We’re just a few days away and I have spoken to so many people since this week’s Game of Thrones: Talking Points that I thought I’d write something else Game of Thrones related, because if you can’t get excited over the season finale then there’s just something not right about you! Here I’m about to discuss my theories, along with popular theories I’ve discussed with other people, and my hopes not just for the season finale but for everything Game of Thrones going into the future.
One Season To Go & So Many Stories Left Unfinished
Can you believe that we’re almost at the end? It feels unfair. This is a show – and a story – that I don’t want to see end, and yet we’re just one season and one episode now from the conclusion.
If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard, next season is going to be another shorter season as well, which likely means it’ll follow this season’s format of a more condensed timeline. I’m struggling to say outright that that’s a bad thing, after all I have really enjoyed the pace of the show this season, but it does kind of feel like a bad thing, doesn’t it? There have been plenty of story arcs and scenes in previous seasons that I felt were almost there to act as filler. There have been plenty of subplots that I’ve not REALLY cared about, or just wanted to see end so that that character could go back to doing something interesting, and yet now that we’re at this stage where we’re nearing the end I actually kind of wish that there had been more of it. That’s especially true this season given the fact that the condescend format feels like we’ve missed out on some of the other kinds of scenes we’d have gotten before. Varys, for example, has been very notable by his limited appearances this season. Tyrion, normally a high light of every scene he’s been in, has continued to be a high light with most of the show’s best lines and yet everything he’s been doing this season has been so focused on Dany that I just kind of miss those gleeful days of Tyrion getting drunk and talking to hear the sound of his own voice.
I kind of hope that we’re going to get some extended scenes on the Blu-ray release for this season, but it does make far more sense that after seven years of this they know how much fits into an episode now and the chances of them filming too much more than they used for each episode is limited. Still, it would be a wonderful surprise to find that they added extra content to each of the episodes on the Blu-ray release (and a hell of a reason to watch the whole thing again on Blu-ray). I’m hoping they’ll do the same thing again next year as well, but with just one season to go now there are still so many plots that are left unfinished. Hell, with just one episode to go now there are so many new stories from this season that are going unfinished. Will they be picked up next season? Will we even have time for them to be picked up again next season? Or are we just going to storm toward the end now, leaving these unanswered questions hanging in the backs of our minds forevermore? Questions like: how did the people of Dorne actually react when Doran was killed by Ellaria Sand? We seem to have skipped that story entirely. And, indeed, how do they feel now that Ellaria Sand is currently Cersei’s prisoner?
That’s not all though. We’ve also not really seen our old friends at The Wall this season, so we have no idea how the Night’s Watch is progressing and if they’re in any way prepared for what’s coming. We’ve not seen much of the Wildlings either, besides the fantastic Tormund. How have they been preparing for what is coming? How have they been adapting to living on the other side of The Wall? And what of all the characters Dany left behind when she decided to cross the sea? I really miss Daario and am genuinely curious what he’s been up to while Dany has been doing her thing on Dragonstone. Plus, there’s the questions from this season, like what Grey Worm has been up to with the Unsullied since they took Casterly Rock, and just where Melisandre went to since her departure as well. It feels weird to think that she’ll disappear as she did and just never be seen again, surely that can’t be the case. She had such an important role to play in the resurrection of Jon Snow and then ultimately in bringing Jon and Dany together this season, to think that she was serious about just leaving and we’re never going to see her again is a little sad. Yet the frantic pace of the show this season does seem like it’s claimed these stories as its victims, and it worries me that next season we may miss out on so much more as well.
Season Finale Preview
I could talk about how many more stories I wish we’d seen conclusions to all day but with the impending conclusion to this season ahead what do we know about the season finale?
The answer to that is ‘not a lot’, besides what we’ve seen from the preview. If you haven’t seen the preview then stop here, go find it on YouTube, and come back. I’ll wait. Assuming you have (or you just went and watched all 47 seconds of it) then let’s talk about that. What we know, based on this, is that there’s going to be some kind of battle? Grey Worm is back and he’s standing in front of the Unsullied forces, and it seems like the Dothraki are there as well. Is this all one giant showing of power from Dany to intimidate the on-looking Lannisters (well, Jaime is at least on-looking from the teaser) or is this the start of an actual invasion and/or battle? Even from the teaser it looks visually stunning, so if there is going to be a full-scale battle here then I’d love to see it. Do the Lannister’s have anything left to fight that force with? Thanks to Dany and Drogon the answer may well be no. However they do have the advantage of holding wherever it is they’re standing (presumably the walls of Kings Landing?) so that’ll make things considerably more difficult, unless of course Tyrion has a master plan for that.
