Jon killing her lacks much story (unless she kills Dany midway through season eight). It would offer the greatest bit of drama to it. I can envision a scenario where any one of Tyrion, Jaime, Jon, Arya or Daenerys could take her out and no one would cry foul. Cersei looks to hold on to the throne as the last villain to be ruler, but who will take her out? A lot of people want her dead. So we’re going to get overlap and the war for Kings Landing will probably wrap up in the final episode, the same as the Night King War (though I can see the Night King going down in the penultimate episode too). We’ll get a happy ending, but with enough death on the side of the good guys to call it “bittersweet.” THE GAME OF THRONES WARĪs said, I think if they were going to fight the two big wars individually they would have wrapped up the war for the Iron Throne first and then had the walkers invade. There may be a more cerebral final battle, maybe between The Night King and Bran, but it could just as easily end with Jon driving a magically-flaming sword through The Night King’s face. So I don’t think there will be any twist like The Hound being Azor Ahai or The Night King actually being a good guy that everyone makes peace with, or even the Night King winning in the end. I won’t predict that for Martin’s book series, but the show has been going for the conventional conclusion to many plotpoints lately. In the end, I expect the show will go for a pat finish. It’s a powerful metaphor and I hope the show allows itself a moment to reflect on that. The fallen from war will literally come back to haunt the living. They’re going to rise to fight against the people who killed them and even against the rulers who led them to their deaths in their quest for glory. Those corpses were never burned, only buried in hasty makeshift battlefield graves. So I think it’s really fitting that the White Walkers are going to be invading Westeros and raising those who died in Robert’s Rebellion and the War of the Five Kings. They’re all killers and rapists, as the Hound told her years ago. It’s why all the honorable knights Sansa dreams about don’t really exist in reality. He wanted to use A Song of Ice and Fire to depict war as ugly, ultimately pointless and lacking in the romanticism that many fantasy writers give it.
#Game of thrones s03e01 in memory of series#
One of the forgotten inspirations of the series is George RR Martin’s anti-war beliefs. Let’s say that the first half of the season takes place in the northern part of Westeros, mainly “the North” and Riverlands. It seems like the show is setting it up so that there won’t be much of a prolonged war for the Iron Throne, but instead we’ll have most of the season focused on the so-called “great war” against the White Walkers, the latter half of which will probably overlap with a fight against Cersei, leading to a dual-climax that resolves both plot-points around the same time. As a wise man said, “From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork.” The best we can do is try and examine clues laid out by the show’s previous seasons to figure out what and how the ends may be. Since we no longer have any books to fall back on, everything below is pure conjecture. With that said, let’s speculate wildly about the fates of each of the major characters and plot points remaining.
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Hopefully next year sends the show out on a high note worthy of its legacy. It made for a year with some amazing moments, but some frustrating segments in between them.
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The show, which used to pride itself on letting its characters breathe, interact and just experience the journey from point-A to point-B was forced this year to just hit the high points. Even with the extra-long finale this year, the seventh season only ran about 450 minutes, and it was obvious that the writers were in crunch-time, racing from one plot point to the next in order to get everything in place for the finale. That adds up to about 540 minutes of screentime, coming in just under a standard ten-episode, sixty-minute each season like we had for the first six years of the show.
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HBO promises a massive final season, where each episode will be “around feature length” similar to the ninety-minute season-seven finale last week. The show is taking a year off, presumably to justify the massive budget HBO is giving the final few hours of its biggest show the finale reached a record twelve-million viewers (the number bumps up to sixteen when you count those who streamed it legally), not to mention the millions more who viewed it through…shall we say “less than official” means? Yeah, that. Only one season remains, a six-episode race to the finish-line due out sometime in 2019. And with that, Game of Thrones season seven is finished.