Endings are an everyday occurrence in Westeros: often abrupt, usually violent. Just ask the High Sparrow, vaporised in the lurid wildfire explosion that left a Sept-sized crater in King’s Landing at the end of season six. But if the notorious Red Wedding blooded the franchise’s army of acolytes – training both readers and TV watchers to expect the worst, especially when it comes to honourable characters – at least we’ve been granted advance warning about the biggest ending of them all. HBO confirmed over the weekend that the eighth series of the fantasy megahit will definitely be its last, albeit at a Television Critics Association press conference rather than by dispatching white ravens. Fans can start physically and mentally preparing themselves for post-GoT life sometime in 2018.
This eighth and final season will nudge the TV show numerically ahead of George RR Martin’s projected seven-book series (currently stalled at volume five, A Dance With Dragons, published back in 2011). In truth, the screen adaptation – while necessarily streamlining characters, collapsing Westeros travel times and torpedoing whole plots – has already expanded far beyond its source material. The books were genre bestsellers, but the TV version is culturally omnipresent. Judging by column inches and online chatter alone, Game of Thrones can justifiably claim to be the biggest show in the world. So how do you satisfyingly wrap-up the most pored-over drama of all time?
Despite shepherding the saga to unprecedented popularity, showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss have always been deferential when courting fans of the novels, emphasising that Martin shared his plans for wrapping up the story with them from the very beginning of development. Even the heartbreaking Hodor revelation in season six was one of three “WTF moments” that Martin outlined for Benioff and Weiss during those early meetings. But the King’s Landing cataclysm and its aftermath – literally purging Westeros of many existing power players – places them very firmly in the driving seat.
The sense is of a gridlocked part of a chessboard being swept clean, perhaps because the destruction of the Sept was the first real game-changing event to outpace the existing novels. The showrunners’ messaging has also been gradually transitioning from a tone of faithful adaptation to respectful autonomy. “People are talking about whether the books are going to be spoiled and it’s really not true,” Benioff told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year. “So much of what we’re doing diverges from the books at this point.”
The capstone of season six was the rousing sight of fireproof queen-in-waiting Daenerys Targaryen finally escaping the political quicksand of Meereen, amassing a war fleet with the help of Houses Martell and Tyrell and plotting a course for King’s Landing with her faithful dragons in tow. With the seventh season confirmed as only being seven episodes, there’s a sense that this tightening of scattered storylines – no more sunburnt sojourns to Essos! – must also surely accelerate the overarching plot. Previous GoT seasons have usually featured one epic, balls-to-the-wall smasheroo episode, such as Blackwater or The Watchers on the Wall or The Battle of the Bastards. Reducing the episode count so substantially creates a certain expectation. Are fans looking for seven Hardhomes in a row?
Or perhaps that is to misjudge what viewers get out of Game of Thrones. Those standalone action episodes are spectacular, but GoT has created equally pulse-pounding drama in scenes that feature little more than two characters conspiring in a draughty-looking castle antechamber. Martin created a whole sprawling continent and mythology from scratch, compete with a long and perhaps unnecessarily detailed pre-history, but the real story of Westeros has always seemed internalised. These are, first and foremost, psychologically recognisable people constantly navigating the realpolitik required to survive in their unforgiving world. We may tingle at the thought of a physical reckoning between ravaged badasses the Hound and the Mountain. But there is an almost equally tangible appetite to see Cersei and Daenerys finally meet face-to-face, expertly throwing shade rather than punches.
The real problem is that even after that fiery Sept clearout, Game of Thrones retains a uniquely sprawling cast. And when the final episode of season eight comes around, they will all need to be counted back in like a humungous football squad. Perhaps the next two seasons are going to be an agonising whittling down of fan favourites, leaving broken helms and shattered corpses by the wayside until only a handful of key players remain. Personally, I’d like to see a counter-intuitively non-violent ending – after years of big blokes hogging the Iron Throne, there are now smart, capable women installed in practically all of the pivotal power positions across Westeros. Surely they can run the world better than the men? But that won’t make for the sensational drama we except from a series that made its name with dragons, flagons and shaggin’. Which raises the question: what do you think will happen?
