11 questions for the new season of Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones comes roaring back Sunday for its penultimate seven-episode season, and with it come hordes of questions, theories, and hopes.

I'm on the record as being overwhelmed and impressed by the exceptional music and direction last season. But when it came to the writing, I had questions. The biggest issue I've had with the series as it's departed from George R.R. Martin's books is that it has solved its plot problems by getting increasingly coy. In seasons past, we understood characters fairly well: how they thought, what they wanted, and how they were trying to get it. These days, rather than frankly admit what characters think and want, the show offers performance after performance that revels in ambiguity. This can be interesting and even effective in the short-term. In the long-term, though, the stakes collapse. If you never find out whether people were being straightforward or manipulative, their arcs fold into nothing as they die without resolution.

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One of my absolute favorite scenes from last season was between Jaime Lannister and Edmure Tully. It's been ages since we've seen two characters actually hash out something that matters. This was that kind of scene — rich, interesting, textured dramatic. (It helps that Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Tobias Menzies are just outrageously good together.) "How do you tell yourself that you're decent, after everything that you've done?" Edmure asks Jaime, and Jaime embarks on a long speech about how vicious he's willing to be because he loves Cersei: "I love Cersei," he says.

You can laugh at that if you want. You can sneer. Doesn't matter. She needs me. And to get back to her, I have to take Riverrun. I'll send for your baby boy. And I'll launch him into Riverrun with a catapult. Because you don't matter to me, Lord Edmure. Your son doesn't matter to me. The people in the castle don't matter to me. Only Cersei. And if I have to slaughter every Tully who ever lived to get back to her, that's what I'll do.

I love those two scenes because they gesture at a character in crisis — at someone struggling with the public's perception of him and with his own understanding of himself. This has long been Jaime's dilemma, but the show hasn't had time for that sort of thing these last few seasons, and it's offered too little consistent characterization for me to trust it now. My sense, watching that speech, was that Jaime was struggling: that despite his casual affect, he has real feeling for Brienne. And that despite posturing as a vicious impassioned lover, what he really needed was to convince Edmure to surrender and himself that his love for Cersei is real. That speech felt to me like an inflection point. The finale, after all, had Jaime watching the carnage at King's Landing looking like this:

These do not look quite like the Man in Love he represented himself as being to Edmure. So the question is: Did Jaime mean it when he gave Edmure that speech listing the things that matter to him and the things that don't? Does he love Cersei? Everything I've mentioned above leads me to believe he was lying, or trying to convince himself. But maybe the show will double down and confirm that he meant it all along.

If, like me, you were trying to figure out to what extent the Sparrow was a true believer vs. a political operator — if you assumed we had scene after scene between him and Tommen (or him and Margaery) in which a delicate dance of faith and politics was being slowly unfurled because the show considered the intersection between religion and politics important — well, you're out of luck. We never got clarity on Jonathan Pryce's character, or on whatever arc was shaping up between him, Tommen, and Margaery. The show killed all of them and never showed its hand, so now there's nothing to say.

Religion is important on Game of Thrones, and last season suggested at least a passing interest in Melisandre and how her understanding of her own powers and failings square with reality. "The Red Woman" showed her exhaustion and some of her ability; we've also, of course, seen her prophecies fail. (Will she meet Arya again, as she said she would?) Jon Snow tells her he saw nothing when he died. But he also came back from the dead. So … where does that leave religion as an agent in this semi-magical universe? (I'm always grateful for Maggie the Frog, since her prophecies to Cersei all actually came true.)

It's irritating — not subversive or experimental but simply irritating — that the rules of magic sprout and bend and break in accordance with narrative needs rather than anything like an interesting self-supporting system. (I wrote about that here.) We've seen the Faceless Men establish extremely strict rules about killing for personal reasons, punish Arya severely for violating them, and then shrug when she does it again and runs away. We've seen Dondarrion insist that he loses parts of himself with every resurrection, but we've also seen Jon Snow return from the dead without noticeably changing. Will the show establish some rules about how all this works? Or why those rules seem to matter sometimes and not others?

There were some signs last season that Daenerys was breaking bad (or mad). Her exhortation to the Dothraki was more about tearing down stone houses and less about granting people freedom than her earlier stump speeches. It felt like a departure. Some fans thought this was a sign she was becoming her father, the Mad King. Later, though — in her discussions with Theon and Yara — she seems quite sensible. Dany tells the Dothraki she wants the Seven Kingdoms. She tells Yara she can have independence in exchange for loyalty. She preaches destruction to the Dothraki while telling Yara their fathers were "evil men" and proposing that they build something better. She tells the Dothraki they'll seize lands, she tells Yara there will be no more raiding or raping. (The Dothraki might be a little resistant to that. So is Yara: "That's our way of life," she says. Dany is firm.)

Same question, really. She killed a few thousand people and blew up the faith. We were given to understand that the High Sparrow's power was a function of his broad popular support. Do Cersei's troops and subjects have any feelings about their elimination? Some expressions at the coronation suggest that all is not well, but somehow — despite the sporadic attention the show pays to "the people" mattering (for Daenerys, especially), I fear that nothing will come of this.

Arya showed both remarkable restraint and unbelievable stupidity in season six. We saw her exert extreme caution on the night she escaped from the Faceless Men — she hid in some kind of cave, ready to defend herself with Needle as spooky music played. Her plan there seemed clear — wait for the Waif and defeat her in the dark. By the next time we see her (which seems like the next day) her whole sense of the situation seems to have changed: She walks around Braavos in broad daylight, unarmed, hands behind her back, wearing her own very recognizable face, and throwing money around. After that pointless, massively incompetent display (this is starting to seem like a Stark trait), she appears to have emerged fully-formed as a tactical genius: By the finale, she's a masterful butcher, pie-maker, and user of other people's faces.

The writing for Arya last season was shockingly bad — I'm not saying anything new there — but what matters more to me than her wasted year in Braavos is the fact that we have no clue what she's like on the inside anymore. It seemed like her bond with Lady Crane reintroduced her to feelings of warmth, friendship, and mercy. It seemed, on the other hand, like her time with the Faceless Men taught her the limitations of personal grudges — and she must at some point have been a true believer, since she was able to drink from the fountain without dying. I guess something changed? Or the water test failed? In any event, next time we see her, she's a grinning revenge machine who seems awfully similar to the Arya we knew two seasons ago. Arya used to be an open book to us; we saw her reciting her list of names. She's been opaque for over a year; I'd love for the show to catch us up on what Arya actually thinks these days.

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.