This review contains spoilers for Game of Thrones Season 8, episode 2, titled "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms." To refresh your memory of where we left off, check out our Season 8, episode 1 review , and for more of our thoughts on episode 2, check out our Dragons on the Wall recap above, or download the podcast version here

Now that’s more like it.

While last week’s Season 8 premiere was a solid, scene-setting hour, it sometimes felt like the script was checking boxes rather than telling an organic story with a fluid sense of pacing. (Every episode has to do a certain amount of narrative legwork to get its characters from A to B, obviously, but the strings seemed more noticeable in the premiere than they have elsewhere.)

In many ways, episode 2 serves a similar function - it’s still an installment that has to establish loyalties, check in with all of our major players, and set the stage for the battle to come, but there’s a sense of urgency in this hour that was absent in episode 1 - an intangible flow that builds on every scene that has come before it, giving us one of the most satisfying episodes in recent memory.

That may simply be due to the confidence of Bryan Cogman’s writing (he’s penned 11 episodes, including some of the show’s best, like “Kissed By Fire,” “Oathkeeper,” and “The Laws of Gods and Men”), since even the crowd-pleasing moments - which some viewers might consider fan-service (like Arya and Gendry’s hook-up and Jaime knighting Brienne) - for the most part feel earned rather than heavy-handed.

Cogman has penned many of Jaime and Brienne’s most pivotal episodes, and you can feel the respect and understanding he has for the characters in every scene they share. There’s still so much the two warriors aren’t saying to each other, but their exchanges are nonetheless laden with meaning, thanks to the discipline of the script and the powerful performances from Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Gwendoline Christie.

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There’s really no better encapsulation of Jaime’s character trajectory than to think back to their earliest scenes together, when Jaime spent the better part of a season belittling and antagonizing Brienne despite seeing her prowess with a sword, compared to him now humbly admitting he’s no longer the warrior he once was, and that he’d be honored to serve under her command. It’s an admission that clearly shakes her, but one that finally puts them on equal footing - something that’s solidified when he grants her the thing she’s longed for all her life but always considered out of reach: the chance to be a real knight, just like him.

It’s one of the most powerful scenes in the show’s history - one that feels so weighty precisely because it’s been hard-earned and such a long time coming. And, because this is Game of Thrones and we can’t have nice things, seems to foreshadow Jaime dying in some horrible, heroic way, just when he’s finally redeemed himself. (You could argue that Bran’s own long-overdue conversation with Jaime foretells his doom - when Jaime asks Bran what will become of him afterwards, Bran ominously asks, “How do you know there is an afterwards?” Ruh-roh.)

Worth noting: That question of “afterwards” also comes up in Daenerys and Sansa’s conversation about the future of the North once Dany wins the Iron Throne - another query that pointedly isn't resolved in this episode.

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There’s an air of foreboding that surrounds so many pivotal interactions this week - Grey Worm and Missandei imagining a life together after Daenerys has won the throne (although I can’t help but hope the show might buck our expectations and leave these two innocent souls among the last characters standing, just because we all expect a tragic demise for one or both of them); Arya, the Hound, and Beric reminiscing over the last time they were all together (and Arya’s ever-shortening list); Davos coming face-to-face with a scrappy young girl with a scarred face who is determined to fight like her brothers (complete with a subtle but poignant musical callback to Shireen Baratheon’s theme of “It’s Always Summer Under the Sea” - well-played, Ramin Djawadi), and the repeated insistence that everyone will be totally and completely safe in Winterfell’s crypts, which could mean there’s some credence to a major fan theory going around. The show is warning us that there will be major casualties during the Battle of Winterfell, but that doesn’t mean there’s any way to really prepare ourselves for it.

While I criticized episode 1 for sowing discord among our protagonists in ways that felt like conflict for conflict’s sake, episode 2 does a much better job of forcing the characters to reckon with their choices in believable ways.

