“The Long Night is coming, and the dead come with it.”
After almost 70 hours’ worth of politically-infused drama of fallen kings and fire-breathing dragons, Game of Thrones is barrelling down on its epic, six-part conclusion. Similar to its predecessor, the eighth season has favored quality over quantity, and the end result is seemingly an “incredibly emotional” journey for the leading players of Westeros.
But it’s also one that will thrust our heroes (and villains!) into “alien environments.” That’s according to John Bradley, who plays the soft-spoken Samwell Tarly on HBO’s fantasy juggernaut.
Via TV Guide, Bradley warned viewers that Game of Thrones season 8 will stretch its characters like never before.
Each of the characters this year is placed in a completely alien environment at some point in the season that they’ve never been placed in before. The thrill is seeing how they react to it and how they respond… This season, I think more than any other, is stretching these characters.
Unfortunately, Bradley doesn’t specify whether these new environments are literal or figurative. Last we checked in on Samwell Tarly, he had arrived in Winterfell with news that Jon Snow and Aegon Targaryen are one and the same, but this comment suggests that season 8 will include some pretty huge character developments come 2019.
Couple this with the fact that an undead army marches on Westeros, and it’s all but certain that Game of Thrones‘ swan song will include a handful of reanimated, blue-eyed characters – characters who have fallen prey to the Night King. Watch this space for more.
Following an explosive seventh season in which allies became enemies and friends became fiends (sorry, Viserion), Game of Thrones is expected to stage its last hurrah in the summer of 2019. HBO’s Song of Ice and Fire doesn’t end there, though, as the network is said to have drawn up multiple successor series from George R.R. Martin and a number of other big-name screenwriters.