Grab the largest horn of giant's milk you can find, my friends, because another chapter of Game of Thrones has come and gone and Everyone. Is About. To Die. Next week is the 82-minute long dead and company battle-a-palooza that's going to make "Blackwater" look like a high-school production of Seussical the Musical, so naturally Episode 2, "A Knight of Seven Kingdoms", was a bleak hour that saw everyone contemplating their impending deaths via walking skeletons while sitting in extremely poorly-lit rooms. It took place entirely on the eve of battle, The Moping Hour™, that surreal pre-fight time when everyone is at their most horny, sad, and sassy, which any scientist will tell you are the three baseline human emotions. Lady Brienne of Tarth is now Ser Brienne of Tarth. Bran Stark revealed that, not to brag or anything, but the Night King is coming specifically to kill him. Arya Stark made us simultaneously cheer for a young woman taking charge of her sexual agency on quite possibly her last night on Earth while also frantically Wikipedia'ing seasons 3-5 to try and parse out just how the hell old Arya Stark is supposed to be.

It was a lot for an episode that actually did so little, is what I'm saying. And mostly we all just have questions. Questions like...

Everyone Is Basically F*cked, Right?

Oh yeah. Big time. Even the hour-long sad-sack-a-thon that was "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" couldn't properly convey how truly, incredibly, astronomically fucked every single living soul inside of Winterfell is. There's a battle a'comin', and on one side you have:

"The greatest army in the world", which is approximately 1/4 scared village-folk who cannot stop shitting in their britches, which ironically looks exactly like the...soup(?) Davos Seaworth is apparently singlehandedly feeding them. There's a good amount of Unsullied, who are mostly good at courageously charging straight at things until they are all dead, a bold strategy when confronting an enemy who can quite literally raise the dead. There's the Dothraki, who are admittedly heckin' great at battle, but also up to about six months ago were all deathly afraid of boats. This side's objectively most decorated fighter has one hand. They are being led up by Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen, two commanders/lovers who, to the tune of the loudest, saddest trombone noise in Westeros history, just found out they're related. Arya has a dragonglass stick now, so, great. The thickest line of defense on Winterfell's side is quite literally Podrick Payne's legendarily girthy loins.

On the other side, you have:

A vast, unending army of the dead who will not tire and cannot be driven back, led by an ancient race of homicidal snowmen whose sole purpose is erasing all life from the planet.

"But Dany has dragons!" you're probably screaming. I get this. I've been screaming this at random passersby on the street pretty regularly since at least Season 4. I've been arrested three times. But lest we forget, The Night King and his Olympic javelin-ass arm took down a dragon without once changing his facial expression, and then raised that bad boy for his own. And by "lest we forget" I mean no one in Winterfell seems concerned with the ice dragon. The homies are out there digging four-foot ditches in front of the walls instead of putting a roof over the courtyard. Daenerys herself took the news that her own dragon child got turned into a Wight like she was hearing a slightly irksome weather report. This woman was already humming "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" en route to bone her blood relative up by an extremely temperature-inappropriate waterfall locale.

Who Is Going to Die?

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Image via HBO

This, truly, is the only important question before Episode 3. There are only four episodes of Game of Thrones left ever headed into the show's—no, sorry, all of television history's largest battle sequence. It's not really a matter of "if" anyone is going to die, but just how brutally Benioff and Weiss feel like kicking the audience in its collective nards. Let's just run down the biggest candidates, listed here in rough order of how likely they are to bite the dust:

Grey Worm: Haha oh my god, Grey Worm is such a definite goner that Jacob Anderson might as well announce the name of the CBS sitcom he'll be starring in this fall. This poor optimistic bastard is out here making beach vacay plans with Missandei like that isn't putting a cosmic "stab me first" sign directly on his forehead.

Dolorous Edd: Unfortunately the army of the dead doesn't care how thicc and well-manicured your new beard is. More like For-Sure-Ous Dead imho.

Jorah Mormont: Pretty much since day one it's been Jorah Mormont's fate to sacrifice himself for Daenerys Targaryen, his lifelong ambition to like, touch her boob just one time going tragically unfulfilled. Now that he's been outfitted with a fancy new Valyrian steel sword thanks to Sam Tarly, this seems like a guarantee.

Berric Dondarion: Most likely the most "lol, okay" death of the episode, seeing as how the once-mysterious Lord of Light follower has been mostly relegated to "that half-blind old man with the helpful flashlight sword." Berric dies here for roughly the 20th and final time, most likely next to...

