After an already strong start, HBO’s Game of Thrones ups the ante with one of its best hours yet. Last week’s premiere was ominous, and while I counted off the characters most clueless to the oncoming storm as the most likely to suffer, I was not expecting this.

Game of Thrones is back, which means it’s another couple months of brutality, mystery, political intrigue, and, oh yeah, dragons. I have not read the books, so no spoilers past “Two Swords” will be seen here.

The last time The Walking Dead delivered a season finale, the response was mixed, to put it delicately. In season three, fans wanted a satisfying payoff to the season-long buildup to war between The Governor and the Team Grimes prison group, and what they got was little more than an inept attack, a hasty retreat, and The Governor losing his mind and slaughtering his own army.

Coming off one of The Walking Dead‘s most emotionally exhausting episodes—the one we have to assume was making AMC executives “nervous” because of the (perhaps unprecedented) depiction a child’s execution—the fifteenth episode of season four needed only to provide a glimmer of hope to lighten the mood before the series finale.

Perhaps more than any other show, The Walking Dead is burdened with the unenviable task of satisfying viewers who want nonstop zombie-stomping action and those who want the character development that makes the storytelling meaningful.

By far the most chilling set of images in tonight’s season finale (and close to the first story in the True Detective anthology series) wasn’t the revelation of a terrestrial Carcosa, the preserved body of Billy Childress, or the superhuman murderous antics of his son Errol.

Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White, Frank Underwood—for whatever reason, modern audiences like their protagonists conflicted, duplicitous and deeply flawed. Despite the moral ambiguity inherent in having to live in a world where you have to kill other humans as a necessity, The Walking Dead is remarkable for just how traditional the show is in portraying its central struggle as being essentially between the good Rick Grimes fighting against the bad, in both zombie and human form.

Okay, it’s official: neither Cohle nor Hart did it, are doing it, or…anything. Writer and showrunner Nic Pizzolatto promised we’d get closure on this matter in episode 7 and he essentially hammered a wisp-thin nail with a sledge to telegraph it.

Portlandia enters its fourth season tonight. Four seasons! Whodathunkit?! From the waning strains of viral hit “Dream of the ‘90s (Is Alive in Portland)” to the literally provincial title, it seemed fated to be one-note, despite its instant charms.