What Jon Snow Brings to Every Party

My ideal Game of Thrones episode has always been simple: Daenerys and Tyrion take Westeros together, laughing the whole way, drinking through someone else’s wine cellar, enjoying the occasional willing company, and leaving a tasteful quantity of blood in their wake. That’s all I need from the show.

Ahead of Season 5, Kit Harington did a bit with Seth Meyers where he showed up to a dinner party fully in character as Jon Snow—treating a casual weeknight supper like a war council on the eve of apocalypse. Guests passed bread and discussed weekend plans. Snow brooded about the Long Night, the things moving in the dark beyond the Wall, and everything everyone else was too comfortable to understand was coming. It’s a genuinely good bit. The joke is that Jon Snow cannot be switched off. He is constitutionally incapable of enjoying a dinner party, and everyone around him is constitutionally incapable of grasping why.

Season 5 was the one where Tyrion and Daenerys finally shared scenes, and I remember watching those exchanges thinking: this is it, this is what I’ve been waiting for. Two exiles, both brilliant, both despised by their families, sitting in Essos trying to figure out what they’re supposed to do with each other. More of that. Significantly less of the Dorne subplot.

The show eventually lost its way—or rather, outran the books that had been carrying it—but in spring 2015 it still felt like something that knew what it was doing. Jon Snow ruining a dinner party is actually a better summary of the show’s whole appeal than anything I could write: someone who has seen real darkness, surrounded by people who haven’t, unable to pretend otherwise. The laugh track being everyone else’s normalcy.