Joffrey’s bratty gloating aside, the death of Robb Stark is really Tywin’s triumph: a hateful one, shameful, possibly anathema to the gods, but a ruthlessly effective one-in other words, it’s pure Tywin.

Those tensions are especially pronounced among the Lannisters, who are not as united in joyful in victory as you might think. In this world, that often makes for tensions between what you do for your family and what your family does to you. But that makes family a complicated thing here: it is, at the same time, a group of people you hopefully love (even if not to extent of Jaime and Cersei) and also a business, a culture, a way of life. Which– duh, right? A drama set in a dynastic feudal fantasy kingdom is obviously going to be about families, those being the organizing political structure of the society. And it weaved together the many, many threads of GoT’s tapestry by returning to a recurring theme: that Game of Thrones is ultimately about family. If the Red Wedding seemed to kill hope, “Mhysa” made clear that it didn’t end anything. The end of season 3, then, spent some time among the winners and losers in post-Red-Wedding Westeros, giving the audience a chance to soak in the shock, seethe at the winners’ glee, and get a reminder of the larger forces–White Walkers, dragons–well beyond the war between the Lannisters and the Starks. In Game of Thrones, think Ned Stark’s death in season 1 and the Blackwater in season 2. It’s standard operating procedure for HBO dramas since The Sopranos–yet keeps surprising people nonetheless–for the really big stuff to go down in the next-to-last-episode, and the finale to deal with the aftermath and look ahead to the next season. Follow for last night’s season 3 finale of Game of Thrones follow:

Game of thrones season 2 ending