Game Of Thrones Season 8: 7 Ups And 3 Downs From 'The Last Of The Starks'
6. Jaime & Brienne
Jaime and Brienne have been having one hell of a season together: him knighting her in Episode 2 is one of the best moments of the entire show, and then they had some excellent sequences in The Long Night as they saved each other from the Army of the Dead.
That comes to a head (get your minds out the gutter) as, after a drinking game turns to talk of Brienne's maidenhood and she leaves, Jaime visits her in her chambers, and the pair have sex. Like with the knighting scene, it's a payoff to their whole relationship on the show: she knows who he is, and he sees her as not just a knight, but a woman too.
Where this gets twisted, though, is towards the end, when Jaime decides to leave Winterfell for King's Landing. It's a brutal scene as he tells Brienne it's always been Cersei, leaving her (and anyone whose heart isn't made of stone) in tears. It's a beautifully acted piece (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Gwendoline Christie are both killing it this season), but the implications won't be known until either next episode or the one after.
If this is Jaime going back to King's Landing to stop Cersei (whether that's killing her or something else), and not telling Brienne is a means of keeping her safe (think along the lines of Arya with Nymeria in Season 1), then that continues the great character development he's been through. If this is simply him being unable to truly leave Cersei and going back to the woman he loves, after sleeping with Brienne no less, then that feels like a betrayal of his arc, and would be a negative, but it's impossible to say right now.