The good news: We didn’t actually have to watch Ramsay repeatedly brutalize Sansa Stark. But we did get to witness her battered body and hear her plead with Theon/Reek to save her from the nightly horrors inflicted upon her. Alas, despite intimations of possible bravery, he winds up delivering Sansa’s candle straight to Ramsay himself.

I’ve noted before my concern that while Benioff and Weiss excel at many narrative tasks (writing strong dialogue, engineering big moments) the single most crucial element of Martin’s work—the extraordinary cleverness of its plotting—is one that’s so far eluded his adapters. Tonight’s episode offered an object lesson. A few episodes ago, a friend suggested to me that while the mini-plot involving the “the North remembers” woman was fine for an adventure yarn, the truly cunning twist would be if she were in fact a Bolton spy, engaged to entrap Sansa.

When Theon went straight to Ramsay, I thought perhaps that was what had happened. But no such luck. This was a potential twist on which the showrunners whiffed entirely. (Shades of the missed Lannister Honeypot opportunity in season three.) Instead, we got to see yet another Ramsay torture/flaying victim, this one an old woman—I swear, half of Westeros must be missing its skin by now—with the camera lingering over her mutilated flesh. Even the Ramsay Bolton Fan Club, if such a thing exists (and if it does, you may want to keep an eye on it, FBI/NSA/PETA), must find this tedious by now.

Now, it was nice to see the best example to date of Dark Sansa becoming a player of the game, as she sows doubt with Ramsay over whether or not he should kill his pregnant stepmother before she births a potential dynastic competitor. (He’s Ramsay, so: duh.) Sansa’s line “Tommen Baratheon? Another bastard!” was particularly well-played. But we could easily enjoy such moments without having to endure all the look-what-a-bad-thing-Ramsay’s-done-today scenes that have now plagued the show for three seasons.

Rounding out this week’s more than ample sex-and-violence quotient were the attempted rape of Gilly, the successful beating of Sam, the subsequent sex scene between the two, and Tyene Sand’s R-rated “who’s the fairest of them all” quiz for Bronn. (Note: Under such circumstances, the use of slow-acting poison really constitutes cheating.) Here’s one breast, here’s the other, now she’s opening her tunic, the camera pans slowly, lasciviously down her torso (twice!) ... You can almost feel the showrunners congratulating themselves for their courtliness when they stop 5 percent short of full frontal. Again, guys: Seriously? It was bad enough when it looked as though the Sand Snakes were going to be poorly-written-but-otherwise-empowered woman warriors. Turning them into ogle-candy is not an improvement. (I’m going to take one more victory lap, however, for intuiting the perfect match between Bronn and the wicked ballad “The Dornishman’s Wife” three weeks ago. It’s practically become his theme song. And this week—as opposed to last—we got to hear the crucial final line.)