Jon Snow made a rather timely appearance as host of Saturday Night Live, but his best sketch had zip to do with Game of Thrones (premiering next Sunday, if you haven’t heard). It’s this, a spot-on send-up of buttoning through garbage-ass hub world dialogue when all you’re trying to do is get to the action.
Note those chest patches — someone was playing Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 when they got the idea for this. I can almost see the writer in the pitch meeting: “So, I’m playing this game, and all I’m trying to do is get out there and kick some ass, but these people won’t stop talking to me!”
Mikey Day and Kit Harington hash out their differences, frustrating Pete Davidson to no end. Their expository lines and reactions to “Skip” are spot-on and seem ripped straight from today’s design docs, too. Ego Nwodim shows up to deliver the money line before the inevitable happens once Davidson steps outside.
I had to look this up, but I forgot that Harington did have a big role in a video game before — as Salen Kotch, in the campaign for that forgettable Call of Duty game that came out in 2016. (He also references 2012’s Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, a film adaptation of Silent Hill 3, in his monologue.) It’s probably why he’s such a natural at that super-serious delivery of “did-anyone-say-this-out-loud-when-they-wrote-it” tutorial dialogue.
Elsewhere in the show, Game of Thrones was an inevitable subject. Here’s the best one for that topic, a look at HBO’s plans to carry on the franchise with even more prestige TV series. Count me in for The Marvelous Ms. Melisandre.
