There is a series of questions that every person asks themselves when a relationship falls apart. Why did this happen? What could have been done differently? How did we end up here, after everything we shared? And then the most fundamental question, the one that holds itself up to your eye like a magnifying glass in the sun: Why did I love you in the first place?

There is no single answer to this question that will resonate for every person, every situation. But the most universal answer, the one that speaks most powerfully and broadly to everyone's heart, is also the simplest: I believed in you.

If the finale of the seventh season of Game of Thrones says anything, it is that this show has failed its fans, and has been doing so slowly for a long time. It did not want to admit it, nor did they. But alas, it's happened and all that hope and emotional investment has been reduced to a series of bullet points and cartoons, an empty dragon breathing blue fire with all the CGI fury of a broken promise with too much momentum behind it to do anything else.

And so every major character in the series gathers at the dragonpit, because they have to. Not because the story demands it, but because the story has found no way around itself. Maybe George R. R. Martin knows one, but he may never finish writing his epic tale. So what's left? A saga that is larger and more complicated than anyone in control of it knows how to finish to anyone’s satisfaction.

Listen: It is not an easy task. Does anyone truly feel they could face the sheer weight of this story, sword in hand, and conquer it? Who thinks it would be simple? Everyone wishes they could be smarter, stronger, more eloquent when faced with their fundamental inadequacies. In the end, people are who they are, unable to be better than their limitations, especially when painted into a corner. If anything, that is when they are at their worst, the most unable to see what happens next.

Perhaps the most unbelievable moment in all of this is the one with Littlefinger, the great puppeteer who orchestrated the War of the Five Kings, the man who has worked himself inside and outside of every vector of power he encountered like a living cross-stitch. Prior to Bran, he was the closest thing this tale had to a seer, a mind with all of his eyes open.

“Don’t fight in the north or the south,” he tells Sansa. “Fight every battle, always, in your mind. Everyone is your enemy, everyone is your friend. Every possible series of events is happening all at once. Live that way, and nothing will surprise you. Everything that happens will be something that you’ve seen before.”

So what's left? A saga that is larger and more complicated than anyone in control of it knows how to finish to anyone’s satisfaction.

And yet when his moment comes, he is undone by the Scooby-Doo gang of Westeros, his mask torn off by those meddling kids—the boy with infinite recall of all events, the girl who learned subterfuge and murder from the greatest teachers alive, the woman who doubts him above all others—and was somehow taken completely by surprise, even as they orchestrated an elaborate Screw You involving multiple political factions across the nation. Why didn't this master of espionage and his vast network of spies see this coming? Apparently, it doesn’t matter.

“So much of that scene is what happens beforehand and building up the tension between Sansa and Arya in the earlier episodes where you really believe that one will potentially kill the other,” showrunner David Benioff says in his Monday-morning quarterbacking of this particular execution. “It’s one of the benefits of working on a show like this, where over the years so many beloved characters have been killed and so many characters make decisions that you wish they hadn’t that you can believe that Sansa might conspire against Arya, or that Arya might decide that Sansa has betrayed the family and deserved to die.”