What I love about the show’s defining moments of horror—the death of Ned Stark, the Red Wedding, the death of Oberyn Martell, the destruction of the Sept of Baelor—was how perfectly they fit with everything that had come before while also catching me off guard. Perhaps Dany’s massacre wasn’t ever supposed to be part of that hallowed category but was meant to be its own class of inelegant monstrousness.

For all my unhappiness, I was still moved by a few scenes. My heart hurt during Jaime and Cersei’s final moments and when Arya tried to save a mother and daughter only to see them both melted by Drogon’s breath into a single, charred mass. Those doomed pairings, along with the Hound and the Mountain diving off the Red Keep steps in each other’s arms (a fitting end to Cleganebowl, I suppose), underlined how powerful the notion of dying together is—whether the animating reason is love or hate. I wonder whether this idea will be relevant for Jon and Dany in next week’s finale. Everything tells me that Jon must now defeat Dany and rule the Seven Kingdoms whether he wants to or not. More interesting and “Thrones-ian,” of course, would be if neither “wins”—if somehow the cruel destiny that brought these two together will want to see them entwined until the very end. Then again, as this episode suggested, I might no longer have a great sense of what is or isn’t Thrones-ian.

Spencer Kornhaber: I understand your dismay, but I’m going to mount a defense. The episode came into focus for me when the Hound thwacked off Darth Mountain’s helmet to reveal the bloated egg man beneath. “Yeah, that’s you—that’s what you’ve always been,” Sandor grumbled: not only a clutch line in a long-awaited duel, but also an explanation for what underlay the destruction of King’s Landing, which was a scandalous, wrenching, enthralling, and appropriate culmination for Game of Thrones.

Definitely, though, I groaned at various points throughout the mayhem. The mega-crossbows that had seemed so lethal on the seas an episode earlier became instant kindling; Tyrion’s plan for Jaime to sail away with Cersei was obviously DOA; Euron Greyjoy running into Jaime at the cave is the kind of TV coincidence no one wants. On the great question of the episode—what the hell are you doing, Daenerys?—it was impossible not to be baffled at first. But that’s because of the greater failing of the show lately: pacing. A series that used to meticulously, even tediously, build foundations for major character decisions instead has been sprinting through plot check marks. I’ve just become resigned to Benioff and Weiss’s shoddy motivation-explaining, I suppose. With just six episodes this season and seven in the previous, there hasn’t been a long enough runway for Dany’s murderous departure.

Still, the pieces of her decision-making apparatus were all on-screen, even if the show hasn’t put them together all that sturdily. Yes, there’s her “Mad Queen” lineage; yes, there is the quite noxious suggestion that she scoured King’s Landing out of some emotional jag. More important, though, is the strategic principle that Dany has learned time and again: Fear works. Love has worked for her too, but as she pointed out to Jon, Westeros hasn’t exactly erupted in cries of “Mhysa!” since she arrived. If she’d more mercifully taken the capital, would the people have been swayed to her? Maybe. But Varys’s betrayal and all its implications—about all her supposed allies who spread the incendiary news of Jon’s parentage—gave her reason to think that she’d be a marked woman after even the gentlest of victories.