The battle on the land may be in Dany’s favour, but the battle at sea also looks completely one-sided in favour of Euron Greyjoy and his ships based on the teaser. The shot of Tyrion and the others on the ship looking at that huge fleet is an intimidating one, and it begs the question of if there is going to be an all-out war break out then what’ll happen with that? One side has the advantage on land, one side has the advantage on the sea… but that said there are still two dragons that could easily reduce those ships to floating, smouldering wood. Would Dany risk that though, given that she’s already lost one in such a heartbreaking fashion? We have no idea what evil tricks they have prepared in their defence, and surely we couldn’t lose a second dragon in as many shows? That said, with Tyrion on your side maybe you don’t need dragons to sink ships. He didn’t need them before, did he? When it comes to him who knows what he might cook up to win a battle. And that, of course, all depends on Euron’s loyalties. It’s also quite possible he may decide he’s not on the winning team and switch allegiances. Quite frankly I’m surprised he didn’t try it already given his frosty reception from Cersei.
The teaser ultimately shows us that if there is a battle then it’s either before or after the meeting between all the core characters at long last. What’s interesting from the shots we saw is that Cersei, Jaime, Tyrion and Jon are all present, but I didn’t see Dany in any of those clips. Is she not attending? Is she busy doing something else? Is there a significant reason that Cersei looks as smug as she does in that shot of her sitting, and is it connected to Dany’s absence from the teaser? Is it possible I’m just reading way too much into that? Still, it would make sense for her to be highly featured in the teaser and yet she’s not. With a show as renowned as this one is for killing off major characters it’s safe to say I’m at least considering the possibility that she’s not in that meeting for a more sinister reason and that it’s not so much a meeting as it is Jon and Tyrion going there to make peace. As cunning as Tyrion can be, Cersei is bloodthirsty and evil on a level that few others have compared over the course of the show, so it’s possible that her absence from last week was building to something very dramatic in the first few scenes of this week, ultimately leading Jon Snow to inform her of the most played line this year.
“There is only one war that matters, and it is here.”
Well, he’s not wrong about that. But how close is it? That’s another unanswered question from the teaser. We don’t see anything of the Night King or the army of the dead at all. I was hoping that they’d reach The Wall this week, that we’d get to see the Night’s Watch try to stop them, and that we’d get the answer to ANOTHER unanswered question: last season we learned that Benjen Stark had survived his season 1 disappearance and was half White Walker. We also learned that that meant that he couldn’t travel beyond The Wall, implying that there was a magical element to it as well as a physical one… but if the Night King is leading his army toward it, how does he plan to get past that element to it? Why couldn’t Benjen go back if the Night King can just stroll on through? Does he need to smash down the wall (or melt it) to get through because of that aforementioned magical protection? And are we even going to find out the answer to that question this season, or are we going to be left waiting until next year to finally see the army of the dead reach and potentially go beyond The Wall?
Then there’s one more thing from the teaser I haven’t touched upon and that’s Sansa’s appearance in it. That confirms that we’re not done with her story quite yet, and that the scenes between her and Arya that I feared many be the last we saw of them this season do actually continue. But in those very short moments from the teaser Sansa does not look happy. We see her opening her eyes, as though she’s been quietly mourning or thinking? And then we see her walking alone down a wall with nothing but snow in the background… I think. If there is something else out there then I didn’t see it. So what’s going on with her? We know there will be something, but does it have anything to do with Jon Snow finally bending the knee (verbally, since he couldn’t do it physically) to Dany? Have the Lords of the North turned against him and make Sansa their new Queen in the North? If so you can bet Little Finger is rubbing his hands together gleefully.
Prognostication Time
So, what do you think we’ll see this week? What stories will conclude, if any? Will we see another epic battle, or will we get the more typical “setting things up for the future” style episode that season finales often end up being?
I for one hope that we get some big events this week. I’m hoping that Jon bringing the captured Wight to Kings Landing to prove to Cersei the whole thing is real is what we saw in the teaser, and Dany is absent from it because she doesn’t need to be there and not for any reason more sinister. I also hope that that’s not all we see. If Jon just shows up, tells her that the Great War is upon us and that it’s the living versus the dead and she agrees to send what’s left of her army/fleet up north to battle the dead and that’s it, we just get a meeting and a new alliance of the living, then I’ll be disappointed. Surely this meeting, at long last, can’t go that smoothly? And with Grey Worm and the Dothraki waiting outside surely we’re going to see something huge this episode, and we’re not just going to be teased into what could happen in the future? I really, really hope not anyway. I want to get some kind of conclusion to something this year, and since we clearly won’t be getting a conclusion to the dead’s march on the wall until NEXT season I’m therefore hoping that we get something juicy to bring the story at Kings Landing to more of a conclusion instead. I was hoping a few weeks ago that that was the story we’d follow in season 8, and I still think it will be, and that we’d get a conclusion to the story of the army of the dead instead… but that’s looking less likely right now, isn’t it?
