Well, we are officially at the half-way point of season four, and this episode didn’t disappoint. This episode featured a lot of call-backs from, as well as tying a few lose ends from previous seasons. These really helped to illustrate how far the show has come, while also acting as a nice, little refresher course for past seasons. 

A lot of this episode was spent looking at some of the traveling groups which gave us a really good scene between  Arya and The Hound which illustrate the growing antagonism in their relationship from the beginning of the season onward. We also got to see Arya practicing her swordsmanship which she learned from Syrio in season one.

Their were also some interesting reveals in this episode some rather large others not so much. The larger of the two was easily the fact that it turns out that Little Finger has been playing a much longer game than anyone suspected. Not only was he seemingly behind the death of King Joffrey but he was also apparently involved in the death of John Arryn way back in season one which is what set this whole chain of events in motion. 

The big action set piece of the episode involved the Night’s Watch’s assault on Craster’s keep and the traitors. This gave us our longest and probably best scene with Bran, Jojun, and Meera in quite awhile. It was also nice to see them show a bit more of Jojun’s own powers for a change. The highlight f the episode for me was Karl’s showdown with Jon Snow, but seeing Hodor finally use his strength for something other than carrying Bran was a close second.

Overall this was a pretty good episode, and a nice half-way point for the season. However I’m not getting the desperate need to find out what happens next that I got from previous seasons. Hopefully they can ramp up the intensity a bit going into the final half of the season.

4/5