow Sea and the showrunners’ promise of a battle scene late in the season that is larger than anything they’ve undertaken before. Plus, Dany’s dragons are growing up nicely.