Things seem to be building up to the last couple of episodes and the tension is becoming unbearable. The eighth episode of the season titled No One bubbles but never boils over. Except perhaps for the person being referred to in the name of the episode — Arya Stark.

The highs

Every scene with Lady Brienne of Tarth in it is a delight. And she shone the brightest opposite Jaime Lannister. It was a meeting fraught with tremendous feelings on both sides — tender, respectful and hopeless. This episode was really all about Gwendoline Christie and Nicolaj Coster-Waldau who turn out powerful performances. Brienne bargains with Jaime to give up the idea of taking Riverrun by force, instead allowing her to take Blackfish and the Tully army to help Sansa Stark.
Jaime refuses to take back the sword he had given her in Season 4 and when she tells him that if it came to battle she would have to defend Sansa’s kin, meaning Blackfish, and therefore fight Jaime, you know he is desperately wishing that it ‘may never come to that’, as he tells Brienne. Their last rueful wave goodbye could have been straight out of a Nicholas Sparks novel.

The other high point of the episode was The Hound’s slasher film-like revenge on the men of the Brotherhood Without Banner who murdered Septon Ray. Beheadings with an axe, lots of spilling guts and gore... a perfect GoT scene.
Things are not going well for Cersei and she has not much to do in this episode, but that one dialogue where she quietly says, “I choose violence”, in response to the threats by the Sparrows, is worth 10 minutes of screen time.

The lows

Things are becoming a little too convenient on the show and that’s a bummer. How convenient that Daenerys drops into Meereen with Drogon handy just as Slaver’s Bay is being attacked by the Masters. 
Tommen makes us miss Joffrey a bit (a very, very nano bit) because Joffrey would have been busier ordering “off with his head” to the High Sparrow rather than leaving his mother defenceless in front of seven Septons. No matter what her fault.
Oh and Edmure Tully (still can’t get used to seeing him as anything apart from the evil Black Jack Randall from Outlander) just hands over Riverrun to Jaime. JLT.

WTF moment

Arya Stark is so badly injured that she can barely move the night before, but as soon as The Waif shows up she is jumping off rooftops and sliding down stairs, seemingly without any pain. And even after she sticks Needle’s pointy end into her nemesis and tells Jaqen H’gar that she is going home, she walks away straight like she wasn’t wounded at all. Straight out of ’80s Bollywood.

Death count

Seven BWB members, one Sparrow and The Waif. Though The Hound’s groin-spilling one was a winner when it came to the gore, his brother The Mountain (now Ser Robert Strong) was the clear winner when he pulled the Sparrow’s head clean off his shoulders with his bare hands.

Sex and nudity

Not for the first time this season, an episode without any nudity or sex.

Best line

“Those are your last words? F**k you? Come on, you can do better,” The Hound tells the BWB member whose groin he’s just axed. “C**t,” the BWB says. “You’re shit at dying, you know that,” responds The Hound, before he axes him in half.

GoT S6E09 airs on June 21 at 10pm on Star World Premier HD