Every week, we'll be declaring a victor for the latest episode of Game of Thrones. Spoilers below for season five, episode one, "The Wars to Come."

The world of Thrones is in complete chaos in the wake of last season's finale. Tonight's season premiere reintroduced us to most of the characters we've grown to obsess over for four seasons, and they are almost all in states of crisis:

Cersei and Jaime Lannister are watching Tywin's body cool, thanks to Tyrion. Tyrion's drinking himself to death on the road to Meereen. Daenerys' grip on Meereen is slipping, and she can barely control her dragons. Jon Snow's angered Stannis Baratheon, one of his few powerful friends on the Wall, by giving Mance Rayder a quick death. The Wildlings sit leaderless in the shadow of their enemies. And Brienne and Podrick gloomily search for Sansa Stark, who rides with Lord Petyr Baelish.

Only Littlefinger shows any modicum of certainty in this episode. Here are the deftest moves he pulled off last season: secretly engineering a successful and deliciously gruesome regicide at the king's wedding; letting the blame fall to Tyrion, a potential political opponent and the person whose guilt no one would question; stealing away with the true heiress to the North, who's starting to scheme with him; marrying the woman who holds the continent's most impregnable castle as well as arguably its most under-utilized army in a strategic location between the North and the South; and inheriting everything from her after killing her and getting away with it. It's Littlefinger's Westeros, and we all just live in it.

And he knows it. In the scene where he and Lord Yohn Royce watch Robin trading blunted-sword blows with another boy, Royce chides the young and pathetically incompetent Robin for not attacking enough. Littlefinger responds with: "Some boys develop more slowly. He is still young." And Sansa sees him stow a cryptic message into his sleeve after reading it. "He has other gifts: a gift of a great name. Sometimes, that's all one needs."

Littlefinger's not talking about Robin, he's talking about himself. He's a commoner who achieved his status by wheeling and dealing as high and as hard as he could and eventually killing Robin's mother after marrying her. The last time he openly challenged anyone was Ned Stark's brother Brandon, years before the show begins, for Catelyn Tully's favor. He lost embarrassingly, but notice how all three of those people and most of their kin are either dead, distraught, disappeared, or directly in the care of Littlefinger.

He's more than alive. And after taking in the mountain air, he'll use his victory lap to take Sansa—the key to the North—away from the few good lords on her side who possess that information, and to a place where he can leverage it for himself. They're moving west, toward the kingsroad. From there, they won't go south back to King's Landing, and they won't go farther west into Lannister territory. There's really only one more option, and that's north.

But he's ridden the road to victory on a combination of strategy and luck. We'll see how long they both hold up.

Eric Vilas-Boas Assistant Editor Eric Vilas-Boas is a former editor at Esquire, where he managed the magazine's social media accounts, helped edit the website, and has written stories about comic books, martinis, and Ernest Hemingway's hamburger acumen.

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