Hello! I am delighted to be guest recapping last night’s episode of Game of Thrones. You are in very good hands here because I have seen every episode of this show and, not to brag, but I have frequently had a pretty good handle on what’s going on. I mean, sometimes. I’m really not clear on what Arya is up to. Are you?!

The episode was called “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” but I think we can all agree that it should have been called “The Dwarf Lives Until We Find a Cock Merchant.” Will we ever hear a more pleasingly demented line of dialogue on this or any other show? Not likely. O.K., here we go with the recapping…

The episode opens on Arya who has apparently been on corpse-scrubbing duty for a while. A terrible job. Not as bad as cock merchant, but pretty bad. She’s still in the big stone building in Braavos where the syntactically challenged guy who was briefly an old black man lives. If he has a name, I don’t know it. From what I can gather, Arya came to this mysterious place in search of magical abilities to kill people and has instead found herself playing confusing games, being hit with a stick when she lies, and preparing dead bodies for something that no one will explain to her. It’s like a waaaay more disturbing Karate Kid. She has to want to become “no one,” whatever that means, and everyone there can tell that she doesn’t really want to become no one. Frustrating stuff, for her and me, but I guess it’ll all be worth it if she can eventually kill anyone she wants. A girl can dream!

After those dark, weird scenes, we’re on the road with Tyrion and Jorah. Sure, their relationship started off rocky but now they’re bonding. They talk about their dads. It’s super-sweet. The highlight of this scene is Jorah’s reaction when Tyrion tells him that Tywin was having sex with the woman he loved. It’s a silent “woah, that is fucked up. Think I’ll go stretch my legs somewhere else.” A lovely scene. Aaaannd then we’re back to Arya.

One of the things Arya’s apparently being taught in this dismal place is how to be a good liar, and she really impresses her face-changing mentor when she persuades a dying girl that she’ll get better if she drinks out of a fountain. The next thing we know, it’s corpse-scrubbin’ time again so I guess that fountain is full of poison, huh? This harmless bit of deception earns Arya the right to see what’s been going on with all the dead bodies and the answer to that question explains everything. Oh, I mean nothing. But it’s pretty gross.

Back to Dinklage and the newspaper magnate from Downton Abbey. They have a brief debate about the merits of monarchy and whether dragons can sing and then they’re captured by slavers. Oops. Tyrion saves the day by making some pretty bold claims about his penis and Jorah’s fighting abilities and they set sail in search of cock merchants and fighting pits! Ah, the adventurer’s life. That’s the last we see of those two because we have a ton of exposition to get to in… King’s Landing!

If you’ve been wondering what exactly Littlefinger has been up to, that lovable scamp, we get to find out a whole big bunch of it here. So. Apparently he set Sansa Stark up to marry Ramsay “the biggest sociopath in the history of this show and that is REALLY saying something” Bolton in order to make Cersei mad enough at the Boltons to want to see them defeated at Winterfell. And the reason he married Lysa Arryn (and then, um, taught her how to fly) was so that he could control the knights of the Vale, which would make him the perfect candidate to defeat the now-hated Boltons, which he will be happy to do in exchange for the somehow deeply coveted title of Warden of The North. Brother, that is some complicated long-range thinking. And what is so goddamn great about living at Winterfell, I ask you. I don’t know, but I guess whoever wins the coming battle between Stannis and House Bolton will have to face the knights of the Vale. Oh, and Littlefinger has promised to put Sansa’s head on a pike if he wins, but I think Arya’s buddy would have hit him with a stick at that point if he’d been there. That did not seem like a sincere promise to me.