The interrogator is also a kind of writer: he is compiling the biographies of the individuals whose confessions he obtains, people who are electroshocked into harmlessness when their stories have been extracted.

NEWYORKER: Dear Leader

Petyr masterfully created the illusion of harmlessness.

FORBES: In Game of Thrones, Who's The Smartest - Tyrion, Petyr, Varys, Or Tywin?

And it does so in a dumbed-down Esperanto that its audience can't fail to understand -- the universal language of commercial TV sitcoms, with their constrained cultural vocabulary and their subtext of harmlessness: Don't be offended, none of this really means anything, it's just a goof about a lot of dumb stuff going down around us.

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