Last night, sandwiched between two episodes of True Detective (which were pretty good!), HBO dropped the first official Game of Thrones season 8 teaser which was not just two seconds of new footage, but actually a sequence specifically crafted for a teaser trailer, rather than being footage from the show at all.
It shows the three surviving Stark children, Jon, Arya and Sansa, walking through the crypt of Winterfell past their relatives like Ned and Catelyn, only to reach the end to find….statues of themselves at the end. Spooky! Sort of, only the likenesses are…a bit off, so a few of those statues end up looking like that bust of Cristiano Ronaldo. You know the one.
The sequence ends with a frozen mist creepy through the crypt, implying the coming threat of the White Walkers, and Jon and Arya draw their swords while Sansa uh, has to outsmart them, I guess? Not the best position to be in.
The teaser ends with the reveal date of the Game of Thrones season 8 premiere, April 14, when previously we only knew that it would debut sometime in April.
As we know ahead of time, Game of Thrones will only have six episodes this season, but those six episodes are said to be practically feature films each in their own right with huge budgets and huge battles so we might get enough footage for ten episodes anyway.
I don’t know how I feel about the White Walkers being the ultimate antagonist for the show. I mean, I understand that Thrones was always building to this point, but its best villains are not motivation-less monsters, they’re other humans. But almost every single good villain the show has had, Joffrey, Tywin, Ramsay, Roose, Walder Frey, Littlefinger, are all dead now, while others have been redeemed (Jaime, the Hound). That leaves, who, Cersei? And I like Cersei? It’s kind of a weird finale here as a result, as I just wonder if it can be as compelling as what came before.
Still, that doesn’t mean I’m not excited. It has been way, way too long since Game of Thrones has been on the air, I hope the year break will turn out to be worth it, even if we’re only getting a month and a half of episodes. And then in either a year or two the spin-off show will arrive, and we’ll get to do this all over again since HBO does not want to let this series go in the least. Stay tuned.
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Read my new sci-fi thriller novel Herokiller, available now in print and online. I also wrote The Earthborn Trilogy.
