For the Best Episode of Season 4 poll, our staff argued for our favorite episodes of the season…

One of the more impressive choices that Game of Thrones has made as a production is to preserve the round robin point-of-view chapter format in the show. It’s not easy to juggle double digit storylines in a show that only gets ten installments a year. I’ve seen more than one television critic complain in earnest that we never get to spend enough time in one place in any given episode, but I appreciate Benioff and Weiss’ choosing to emulate the novels this way.

This is my favorite episodes are the ones where they are most successful within the format. This is partly why I chose the seventh episode of Season 4, “Mockingbird” as the season’s best episode. In “Mockingbird,” we check in with no less than seven different plot lines (Tyrion, Dany, Arya, Brienne, Sansa, Jon, Melisandre) and, within 51 minutes, we see major forward momentum in five of them…

Tyrion’s story moves forwards with impressive speed. We start in the aftermath of his outburst in court the week before, and his demand for Trial by Combat. In quick succession we see his rejection by Jaime (who is not ready to do anyone left handed in the public square) but also the conclusion of his long running series One and a Half Men with Bronn, who has moved on to a new patron, Cersei. She hasn’t just offered him position and authority as Tyrion did, but marriage to a noblewoman. Tyrion just can’t double that price.

The tragedy of Tyrion never understanding the difference between real and bought friends is short-lived, however. The next thing you know, Oberyn has walked in with a monologue story for the ages, which says so much about the relationship between the Lannister siblings over the years, and ends with those five famous words: “I will be your champion.”

In between these scenes we see our strongest female characters taking control. Dany orders Daario to strip and then into her bed. Arya kills Rorge with a needle through the heart. Brienne shows up Pod by getting Hot Pie to give them information on Arya’s whereabouts. HOT PIE! Any episode that brings back Hot Pie is a good one.

(This is not just impressive forward momentum as a TV show. For readers, these three short scenes condense two of the worst of the meandering storylines from Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons, neither of which I was looking forward to. It does raise the question of what the show is planning to do next season in their stead, but that doesn’t take away from the speed and with which Benioff and Weiss found a way to dispense with them and move everyone’s story forward.)

But even with all these moments, the thing this episode will be most remembered for the most is the storyline from which it takes its name, and the eerie scenes in the Eyrie. “Mockingbird” was nominated for a cinematography award, and most of that comes from the beautiful footage of the Eyrie courtyard in the snow. As for the snow castle Winterfell—I don’t know who in the props department created it (or how many times they had to create it for filming shots) but they should get their own award. It’s an impressive enough creation that we the audience side with Sansa in her last childish act of slapping Robin for destroying it over a lack of Moon Door. I say it’s Sansa’s last childish act, because this episode is the point where her childhood is taken away from her for good by Littlefinger’s creepy kiss.

As for the death of Lysa that stems from that moment, I admit, at the time the episode aired, I missed the one-two punch of Lysa’s revealing Littlefinger masterminded nearly every major plot point in King’s Landing from the very beginning just before she’s killed, like she does in the novel. But the show separating these two moments for the audience to maximize the number of shoes dropped over the course of the season helped emphasize that this was the first time Littlefinger directly commits a murder himself. In all other instances, from Jon Arryn to Joffrey Lannister, these were deaths he was happy to serve cold from a third party distance. Lysa should be honored—she is the only one to ever push Littlefinger to commit murder directly.

She made no sound as she fell.

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