S5·E3 — High Sparrow

The hour retold

Cersei’s worst decisions have always looked like her cleverest ones in the moment, and the hour’s title belongs to her masterpiece of self-sabotage: recruiting a barefoot zealot and his Faith Militant to humble Margaery Tyrell, mistaking a fanatic for a tool she can put down when she’s finished with it. The High Sparrow speaks the language of humility and means every word, which makes him the one person in King’s Landing immune to Cersei’s usual currencies — flattery, fear, family name — and the queen mother hands him an army because she cannot imagine losing an argument to a man in rags. It is the funniest and most expensive misjudgment of her life, and the show lets her walk out of the soup kitchen looking pleased with herself.

North, the machinery Littlefinger built in season four finally delivers its cargo: Sansa Stark returns to Winterfell as Ramsay Bolton’s intended bride, walking back into the home her family lost to marry into the house that took it, smiling for an audience of Boltons because Littlefinger has taught her that survival wears a pleasant face. At Castle Black, Jon Snow is elected Lord Commander by a margin no one is thrilled about, and his first real order — sparing no one, not even the officer who despises him, for a crime the order can’t forgive — costs Janos Slynt his head and buys Jon exactly the authority a hard first day is supposed to buy: obedience without affection.

What happens

• Tommen weds Margaery; the new queen sweetly suggests his mother might prefer Casterly Rock.
• Cersei meets the High Sparrow in a soup kitchen and mistakes a fanatic for a tool.
• Littlefinger's plan lands: Sansa Stark will marry Ramsay Bolton, in Winterfell.
• Jon Snow, elected Lord Commander, gives Janos Slynt one order — and then the sword.

The people of the episode

The fallen — spoilers

• Janos Slynt — "I'm afraid. I've always been afraid." Too late, at the block of the bastard he mocked.