Everybody goes home.

Quick takes: FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE. The moment Danaerys was sent to the Dosh Khaleen I turned to Mr. A and said, “She’s gonna raise them all up as an army and fuck up the khals.” That’s what Dany does. She takes the role she’s given — in order: pawn, wife, widow, slave, queen — and turns each one into its equal opposite. Oh, you want me to sit quietly in this mud hut and think about my life? Fuck. That. Dragon mama has PLANS, y’all.

Robin Arryn. Shudder. He’s like Joffrey II. This catches us up to where we were in the books with the Vale, which is that it is full of bored old jackwagons waiting for orders, and now comes Lord Tommy Carcetti to give them some.

RIP Osha, who kept creepy little Rickon alive all this time. Thanks for delivering him to be filleted and eaten by wild dogs!

I’m really bored by TV!Yara Greyjoy, because book!Yara (or book!Asha) is fierce and wild and kind of slutty, and TV!Yara just mopes around. Book!Yara’s life sucked just as much as her screen counterpart, but she managed to liven things up with some throwing axes and bad sex decisions.

Shut up, Tyrion. You are whitesplaining slavery right now and that is not a good look. Have the self-awareness God gave a carrot.

Shut up also, Daario, and your knife with the skank handle.

WHAR IS DROGON.

I think I was supposed to be amused by that exchange between Brienne and Davos but all I could see was Davos’s devastated face when Brienne talked about Stanns. Liam Cunningham, you are a genius, sir.

The Stranger is the outcast.

In the mythology of Westeros, the Stranger is Death, the Unknown, the Great Mystery. People pray to the Mother for children and the Father for justice and the Smith for strength and the Warrior for courage and the Maiden for love and the Crone for Wisdom.

No one prays to the Stranger. They leave Him an empty place at the table during a wedding or feast, and credit Him the cold breeze across the backs of their necks in the graveyard, but they don’t ask anything of Him.

Still, He guards the doorways, the crossings, the places where one thing becomes another, and as everyone in this story becomes something else, the Stranger watches.

Tyrion, a slave, rises to the top of the Great Pryamid. Missandei and Grey Worm stand beside him and look down upon their one-time Masters. They’re strangers in the world they built.

Theon, beaten and broken, walks through the doors of what once was his home, and only wants to sit by the fire. He’s a stranger to the House where he was born.

Jon Snow, life breathed into him by the Red God, sees strangers all around him. The Night’s Watch was his home, and he fought for every inch of it, and now he doesn’t know it at all. It might as well be another planet.

And Sansa Stark, Queen in the North, calls her banners. I was half joking about it and desperately hoping for it and here she is, Catelyn’s daughter and Ned’s, passing sentence and swinging the sword.

She rides up to Castle Black seeking refuge but if there’s one thing Catelyn, Cersei, Littlefinger, Ramsay Bolton have taught her, it’s that there is no refuge. There is no safety. There’s only the next battle and the next and the next, so she says to Jon Snow, how many men can you count on? Because we have places to go.

She’s not a Stranger anymore. She’s on her way home.

A.