Begin with Stannis. Just two episodes ago, he was among the most likable characters on the show, and certainly near the top of the more plausible prospects to bring peace and justice to Westeros. Then, last week, in a radical departure from his previously expressed beliefs, he hastily burnt his daughter to death for a red priestess who has now been revealed to be a quack. Tonight, his men abandoned him, and his wife was hanged (or hanged herself? It felt as though they were implying the latter, but given the height and the knot it seemed like an improbable suicide), and he and his shattered army were subsequently slaughtered by Boltons. This arc might have worked—might even have been heartbreaking—if it had been stretched out over, say, four episodes or more. But like several plotlines this season (e.g., the rise of the Faith Militant), it was squeezed to the point where it lost both moral weight and narrative coherence. I’ll miss you tremendously, Stannis; and at the same time, good riddance.

Brienne’s subplot was not a tragedy comparable to the utter collapse of House Baratheon—which is now represented by only two heirs one heir utterly devoid of Baratheon blood—but it nonetheless had a dark underside. Yes, Brienne finally got vengeance for Renly by killing his big brother. But let’s face it, that big brother was already three-quarters dead. And more importantly, she once again failed her vow to Lady Catelyn to protect the Stark daughters. Sansa lit her candle and … no Brienne. Littlefinger’s tavern critique of her usefulness as a bodyguard is ringing truer by the season.

Things were hardly any better in Braavos, where the time spent these past two weeks making Meryn Trant an abuser of little girls—a charming tidbit that is not, again, in the books—could have been put to better use doing literally anything at all. There was a time when “All men must die” seemed like the perfect tagline for Game of Thrones. But that title has been clearly usurped of late—and not for the better—by Cersei’s last-season comment to Oberyn, “Everywhere in the world they hurt little girls.”

About the only thing worse than making Arya pretend to be underage in order to get close to Trant—as opposed to, say, selling him a poisoned oyster at the docks, or slipping Needle into his back in some alley—was turning her into a Ramsayesque avenging angel, slicing out Trant’s eyes and monologuing like a Bond villain. Again, maybe this is an evolution that could have been pulled off over time. But this new psycho version of Arya felt utterly unearned. (Also: foolish and implausible, given that she was dealing with a knight who outweighed her by 100 lbs.) And then she went blind. Good times.

Regular readers of the roundtable will know that I’ve long been convinced that nothing of importance was ever going to happen in Dorne. I fear I’ve been proven correct in the most dramatic fashion possible. The whole Jaime-Bronn trip was occasioned by the idea that Ellaria Sand wanted to kill Myrcella to avenge Oberyn and foment war between Dorne and the Lannisters. And now, after an embarrassingly easy infiltration of the Water Gardens, a cellblock striptease, and the utterly absurd pardoning of a clearly unrepentant Ellaria (Prince Doran is obviously not the one tasked with getting red-wine stains out of his rugs), that’s exactly what happened.