S5┬ÀE10 ÔÇö Mother's Mercy

The hour retold

Winter finishes what the burning started. StannisÔÇÖs host deserts him overnight ÔÇö soldiers do not forgive what he did to buy good weather ÔÇö and Brienne of Tarth finds him alone against a tree with nothing left to command, and delivers, at last, the sentence she swore years ago in a tent at StormÔÇÖs End for a king she loved and lost to a shadow with his own brotherÔÇÖs face. It is one of the seasonÔÇÖs few deaths that plays as satisfaction rather than tragedy, an oath honored on schedule after two seasons of patient waiting, and the show grants it almost no ceremony ÔÇö a sword, a nod, and the snow closing back over the story of a rightful heir undone by his own certainty.

In KingÔÇÖs Landing, the seasonÔÇÖs cruelest engine of comeuppance finishes its work on the queen who built it: Cersei confesses to a fraction of her sins, is shorn in a cell, and walks the mile from the sept to the Red Keep naked, pelted with filth while the city she has spent years terrorizing chants Shame at her like a bell tolling. The sequence is filmed with an unflinching, almost clinical patience ÔÇö the camera studies CerseiÔÇÖs face as much as the crowdÔÇÖs cruelty ÔÇö because the show wants the audience to feel two contradictory things at once: that she has earned every step, and that watching a person broken in public, regardless of who they are, is its own kind of horror. At Winterfell, in the episodeÔÇÖs gentler mirror image, Sansa and Theon choose the jump off the battlements into the snow together rather than one more night under RamsayÔÇÖs roof ÔÇö a small, cold, hopeful ending stitched into the same hour as CerseiÔÇÖs public ruin.

The season closes on two falls that are really the same fall told twice. Arya, given Meryn Trant at last, takes his eyes and his life in a Braavosi brothel ÔÇö vengeance she was explicitly forbidden ÔÇö and the Many-Faced GodÔÇÖs house answers by taking her sight, the price for stealing a debt that belonged to no one. And at Castle Black, Jon SnowÔÇÖs mercy toward the free folk, the very choice that made him a leader worth following, gets him a dagger from a boy he saved and then blades from officers who never forgave him for it ÔÇö For the Watch, they say, and OllyÔÇÖs knife goes in last and worst. The season began by asking what fills a vacuum of power; it ends by demonstrating that doing the right thing, in this story, has never once been the same as doing the safe one ÔÇö a lesson every major character in the finale learns at exactly the same, unbearable moment.

What happens

• Stannis's host deserts; Brienne finally gets her sentence ÔÇö and Ramsay's men get the field.
• Sansa and Theon jump from Winterfell's walls into the snow, hand in hand.
• Arya takes Meryn Trant's eyes and life; the Faceless Men take her sight for it.
• Cersei confesses, is shorn, and walks the city naked to the bells of 'Shame'.
• "For the Watch." Olly's knife is the last of many; Jon Snow bleeds out in the snow.

The people of the episode

The fallen ÔÇö spoilers

• Stannis Baratheon ÔÇö The rightful heir, executed by Brienne of Tarth against a tree, for Renly.
• Queen Selyse Baratheon ÔÇö Hanged herself in the ruin of her daughter's pyre.
• Ser Meryn Trant ÔÇö Blinded and bled by a girl whose dancing master he killed.
• Myranda ÔÇö Ramsay's kennel-love, pushed from the walls by Theon's first free act.
• Jon Snow, Lord Commander ÔÇö Stabbed by his own officers under a sign that read 'traitor'. For a time.