This was my favorite episode of the season so far. Loved the sea battle last week but GoT hasn’t greatly surprised me this year until this episode. Sure, we got battle teased, GoT loves to do that, but now Dany feels like the underdog in this fight. She didn’t listen to Grandma Tyrell when she told her to be a dragon and here we are. And the fact that the best scene in the episode where Jon and Dany met for the first time is between Grandma Tyrell and Jamie is great. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Jon and Tyrion met up again, and try to figure out if they can still trust each other, and feel out how each changed in the course of their struggles.Melisandre and Varys talked, I kept thinking she was going to jump off the cliff in this scene, but no suicide. She just predicted both of their deaths and menacingly walked off into the sunset.

Then Jon and Dany met!

That’s a huge moment. As Melisandre says she brought fire and ice together and the day is safe thanks to the Power Puff…I mean, Melisandre. We got a taste of the differences between Dany and Jon in this scene. Nothing encapsulates their differing personalities better than Missandei listing all of Dany’s titles and Ser Davos saying, “This is Jon Snow. He’s King in the North.” It’s hysterical.

Looking back it’s interesting how Dany has styled herself Queen of Westeros for years the way Jack Sparrow styles himself captain of the Black Pearl in the first Pirates movie. She’s so confident that she will eventually take the Throne that she puts it in her title; Jon has never asked for any of this. He doesn’t care how he looks, he just sees something that needs doing and he does it. And soon enough we’re gonna have to talk about how he has the better claim to the Iron Throne because of his secret Targaryen ancestry. Jon and Dany don’t immediately get along, but with Tyrion they come to a compromise, and Jon is going to get his dragon glass.

Euron returned to King’s Landing with Ellaria, the last living Sand Snake and Yara in tow. He and Jamie threw some shade at each other, ending with Euron asking what Cersei likes in the bedroom. Cersei tortured Ellaria by poisoning her last living daughter with a kiss. She claims the poison can take days to weeks to work. Then she sauntered out of there, getting off on their horror and misery. She immediately goes down on Jamie in the next scene, so I think that’s a fair statement. Also I love that she dresses like the Wicked Witch of the West now. It’s great that we got to witness her transformation into a super villain, complete with new super villain score. Also love how Cersei is just like, “fuck it, the servants can know Jamie and I fuck. Eh, whateves.” Then Cersei says she’s gonna pay the Iron Bank back, leaving us to speculate how until the end of the episode. (She robbed the Tyrells in case you missed the implication of that.)

Bran and Sansa were reunited…and things got weird. He decides not to take five minutes to explain everything that happened to him and instead talks about how beautiful Sansa looked the night Ramsay raped her because he’s a “good” brother, I guess. By “good” I mean “what the hell is wrong with you, Bran? Go die already.”

Sam cut off all of Jorah’s grayscale and wasn’t expelled from the Citadel, but Professor Slughorn gave him lines for it, so there’s that. A coworker and I were talking about this, it seems in the last episode Sam puts a hand to his mouth during the cutting off grayscale scene, meaning he could in theory be infected. Likely this is a continuity error a la scenes where Melisandre clearly is not wearing the glamor necklace and is still young when apparently she’s five hundred years old without it, but who knows maybe Sam will become a Stone Man.

The battle at Casterly Rock goes very differently than Tyrion thinks it will. The Lannisters abandoned the castle and went after Highgarden. I, like a lot of you I’m sure, was pretty stoked for Unsullied versus Lannisters at Casterly Rock, but it was great we got to see both long teased castles in ten minutes and Cersei and Jamie turned the tides of the war in their favor. Taking the last Tyrell and her army out of the war, stranding the Unsullied across the country is a master stroke and now Dany is in trouble.

(Sidenote: Why is Sam’s Dick Dad with them to take Highgarden? Didn’t he say this is the one thing he would not do? Damn, dude you a dick, and I take back that you are a loyal dick.)

But let’s talk about the best scene, the scene I’ve been waiting to discuss: Jamie Lannister and Olenna Tyrell sitting down and talking. Holy shit! This scene is a master class in writing and acting. The directing is pretty standard, shot-reverse shot (cutting back and forth between two characters talking at medium close up) with a wide thrown in here and there for most of it. We get a nice rack focus (a shot where we switch focus between an object or person in the foreground and an object or person in the background in the middle of a take) when Jamie dumps the poison in her cup, all pretty standard.

(Directing-wise for GoT it doesn’t get better than Miguel Sapochnik’s episodes and looks like he didn’t direct any this year so I don’t get to gush about his work, hopefully we get some next year. His previous episodes are “The Gift,” where Tyrion and Dany meet for the first time, “Hardhome,” where the wights and White Walkers attack the wildling village, and last year’s episodes 9″The Battle of the Bastards,” and 10 “The Winds of Winter.”)

But the writing. I’ve watched the series several times now, and I don’t recall these two characters ever interacting like this, one on one in a room, alone. The two of them enter a verbal sparring match, Olenna has lost the battle and she knows she’s about to die. Jamie has won, he’s the conquering hero but Olenna changes how he thinks about this victory. She jabs him saying that he’s doing the dirty work of a monster, that his love of Cersei will be his doom, oh and by the way I killed your son. Jamie stood up for her, he convinced Cersei to give her an honorable death. And once Olenna knows how she is going to die she grabs the cup, downs it and lets loose. “I want Cersei to know it was me.” Oh my God…

The creators say in the after episode that she’s probably the only person on the show to win her own death scene and damn is it awesome. This cements her in my top 10 favorite GoT characters. So the writing is great. This scene is so unexpected, and it pits two people we didn’t quite expect to meet up against each other and it’s beautiful. No one outside that room will ever know but Olenna Tyrell won. She gave Jamie some things to think about and he doesn’t like them. Will he tell Cersei? Probably not, and that means it’s going to fester inside him. It’s glorious and she knew EXACTLY what she was doing.

We haven’t even gotten to what magnetic performances Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jamie) and Diana Rigg (Grandma Olenna Tyrell) give in this scene. There’s so much packed into this scene by these two great actors. It’s a battle of wills, Olenna lost the war but she takes her revenge. When Jamie sweeps from the room leaving her to die we know who’s won the exchange and it’s the best scene so far this season and certainly one of the best for the series. It takes what is a good set up episode and makes it great. It encapsulates what the series is about, it isn’t always winning in battle. It comes down to creativity and misdirection for the Lannisters to win, and yet even in defeat we see Olenna growing strong. I didn’t want to see her go but this was the perfect end for a fantastic character. Bravo.

Tomorrow 7.4 “The Spoils of War.” Review next week. See you then…