Note: Spoilers for Game of Thrones like you wouldn’t believe. Turn back!
On Sunday night’s Game of Thrones, Sandor “the Hound” Clegane, a character who’s been edging toward redemption lately, finally had the chance to do something really heroic: Save all of humanity from certain doom. All he had to do was convince Cersei Lannister that the Night King’s army of the dead was a real threat. Normally, that might have been a challenge, but Clegane also had the most unassailable proof imaginable: a decomposing but still very much undead wight, ready to snarl at Cersei more or less on demand. It should have been an easy layup.
Unfortunately for humanity, the Hound somehow managed to screw it up. Forget about production values: He presented the wight to Cersei like a kid being forced to deliver a book report. At first, it seemed like his boring dog-and-pony show succeeded despite him, on the strength of having a live zombie instead of dogs or ponies. But even as Cersei pretended to be scared by the Hound’s wight, she was plotting a complicated double-cross that got her crowned this week’s “Worst Person in Westeros.” The end result was that humanity was in a much worse position vis-à-vis Night Kings than if no one had met with Cersei at all: Better to have a known enemy than a false friend. It was, in short, a disaster, even if we don’t know yet exactly what Cersei’s upcoming betrayal will cost everyone.
So what happened? To figure out exactly where the Hound went wrong, we took the essential elements of his situation—a high-stakes presentation in front of hostile family members involving a large wooden box—and used Slate’s supercomputers to search every frame of television ever broadcast for other TV characters who faced similar challenges. It turned out there was one man who had been in almost exactly the same situation: Gob Bluth on Arrested Development. But while the Hound struggled to make an impact on Cersei, Gob’s performance was such a triumph (for Gob, anyway) that it drew polite applause. What did he do differently? Well, see for yourself:
That is a significantly better presentation than the Hound’s, and it’s not hard to see why: showmanship! But would the technique that served Gob Bluth so well in modern-day California still work back in Game of Thrones days? To find out, we used Hollywood special effects magic to carefully apply 36 percent more showmanship to the Hound’s lackluster presentation. Let’s see how he does:
Wow. Chills. Chills! There’s no doubt about it: If the Hound had studied Gob’s technique, he’d have Final-Countdowned his way onto the Iron Throne back in the first season. Even if he’d only stumbled on it in this week’s episode, he could have terrified Cersei into agreeing to the truce he wanted and given Jon and Daenerys a better shot at fending off the Night King themselves. Instead, Cersei is up to her old tricks, the wall has been breached, and it seems like all that’s left for anyone to do is wait as the Night King inexorably approaches, watching the dwindling hours, minutes, and seconds remaining. If only there were a song about that!
