Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of House of the Dragon.

The end of a season in the Song of Ice and Fire universe comes with certain expectations. Game of Thrones set the bar high with a debut outing that culminated in the execution of its apparent hero, Ned Stark; the secession of the North; the death of Khal Drogo; and the birth of Daenerys’ dragons. In subsequent seasons, the final episode or two consistently delivered battles, bloodshed, shocking reversals of fortune. House of the Dragon carried on that tradition in a Season 1 finale that opened in the immediate aftermath of King Viserys’ death, as Aegon II ascended a contested Iron Throne, the Green and Black factions rallied their respective allies, and Aemond’s dragon Vhagar killed Rhaenyra’s son Lucerys and Lucerys’ dragon Arrax.

Sunday’s Season 2 finale was different. There was no grand, CGI-heavy battle sequence; combat fans had to content themselves, this season, with the Battle of Rook’s Rest. Neither were there any major character deaths. I had predicted we would see Aemond, now the Greens’ regent, cross swords with his elder doppelganger, Daemon. (Never heed my hunches. I haven’t even read the books!) But I’m happy to have been wrong. Because, as talky as it was, this finale served up some of the best plot twists, character beats, and new faces the series has given us to date.

Any Thrones fan who enjoyed the rapport between Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth must be psyched about the new dynamic duo of Tyland Lannister and Admiral Lohar, a fearsome Triarchy commander who is played by a female actor, Abigail Thorn, but who uses male pronouns and has a bevy of wives. First we see the Lannister golden boy mud-wrestle his way into Lohar’s good graces. “Have you ever eaten the flesh of your enemies?” the admiral demands. Lord Tyland is relieved to discover he’s just kidding. But Lohar is dead serious when he announces: “I wish to have children by you.” “You… you want me to…,” Tyland stammers. “Indeed,” Lohar replies. “I want you to f-ck my wives.” OK, then! “How many wives do you have?” asks the visibly nervous Lannister. We may not learn the answer before Season 3, but one thing is sure: Dragon has been hurting for some Thrones-level oddballs, and this new Lohar-Tyland buddy comedy is among the most entertaining developments we’ve seen.

Turning to more dramatic storylines, I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to see Daemon—inspired by a bloody vision bestowed upon him by his own personal witchy, proto-feminist spirit guide, Alys Rivers—rethink his plan to betray Rhaenyra and seek the Iron Throne for himself. For one thing, the twist represents what might be the first truly effective deployment of the Song of Ice and Fire prophecy we’ve seen in Dragon. Daemon suddenly understands how pathetically minor his own personal ambitions are when dragon warfare puts the entire future of humanity—a future that looks very much like a supercut of Thrones highlights—at stake. (If only J. Robert Oppenheimer had had an Alys Rivers.) Daemon has always been a wildcard, but this season had him veering toward a particularly unsurprising, male-chauvinist form of villainy. By bending the knee to Rhaenyra, he not only evolves into a more complex character, but also subverts Dragon’s tiresome habit of making it sucks to be a woman the moral of every story.

Daemon’s redemption was hardly the only breathtaking bit of character development. If there was one area in which the finale, written by Sara Hess and directed by Geeta Vasant Patel, most excelled, it was in one-on-one exchanges. We got a long-awaited confrontation between Alyn of Hull and Lord Corlys, who still refuses to openly acknowledge the sons he sired out of wedlock in an otherwise frank conversation with Rhaenyra. “Do you know what hunger does to a boy? What grief does? Or shame?” Alyn demands of his absent father. We got Rhaenyra asking Mysaria “Who pays the price?” of war. We got bratty Jacaerys absolutely losing it over barroom braggart turned dragonrider Ulf’s coarse manners. And who didn’t love watching the once-meek Helaena assure her awful brother, Aemond, now desperate to have her ride her own dragon into battle with the Blacks, that he would never be king. “And you? You will be dead.”

Of course, no tête-à-tête hit harder than Alicent’s climactic appeal to Rhaenyra. Fresh off last week’s head-clearing walkabout and free swim, it’s a contrite Alicent who arrives at Dragonstone ready to, as she puts it, “cast myself on the mercy of a friend who once loved me.” Indeed, she says all the right things—that she was wrong to resent Rhaenyra’s freedom and to put her “faith in my husband, my father, my lover.” (Rhaenyra’s mock shock at the revelation that prim and proper Alicent had taken a lover is pretty delectable.) What’s more, Alicent assures her childhood playmate, “I do not wish to rule. I wish to live.” To that end, she’s here to tip off Rhaenyra that Aemond will soon depart for the Riverlands, leaving Helaena in charge of King’s Landing. With Alicent ordering the Kingsguard to stand down, “You will enter as a conqueror.”

Considering how horrified she has been by the carnage thus far, a bloodless transfer of power would seem to be Rhaenyra’s ideal resolution to the Dance of the Dragons. Yet she’s not immediately buying what Alicent is selling. “It’s too late,” she says, reminding her old friend: “Blood has been shed. Cities burned. Armies march. And you want to wash your hands of what you set in motion?” Rhaenyra insists that she can’t genuinely win without killing Aegon. “Choose,” she commands. “A son for a son.” When Alicent mumbles something about persuading Aegon to bend the knee, Rhaenyra forces the issue. There is obviously a pragmatic aspect to making the deal contingent on the king’s death. In reality, though, a broken Aegon doesn’t pose much of a threat. Even Rhaenyra is open about the fact that what she really needs, to accept Alicent as an ally, is for her to experience the pain Rhaenyra felt at the loss of Lucerys (not to mention the mother Alicent replaced). So the price of a peaceful end to the war is yet another Targaryen head. And after some hesitation Alicent is, in return for the freedom to live a quiet life with Helaena, willing to pay it.

The scene works on so many levels. The dialogue is layered, drawing on a whole lifetime’s worth of affection and enmity between the show’s richest characters. Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke are so well cast—and so well matched—as the righteous, weary, scornful Rhaenyra and the brittle Alicent, who has slowly come to realize that everything she once believed was wrong. As Rhaenyra watches Alicent beg, there are hints of empathy; her face softens. But the scene never devolves into the fan service of, well, two literal queens coming together to maximize their joint slay. As Rhaenyra understands, that would be too easy, too glib. She and Alicent may need each other, but they’ve also hurt each other too much to do anything but part ways once the plan is executed.

As she sends Alicent home, the episode closes on a montage of armies and navies and dragons and dragonriders gearing up, setting sail, and marching towards the battlefields—many, presumably, to die in what is shaping up to be a feint to put Rhaenyra on the throne. I have a feeling that this resolution will be received by viewers who crave dragon fire and a body count—both of which seem to be on the horizon for Season 3—as anticlimactic. But as far as I’m concerned, House of the Dragon gave us something better this week, something that separates George R.R. Martin’s franchise, at its most sophisticated and compelling, from so many other fantasy shows. Anyone with a big-enough budget can produce cool-looking digital violence. It’s the characters and their regrets and the evolution of their relationships that give this Targaryen civil war its stakes.