Over all, it made for one of the show’s most gruesome episodes. For those irked by the relatively scanty death toll so far this season, well, on Sunday your cup runneth over.

Varys was the eunuch in the coal mine, offering an early glimpse of the corner Daenerys had turned — less the fact that she dracarys’d him, her default response to open defiance, than the casual way she got on with it. This was a person for whom human life had ceased to matter as much as it should.

Euron discovered that what is dead may never die, unless you put a sword in its guts and twist. Qyburn met the fate of all who play God, and he was dispatched by Mountainstein with its signature smash-and-toss finishing move. And the Hound discovered that what is actually dead may really, really never die, unless you shove it into the hellmaw of a burning city. (Even now I’m not positive a charcoaly Mountain torso isn’t scooting around King’s Landing like half a Terminator.)

Then there were the toxic Lannister twins, whose grand fall was symbolized by the fact that they kick-started this whole story by fornicating in a northern tower and ended by dying in a southern crypt. It’s a testament to the dramatic talents of Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau that an incest reunion that took a somewhat galling amount of forced plot mechanics to enact still tugged at my heart strings.

Cersei and Jaime were destined to die together, of course, whether he killed her or she killed him or they killed each other. The outcome was less interpersonally violent than most of us probably expected, which is perhaps oddly fitting for what, in the end, was the most enduring romance of this story. I just wish we’d gotten here more gracefully.

If there’s anyone who’s been more narratively jerked around than Daenerys this season, it’s Jaime. We talked a few weeks ago about how his villainy was always overblown, and his trajectory since that tower liaison has been mostly about how people can get past the world’s definition of them by doing the hard work of trying to be good. (And if you have a warrior maiden around to help, so much the better.)