Yes, there’s narrative tension in emphasizing that Sansa doesn’t trust Daenerys and would prefer Jon to rule, but it’s far more realistic to imagine that these two powerful, capable women would simply sit down and have an honest conversation, rather than scheming behind each other’s backs. Those simple exchanges (while still fraught with uncertainty) do far more justice to the journeys that our heroes have been on over the past seven seasons than an episode full of suspicious side-eying and attempts to undermine each other. In terms of major narrative moves, aside from Sam’s pivotal conversation with Jon in the crypts and Theon’s rushed rescue of Yara last week, it doesn’t feel like we’d have missed much of anything if this had been the Season 8 premiere instead of “Winterfell,” which is kind of nuts when you consider that there are only four episodes left after this installment. The absence of King’s Landing isn’t particularly noticeable when there’s so much going on in the North.

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The episode also plants a few intriguing seeds that have to bear fruit in the next couple of episodes - Bran drops a bombshell that the Night King has tried to destroy “many” Three-Eyed Ravens in the past, and that he wants to erase the world of men - including any memory of humanity’s past. It can’t be an accident that Bran intends to bait the Night King into the godswood (we have a theory about that), given the importance of weirwood trees in the creation of the White Walkers.

It also feels important that Tyrion asks Bran to tell him the very long story of how he became the Three-Eyed Raven - it seems as if Tyrion might gain some useful insight during that conversation that won’t become apparent until later. The episode also doubles-down on emphasizing that Daenerys values Tyrion’s intelligence above all in his position as her Hand, even as the show has gone to great lengths to undermine that intellect (especially in Dany’s eyes) of late. Does that mean Tyrion is due for a game-changing plan - perhaps one that involves his own sacrifice - in order to turn the tide for his queen?

The episode features plenty of full circle moments: Theon trying to redeem himself for taking Winterfell from Bran and faking his death by pledging the Ironborn to protect him; Jorah and Lyanna having a long overdue mormont (sorry, I had to), and Sam giving Jorah his family sword; Tyrion admitting he’s lost the taste for whores since Shae (something we realized way back when he and Varys were in Volantis, but it's nice to see echoed here); and Podrick proving his fighting skills after Brienne’s promise to train with him twice a day way back in Season 5. Oh, and surprise, Ghost is back! No one acknowledges the fact that he’s been AWOL for more than a season since we’re supposed to believe he’s just been lurking in the background of every Winterfell scene since the Battle of the Bastards, but there’s an inherent ridiculousness to the way the showrunners are attempting to slip that one by us.

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But perhaps the most long-awaited (but admittedly jarring) moment comes courtesy of Arya and Gendry, who decide they might as well smoke ‘em if they got ‘em if everyone’s about to die. While the show has certainly laid the groundwork for this moment over many seasons, and it's refreshing to see Arya asserting herself and taking ownership of her desire the way women are seldom allowed to do on Game of Thrones, it’s still strangely disconcerting to see our little wolf all grown up and seducing Robert Baratheon’s bastard. (But it was a great payoff of Robert Baratheon's long-ago observation to Ned, "I have a son, you have a daughter; we'll join our houses.")

I know Maisie Williams is 22 (and Arya is probably 18 or 19) and the show has certainly been far more graphic with its sex scenes in the past, but by the old gods and the new, this scene made me more squeamish than pretty much anything since Oberyn’s head got popped like a pimple, simply because we've watched her grow up on screen. (I'd feel the same way if Bran actually had any chance of getting some this season too, for what it's worth.) It seems like a specific punishment for all of us who made those endless rowboat memes about Gendry, and we deserve it. Nothing the Night King can do to us will be more traumatic than seeing Arya’s sideboob.

It's also a typical "you know nothing, Jon Snow" moment for him to drop that major bombshell on Daenerys right before the toughest battle of their lives (because who wouldn't want to be thinking of someone else stealing their throne right before a face-off with a zombie king?). Sure, dramatic tension, blah blah blah, but after dodging her all episode long, Jon definitely could've put a pin in that revelation for just a little longer and allowed Dany to keep her eyes on the prize, rather than adding to her stress when either one of them could end up dying in the next few hours anyway. We’ll probably have to wait until episode 4 to get any kind of resolution on that front, given that the Army of the Dead just rolled up like Tormund looking for a refill of giant's milk.

Check out HBO's preview for episode 3 below: