Sunday’s episode of Game of Thrones, “The Last of the Starks,” was disappointing on several fronts: poor plotting, frustrating character development, a coffee cup. But what stopped me in my tracks was an early conversation between Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) and Sandor Clegane, a.k.a. the Hound (Rory McCann), the first between these two characters since they parted at the end of Season 2 in King’s Landing.
Back then, the Hound was Joffrey Baratheon’s (Jack Gleeson) right-hand man. Sansa was just a little girl when they first met, and had watched him do plenty of awful things. When they were in King’s Landing together, their relationship interrogated the deepest prejudices each one had, which made it both fraught and one of the show’s most intriguing. (It has spawned quite a bit of fanfiction as well.) Much has changed for each character since then.
But, frustratingly, in “The Last of the Starks,” every piece of their interaction is confusing and limited. Worse, it obfuscates each character’s growth.
The scene is barely a minute long, set during the drunken carousing in Winterfell’s great hall after the victory against the Night King. Oddly, and perhaps significantly, it begins with sex: a few nameless women proposition Tormund (Kristofer Hivju) and the Hound, with the curious phrase “I’m not afraid of Wildlings.” This dubious pick-up line works on Tormund (“maybe you should be,” he jeers), who disappears to drown his sorrows about Brienne. Sandor refuses the bait, going so far as to growl and menace at the other woman who expresses interest. Sansa observes this from a distance (very Littlefinger of her), and then makes her approach.
“She could have made you happy, for a little while,” she says, sitting down.
Sandor dodges her overture—and the topic of sex—switching to his ever-present anger against his brother instead. “There’s only one thing that would make me happy,” he responds, glowering.
“What’s that?”
“That’s my fucking business.”
This whole time, the Hound hasn’t so much as smiled at her. He’s barely even looked at her. But then he glances up and sees that Sansa is steadily gazing at him. “Used to be you couldn’t look at me,” he grumbles.
“That was a long time ago,” she answers, coolly. “I’ve seen much worse than you since then.”
Yes, the Hound’s awful scars carry with them a visible indication of how cruel the world can be, and it’s true that in Seasons 1 and 2, Sansa literally couldn’t face the sight of him. But there’s an edge to her statement here, too. She’s asserting how much stronger she is now, and how much less afraid. She’s doing this partly because she has pride in who she has become, but also because the Hound isn’t being very nice to her.
“Yes, I’ve heard,” he responds, leaning in a little. “I heard you were broken in. Broken in rough.”
This line pivots the whole conversation—and its tenor. Remember, Sansa just sat down. She’s the Lady of Winterfell. We’re in her house, nay, her castle. And Sandor Clegane, who stood by and watched as Joffrey taunted and berated her, as Ilyn Payne beheaded her father, as Meryn Trant beat her in front of the entire court, abruptly shifts the conversation to her repeated rape and torture while married to Ramsay Bolton with a particularly dehumanizing phrase. As though Sansa had been a disobedient horse—not a terrified teenager. As if rape is somehow training, or otherwise a process by which she would be tamed or matured. It’s entirely in character for the Hound to insult Sansa, but let’s be clear: this is a taunt, and a deeply disgusting one, accentuated by the way he ducks his head closer to her, like he needs to get a good look at her suffering. (To the show’s credit, we saw exactly how miserable that suffering was—and also how tenacious Sansa was as she endured it. Her decisions, though limited, were still strategic.)
The scene does not give the Hound’s words room to breathe—to either let the impact of the insult sink in, or to remind the audience of Sansa’s arc up until now. (Though the episode somehow found time for long minutes of portentous dithering outside King’s Landing.) Instead, Sansa immediately presses on, apparently declaring the Hound’s statement in-bounds as she defends her autonomy: “And he got what he deserved.” She gets to tell the Hound that she threw Ramsay to Ramsay’s own hounds, and they both chuckle a little about this. It’s very Game of Thrones to see characters only express satisfaction when their power has been achieved through brutal, irrevocable violence—but in context, again, it makes sense: this is the world they live in, and Sansa might clock that Sandor would only respect a demonstration of violence.
What’s really bizarre about this entire scene, from anonymous sexual proposition to “broken in rough,” is that we don’t know why Sansa sat down here. We don’t know what she wants to say to the Hound.
And we never do find out. Because the Hound then takes the opportunity of their brief moment of companionship to deliver another astonishing statement: “None of it would have happened if you’d left King’s Landing with me. No Littlefinger. No Ramsay. None of it.”
