Game of Thrones - 'The Door'

"There are our judgey faces."

Petyr Baelish pays a call on Sansa and gets a verbal slapping, but does pass on word that Brynden the Blackfish has reclaimed River Run for the Tully family. Caught between the White Walkers and the Boltons, Jon sets out to recruit the minor northern houses and Sansa takes Brienne to recruit Brynden.

In Braavos, Arya continues her training with a history lesson on the Faceless Men; former slaves who used the Many-Faced God's gifts to overthrow their masters, founded the free city of Braavos and now shank people for money. While the Waif is not impressed with 'Lady Stark', a Man gives her another chance: Assassinate a relatively harmless actress playing in The Moste Comic Tragedie of King Robert Baratheon and the Pretender Ned Stark and earn back her place in the full training programme.

In the Iron Islands, Euron turns up for the King's Moot and carries the vote pretty much by countering Theon and Yara's arguments by shouting 'pirate!' and declaring his intention to wow and woo Danaerys Targaryen. The priests drown him and then he forms up a quick lynch mob for his relatives, only to find that they have already nicked off with their supporters and the best ships on the islands.

These are the armies of the Night.
They are 60,000 strong.
They outnumber the Night's Watch 3 to 1.
Tonight, they are all after Bran Stark.

But the big news is in the far north, where Bran sees the creation of the first White Walker as OH, HOLY CRAP, as the Children of the Forests' version of the Abomountaintion. Seeking to learn more while everyone else is asleep, he screws up on an unofficial warging and gets bad touched by the Night's - or possibly Night - King, marking him so that the Walkers can find him. The Three-Eyed Raven declares that it is time for Bran to become him.

Tyrion reaches out to the Red Priesthood to help ensure that Danaerys' name remains in favour, while Danaerys herself heads back with pretty much all the Dothraki after ordering Jorah to get his leprosy seen to.

"Can you dig it!?"

The Walkers and their wight power rally stack up outside the tree and blow through a defensive ring of fire while Bran and the Raven are warging to old Winterfell. Meera manages to get Hodor to help move Bran and dragon glasses one of the Walkers, but the Children and Summer fall to the wights; it's almost as bad a year for direwolves as for celebrities.

The wights charge through the tree like it's 28 Days Later. The Raven gets cut in half and vanishes from the warg, but the big shock and the real heartbreak comes as Meera drags Bran out into the snow and her last desperate call echoes back into the warg and apparently imprints itself into the young Wyllis's mind: "Hold the door." And that's all he says for decades, and the last thing he ever does.

After a rough few weeks, 'The Door' has some serious punch, and perhaps the presence of a confirmed George RR Martin-penned plot point (the death and effective birth of Hodor) at the centre of it. It's also possible that I appreciate the arrival of the White Walkers as a palate cleanser after all the backbiting and baby killing; I've always preferred PvE.