S4·E10 — The Children

The hour retold

The children of the title are everywhere once you start counting: the children of the forest, the children men raise, and the children they ruin. The finale opens by resolving Jon’s suicide walk with cavalry — Stannis Baratheon, of all people, breaking the wildling camp with the only army that answered the Watch’s letters, the Iron Bank’s gold spent where the realm’s conscience should have been. Mance yields rather than let his people bleed; Jon, asked what Ned Stark would do with the prisoner, answers honestly, and the season’s northern war ends not in slaughter but in custody. Beyond the Wall, Bran’s party reaches the heart tree at terrible cost — Jojen dies at its roots — and beneath it a man grown into the wood makes the series’ strangest promise: Bran will never walk again, but he will fly.

In the Vale’s foothills, the show stages the fight it spent two seasons arranging: Brienne of Tarth and Sandor Clegane, two of the realm’s best, brawling over which of them gets to protect a girl who wants neither. It is ugly, magnificent and pointless — while they fight, Arya slips away, and when she finds the Hound broken at the bottom of the bluff, she conducts the season’s coldest transaction: he begs, argues, and finally taunts her toward mercy, and she takes his silver and leaves him to the rocks. Whether it is vengeance or the only mercy she has left, the show declines to say. She spends his coin on a ship, gives the captain a different coin and two words — valar morghulis — and sails for Braavos, the last shot of the season carrying her toward the house with the black-and-white door.

And in King’s Landing, the Lannister family drama arrives at its privy. Jaime frees his brother; Tyrion, detouring through the Tower of the Hand, finds Shae in his father’s bed and strangles her with the chain she wears, then takes a crossbow to find Tywin enthroned in the smallest room of the keep. Their last conversation is the family in miniature — Tywin still negotiating, still certain, still saying whore — and the bolt Tyrion puts in him is punctuation the whole series has been withholding. The great lion of Lannister dies on a toilet, killed by the son he sentenced, and the bells that ring are for more than a Hand: the realm’s indispensable man is gone, and every ambition he was sitting on stands up at once. Tyrion goes into a crate, and east.

What happens

• Stannis's cavalry breaks the wildling camp; Mance yields; the debt to the realm is paid at the Wall.
• Bran reaches the heart tree; Jojen dies at its roots; the Three-Eyed Raven waits below.
• Dany chains Rhaegal and Viserion after Drogon burns a child; the mother locks up her children.
• Brienne and the Hound fight over Arya; Arya leaves him begging for mercy she won't give — and sails for Braavos.
• Tyrion, freed by Jaime, finds Shae in his father's bed and Tywin on his privy. The crossbow speaks twice.

The people of the episode

The fallen — spoilers

• Lord Tywin Lannister — Hand of the King, shot on his privy by the son he sentenced to die.
• Shae — Strangled with the golden chain she wore in another man's bed.
• Jojen Reed — Stabbed by a wight at the very door of the Three-Eyed Raven.
• Sandor Clegane — Broken by Brienne and left begging for death on a stony bluff — presumed.