Bam! Once again, Game of Thrones’ fourth season has knocked it outta the park, continuing on its winning streak with this week’s cracking, twisty-tailed episode.

Lysa Arryn took a last minute topple from her Moon Door, Oberyn Martell stepped forward to be Tyrion’s champion in his trial by combat, Mance Rayder’s men grew closer to the Wall and we discovered that there’s something nasty brewing for Stannis’s daughter Shireen. All in all, it looks like the remaining three episodes of this season will be full of thrills, spills and (what the hell) chills galore.

We opened with Tyrion and once again the episode was largely – and rightly – devoted to him, dealing with the aftermath of his glorious diatribe at his trial last week. This week he was back in his gloomy cell, frowning in the half light (reduced to a shadow of his former self, if you will).

Already betrayed by Shae and Varys, we watched as Tyrion faced the prospect of having no champion to represent him in his trial by combat – Jaime’s lack of a right hand rendering him incapable, and Bronn being sadly but authentically swayed by Cersei’s clever bribery. It was at Tyrion’s lowest point that Oberyn Martell swanned in with all the flounce and ballsiness of a Medieval Toreador, and declared himself Tyrion’s champion.

In another show, such a declaration might be satisfying in itself, but as we know Game of Thrones has a knack for mining scenes for all their character-building potential. Thus, Oberyn’s visit to Tyrion turned out to be one of the most heartbreaking and rousing scenes of the season. We watched as Martell coolly recounted to a teary-eyed Tyrion the details of their first meeting, when Tyrion was a newborn and Cersei was already full of hatred for him, unable to forgive her baby brother for their mother’s death.

Indeed this was quite the episode for childhood reminiscence. The Hound broke character (forgivably so) to open up to Arya about his mutilation at the hands of his brother, and Sansa built the Winterfell of her memory in the snowy grounds of her new, and far less welcoming home, the Eyrie.

Daenerys, on the other hand, seems to have entirely shrugged her wide-eyed ingénue shtick and is now modeling herself on Cersei Lannister – i.e. having people killed whilst holding a cup of wine. As of this episode, she’s happily shagging Daario Naharis and getting her reign on, but we’re still yet to see anything on a par with last season’s thrilling “Actually I speak Valyrian and now my dragon’s going to eat you” sequence.

That’s where the jaw-dropping final scenes of ‘Mockingbird’ came in handy, pleasingly rounding off the episode with Petyr Baelish snogging Sansa and then promptly shoving his new bride Lysa out the Moon Door.

Of course, most important of all was the brief return of Hot Pie who turned up to, um, make a pie, give Brienne and Pod some clues as to Arya’s whereabouts and generally prove that not every innocent on this show dies a grisly death. Who knows? Maybe Hot Pie will be the one who makes it through all of this.

Aired on Monday 19 May 2014 on Sky Atlantic.

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