I also want to see something big happen in the North. With so many key characters now down south for this meeting there’s only so much that we can focus on them, surely? Therefore, I’m hoping that we’re going to see more adventure up North, and I’m hoping that this could finally be the show where we see Little Finger’s plans either pay off and we get to see what he’s really after and what he’s been scheming for all season – because you know it’s going to be good if he pulls it off – or we see the end of Little Finger at long last, preferably at the hands of Arya. I’d even accept that the wedge that finally pushes the Stark sister’s apart irreparably is Arya being the one who kills Little Finger and Sansa refusing to believe that she did it for the right reasons. That would be nice, to see how that turns out, but it wouldn’t really be the completely satisfying ending to the season I think we’re all looking for at this point. Still, it would feel like something has concluded at least, which would make a nice change from the week on week build we’ve had with nothing yet actually coming of it from any corner. This can’t be another plot that goes on into season 8, can it?
If we can’t see the conclusion to the story with the army of the dead then I at least want to see the season end with them finally reaching The Wall, and perhaps battling with the Night’s Watch. I’d also like to see Sam return as well, either to The Wall to learn that Jon has gone off and is doing far more now, or to have learned about this somehow and show up somewhere else instead. Most importantly though, if the season ends with the dead on the attack, I want to see Viserion in all his new undead glory and I want the answer to the most important question of the week…
Do Undead Dragon’s Breathe Fire?
I said I’d talked about this with friends this week, and I have, and the most interesting topic this week has been exactly on this. Do undead dragons breathe fire, or something else?
There’s a few different ideas I’ve been part of to answer this. The first answer is no, that now it’s undead it breathes ice instead. That would be cool, and a very nice visual given the power of the fire that we’ve seen from the other dragons being completely stopped by the power of an ice-breathing dragon instead, but I’m not sure this has the necessary impact really. What good would it ultimately do them? If it breathed ice up in an already-frozen wasteland then all it’d do is just make the already-half-frozen people just more frozen? What fun is that? It would make for an amazing visual, don’t get me wrong, and then seeing the live dragons battling their now undead brother and literally seeing Ice versus Fire would be an incredible thing to see. The books ARE called A Song of Ice and Fire after all, right? You’ve got to wonder if they’ve had that thought. But personally what I’m hoping for is the suggestion of another friend of mine, that they still breathe fire but that it’s BLUE fire. The visual of that, with the blue flames burning away at everything much as we’ve seen the regular flames doing this season, would be something to see. Plus it would still give us the very cool blue vs. yellow effect for the future dragon vs. undead dragon battle that I think we all want to see.
Most importantly of all, I’ve already mentioned that Benjen couldn’t go beyond the wall because he was half-undead, and that implies there’s more to The Wall than simply the fact that it’s really, really tall. Well, what if Viserion is the key to that? What if the season ends with the Night King commanding the undead Viserion to unleash his blue fire on the wall, melting it and giving the dead a pathway into Westeros that nullifies any magical barriers at the same time? Also, is it just me or does everyone else hope we get to see the Night King riding a blue-fire-breathing Viserion? If you ever wanted a cool visual to end the season on the that one may just be it, as the army of the dead walk freely into Westeros and through the wall and the season ends with the future now looking very, very bleak for everyone. Whatever happens in the south and with the meeting with Cersei, ending on that kind of visual would give us goosebumps that lasted until the next season begins… which I damn well hope is next year, even if I have heard reports that it may not be until 2019. I hope that I was lied to and that that’s not even being considered, because a two-year (or even 18 month) absence now just wouldn’t be fair. We need to see what happens, goddamn it! We need our fix. We need our Game of Thrones goodness. And if nothing else, at least we’re going to get that one last time this week…
So, I’ll see you Monday for the Game of Thrones: Talking Points, and then I’ll likely actually be TALKING about Game of Thrones later next week as well, assuming I’m joined by my lovely Northern friend for us to have a good chat about this season as a whole and where we hope we’ll go in the future. Plus it’ll be my YouTube debut, so I’m somewhat excited about that. Until then, let me know your thoughts on Twitter (@AlexisEbdon) or Facebook (Facebook.com/ajebdon) and have a good weekend, guys. It’ll be the last one we’ve got with Game of Thrones to look forward to, so enjoy the anticipation. I know I will!