Sandor "The Hound" Clegane: Anyone who has unearthed my long and extremely NSFW fan-fiction knows I want The Hound and The Mountain to interact just one more time more than I want to interact with most if not all of my actual family. But I don't think that's in the cards — the scene atop the Winterfell battlements between Arya, Berric, and the Hound seemed a clear sign that the age of old men who know only war and death and bloodshed is over, and by the looks of it those old men won't mind too much.

Theon Greyjoy: Remember in the premiere when Theon looked his sister in the eye and said, word for word, "I'm going to sail back to Winterfell so I can die in Season 8, Episode 3"?

Gendry Baratheon: We all saw the way he runs in "Beyond the Wall."

Ser Brienne of Tarth: Tragic. Straight tragic. Of all the likely deaths, this will be by far the saddest because Gwendoline Christie has consistently filled this role with such a potent combination of pathos, sadness, strength, and just a glimmer of hope she herself refuses to let herself feel. Ugh. Ugh. Best believe Ser Brienne of mo-effin' Tarth is going to go down swinging, taking like sixteen White Walkers with her while Jaime Lannister looks on, confused at all these sexual feelings for someone who is not his direct sibling.

Who Is Going to Survive?

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Image via HBO

To be absolutely clear, out of Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, Jaime Lannister, and Tyrion Lannister, most and possibly all of those bold-faced names will be dead by season's end. But all of them have much too important loose ends over in King's Landing to go out this early in the game. Tormund is going to survive to get that extra wicked little twist of the knife over Brienne. Sam is going to survive because if someone even looks at Gilly in a funny way my dude turns into an extremely literate Incredible Hulk. The remaining Starks—Arya, Sansa, and (technically not anymore but shut-up) Bran—are all wild cards because A) Dying horribly for reasons of honor is the Stark Family Tradition, and B) This episode is actually impossible to 100% predict, death-wise. But I think all the Starks also have far-too-important roles in the endgame.

Also, Podrick Payne will absolutely survive through sheer stamina and a sort of mysterious protective shroud, just this big, defensive energy, which future maesters will refer to in their texts simply as "BDE".

Will Daenerys Play Nice on the Battlefield?

Noted dingus Jon Targaryen (née Snow) has quite possibly the worst instincts for reading the room in Westeros history, and I'm including every single person that attended the Red Wedding. On the night before the greatest battle in human history, a battle in which Daenerys Targaryen plays a pivotal role, Jon and his Stark-ass Code of Ethics just had to tell the low-key insane Dragon Queen that A) He's her by-blood nephew and B) She actually only has the second best claim to the Iron Throne. Imagine if mere moments before the 1991 NBA Championships Scottie Pippen had looked Michael Jordan in the eyes and said, "Just so you know, I'm your son" but then also somehow proved he'd been better at basketball than him the entire time. This is a terrible analogy. I stand by it.

It's a wonderful bit of symmetry from David Nutter—who directed both "Winterfell" and "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms"—that Dany and Jon did nearly identical step-back "buh-whaaa?" responses to learning this truth. It also speaks spades about these characters, and Game of Thrones itself, that both of them went straight to the "Iron Throne claim" thing and not the "doing countless incest" thing. When you play the Game of Thrones you're almost always having sex with a relative, but I've also heard you either win or you die. Dany, from the jump, has been here to play. Look at her face even as the dead are at the gates — she is pissed her lifelong dream to be Queen is in question. I'm not saying she's definitely going to try and BBQ Jon on the battlefield with a "whoops collateral damage" shrug. But I'm not not saying that.

What Is Going to Happen Down in Those Stark Crypts?

Samwell Tarly, Gilly, and Little Sam sleep peacefully in "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms."
Image via HBO

You may have noticed that "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" featured roughly a dozen instances of someone saying the Stark family crypts will be the safest place during the battle. This is a lot like someone in a shark movie saying, "I love having legs. Probably my favorite part of having legs is the fact nothing has ever bitten them off." Some shit is about to Go. Down. In the crypts, which will be housing main characters like Tyrion, Gilly, and Varys while the fighting goes on above. Now, maybe someone's already mentioned it off-screen, and maybe they've already thought this through, but to me, it seems like no one has put two and two together to realize they are hiding their elderly, their children, and their infirm down in a crypt filled with dead bodies to avoid The Night King, a person who can bring dead bodies back to life.

Is The Night King's resurrection power like a Wi-Fi situation where he needs to be in a certain range for it to work? Or a Roku remote where you gotta like point the dang thing right at the box? Or is this just a massive, kind of obvious oversight from the Winterfell battle planning committee?

Like I said, Game of Thrones Season 8's still-untitled third episode is almost impossible to predict. But the one thing I know for absolute certain is that if we get a skeleton Ned Stark holding his head in his hands it better still be played by Sean Bean.