He’s referring to what happened at the end of Season 2, when Sansa did not trust the Hound enough to leave the capital with him. What he’s telling her is that her lack of trust hurt him—a self-centered admission, maybe, but a real one, for a character who struggles so much to express his pain. At the same time, it’s a very limited statement. Sandor has no sympathy for her position at the time; he has apparently chosen to ignore how his close loyalty to Joffrey made him a terrifying figure for Sansa right from the start. Also, his assertion that Sansa would have been spared pain if she had traveled with him is . . . rich. The Hound had Arya in his care for almost two seasons, and they ran into trouble all the time. In the books, the Hound also had a more overt attraction to Sansa. When he asks her to leave with him and she refuses, he kisses her—and at knifepoint, demands a song for her. No wonder a child wouldn’t want to travel with someone so sexually threatening.
There’s another bizarre elision here, too. The Hound, the show has told us, changed dramatically after Brienne of Tarth kicked his ass and he nearly died. He fell in with the Brotherhood Without Banners; devoted his strength to fighting the wights; and in Season 7, mourned the deaths of a farmer and his daughter who died of starvation because of his actions. He reconciled with Arya Stark. He’s seen armies of dead people, and seen what became of his brother Gregor. But right here, he doesn’t seem to have changed at all. He’s still putting down Sansa, reminding her of her innocence, her vulnerability, that she used to be a “stupid little bird.” It could be explained—the Hound clearly has a lot of feelings about Sansa, and maybe he’d regress or act out in her presence as a result.
There’s a pause, and then Sansa reaches out and takes his hand. Her gaze is pitying—generous but a little didactic, as if she’s explaining something he should already know. “Without Littlefinger and Ramsay and the rest, I would have stayed a little bird all my life,” she says. Then she gets up, gazes at him for a bit longer, and walks away.
I don’t even know where to start with this line. It’s dense with implication: Sansa rejects her “little bird” self, the character some of us grew to love in the first seasons; she directly connects her hard-won cynicism and steely demeanor to leaving that identity behind. Yet despite how they manipulated and hurt her, she credits Ramsay and Littlefinger with her transformation. She seems almost grateful to them. To be sure, Sansa is satisfied with where she is now; she’s assumed a mantle of dignity that impresses and awes the people around her, but she also hasn’t lost her sense of justice. Yet forgiving abusers and not letting them own your narrative is pretty different from expressing, to someone in the midst of grossly insulting you, that being raped made you stronger. Sansa is saying that being victimized and manipulated by powerful men made her grow up—even though when she was being victimized and manipulated by Joffrey Baratheon, she was still, by the Hound’s estimation, a “stupid little bird” who hadn’t learned anything.
Perhaps this is what Sansa really believes. Perhaps the show is telling us that suffering leads to strength. But what really makes no sense is that while Sansa apparently agrees that she was “broken in,” transformed from a little bird into a queen through the brutalization of men, in this conversation, she exerts no power of her own. She doesn’t tell the Hound to fuck off with his metaphor. She doesn’t tell him that he’s wrong about protecting her. She doesn’t ream him about standing by silently as Jofffrey and Cersei ruined her life. The only decisions she makes are to sit down, hold his hand, and then to stand up—and we don’t even know why she sat down in the first place. She’s asserting how she’s changed—in a conversation where the Hound is rude to her, belittles her, and insults her. She just sits there and takes it. It feels like a repudiation of both of their character arcs—and, as I have said again and again this season, a missed opportunity for growth and connection.
This is a lot to write about one scene, I know. But it goes to illustrate two points. One: these characters, for so long, have been so beautifully drawn that this compressed, sloppy conclusion is increasingly galling. It’s shortchanged their long-running, thorny, often quite moving transformation as characters. You could analyze nearly every scene in “The Last of the Starks” in this way, and come up just as frustrated and confused as I am here. The way that I feel about Sansa is the way that other fans feel about Tyrion, or Jaime, or Jon, or Missandei. The show’s conclusion is crushing the nuance and movement out of each character, reducing them to bite-size takeaways. To me it seems as if Sansa sat down at that table not to speak to the Hound, but to tell the audience something they already know: she’s been through a lot, and she’s strong now. The way that she did that undermines her own statement—but at this point, Game of Thrones is entirely surface-level. We cannot read more nuance into this scene, even though eight seasons of backstory are there, waiting to be brought to bear into the scene.
The other point is much simpler. If you want female characters in your show—if you want them to struggle and survive in a gendered world, if you want them to be stately queens or mad ones, if you want them to fuck or fight or cry or do all three at once—hire female writers. It will help.
