It’s time to start saying our goodbyes. HBO has finally confirmed that the last season, season 8, of Game of Throneswill air in April 2019. This means that instead of studying for finals, you’ll have the opportunity to watch your favorite Westeros characters kick some Army of the Dead ass.
While HBO has many details of the season locked under lock and key, E! News has been the number one source for everything that is known about the last season, watching cast interactions, social media posts and everything in between to give us the faintest idea about the upcoming drama’s final season. Here’s what they’ve found:
Most importantly, the air date is in April 2019 but don’t plan on being able to breeze through a 58 to 60-minute episode like past seasons. The director, David Nutter, said during his Reddit AMA that episodes will “be longer than 60 minutes. They’ll be dancing around the bigger numbers, I know that for sure.” Plan on popping a lot of popcorn because this means it’s basically a Game of Thronesmovie each week. Additionally, David has described the final season with three words, “spectacular, inspiring, and satisfying,” which sounds like the typical plot twists that keep us up at night will hopefully end with less uncertainty. But don’t get too comfortable, David has also said that in terms of the last season, we’ve seen nothing yet “as far as season [eight] compared to the Red Wedding I just have to tell you—hang onto your seat cause it’s going to be special.” So can we count on a happy ending? Of course not. Kit Harrington has said “I think a TV series that’s spanned eight, nine years is an incredibly difficult thing to end. I think not everyone’s going to be happy, you know, and you can’t please everyone. My favorite TV shows are Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and The Wire, and they all ended in a way that… it’s never going to satisfy you.”
Courtesy: The Independent
Now what do we know about the plot? Break out some tissues because co-executive producer Bryan Cogman told EW that “It’s about all of these disparate characters coming together to face a common enemy, dealing with their own past, and defining the person they want to be in the face of certain death. It’s an incredibly emotional haunting bittersweet final season and I think it honors very much what [author George R.R. Martin] set out to do—which is flipping this kind of story on its head.” EW has also reported that the season will begin with Daenerys and her army coming to Winterfell. This leads us to what is reported to be the biggest battle in Game of Throneshistory: “It’s brutal. It makes the Battle of the Bastards look like a theme park,” co-executive producer Peter Dinklage said to EW, referencing the infamous battle from Season Six that took over 55 nights outside to shoot with additional weeks spent filming inside.
Courtesy: E! News
Looking for more information? Sophie Turner has reported to Digital Spy that this season has “been tighter than the White House security!” She explained that “I mean, we wouldn’t get anything physical. We would have it on an app. We would get sent sides for the scene [we were shooting] the next day. So we would have to learn it all the day before. And once you’ve read it, it disappears 24 hours later, and you can never access it again.” Between all of that and the cast and show using fake names during all of shooting, security was at all time high to keep the filming this season secret. All that we can know for sure is that ending of Game of Throneswill truly be one of the most epic endings to come to TV.
Quotes courtesy of E! News.