Winter is already here.
“Game of Thrones” season 6 finally came to a close with the explosive finale, drawing in the show’s most viewership ever. Now, co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are already dropping major hints on what fans can expect to see in season 7 and 8.
It was previously reported that there will only be a handful of episodes left to spread across the final 2 seasons of “GoT”. 13 to be exact – 7 episodes for the 7th season and 6 episodes for the 8th (also the final season). Unlike the previous seasons where we’ve been accustomed to 10 episodes per season, the show-runners explained that the shorter episode count would give them more time to spend on their big finish.
There has been many fan-theory speculation throughout the past season and 1 of them included Cersei obliterating all her enemies (including Natalie Dormer’s Queen Margaery) in one fell swoop by using the wildfire stored under the Sept of Baelor. What Cersei didn’t foresee coming was her son, King Tommen, taking his own life after being devastated by the destruction.
So now that she’s a childless mother as Maggy the Frog once prophesied in season 5, is the show setting Cersei up to be a ruthless ruler?
“That’s what so much of next season is going to be about. Finding out what Cersei’s mind-set is. Who is she? While Cersei has certainly done a lot of horrible things in her life and she could be a very cruel person, the one thing that was redemptive about her was that she genuinely loved her children … Who is she without her children? The answer is something you’ll find out next season,” shared Weiss.
Since most of the main villains (Joffrey Baratheon, Walder Frey, and Ramsay Bolton) are all dead, the Night King seems to be the next major villain to wreck havoc on Westeros. But Weiss explains that this character is something else entirely.
“I don’t think of the Night King as a villain as much as, Death. He is not like Joffrey, or Ramses. He’s not really human anymore. To me, evil comes when you have a choice between that and good, and you choose the wrong way. The Night King doesn’t have a choice; he was created that way, and that’s what he is. In some ways, he’s just death, coming for everyone in the story, coming for all of us. In some ways, it’s appropriate he doesn’t speak. What’s death going to say? Anything would diminish him. He’s just a force of destruction,” Weiss told Deadline.
Although the Seven Kingdoms is protected by a Wall that has been enhanced by powerful spells, it looks as though the Night King and his army will get past it somehow. “What is laid out in this season is, very clearly, that the wall isn’t just a physical structure keeping the army of the dead out. If the Wildlings managed to make it over, which they have, and the Night King has so much more in the way of both power and troops who’ll do literally anything he says…we’ll keep it at that for now,” Weiss added.
As Weiss continued to explain, some of things that will take place next season had already been planned long time ago. “We’re trying to tell one cohesive story with a beginning, middle, and end. We’ve known the end for quite some time and we’re hurtling towards it. Daenerys is finally coming back to Westeros; Jon Snow is King of the North and Cersei is sitting on the Iron Throne. And we know the Night King is up there, waiting for all of them. The pieces are on the board now,” he revealed.
“The thing that has excited us from the beginning, back to the way we pitched it to HBO is, it’s not supposed to be an ongoing show, where every season it’s trying to figure out new story lines. We wanted it to be one giant story, without padding it out to add an extra 10 hours, or because people are still watching it. We wanted to something where, if people watched it end to end, it would make sense as one continuous story. We’re definitely heading into the end game now,” said Weiss.
If you’ve watched episode 10’s “The Winds of Winter“, feel free to dive into the “GoT” viewer’s guide below:
Are you bummed that our time with Westeros is almost coming to an end? Anyways, here are some brand new shows to keep you company while we wait for the end game to begin.
Sources: Screen Rant, /Film, E! News.
