I feel like a season of True Detective starring Oscar winner Mahershala Ali would generate enough hype on its own, but HBO is giving people one more reason to tune in. They’re revealing the exact premiere date of Game of Thrones season 8, which has been on break for two years now.
This is…not exactly a momentous occasion, given that HBO has already told us that Game of Thrones is coming back this April. So now all that really matters is which Sunday in April it will return, and it could be the 7th, 14th, 21st or 28th. Even though I want it to get here sooner rather than later, I can’t say I care all that much which week it actually gets here, and if I have to wait three more than I was expecting, what’s that compared to waiting two years for the show to return?
Game of Thrones season 8 is only going to be six episodes total, down from seven last season and down from the usual ten in all the seasons before that. But the reason isn’t cost-cutting, rather, it’s the opposite. Reportedly each episode of Game of Thrones season 8 is more or less going to be an entire feature film, at the very least longer than the traditional hour we’ve come to expect from the series. We have also been promised some of the biggest battle sequences that have ever been filmed, and that’s across television or movies. HBO is going all-out for this finale, although we know they’re not going to let Game of Thrones go after this, as a prequel series has been cast and should be coming in a year or two. Though it will have no overlap with the current show, considering it takes places not decades in the past, but thousands of years ago.
I remain…somewhat concerned about season 8 of Game of Thrones. While yes, its battles have been getting bigger and badder than ever in the last few years, I think the show has gone a bit of course in the wake of passing up George RR Martin’s source material. Not that I think they should wait for him to finish the books (the Lord of Light only knows when that will be), but you can tell the difference as the writing, the story turns, just aren’t really there the way they used to be. I worry that the show is more concerned with the epic scale of its battles than with its characters (when’s the last time Tyrion did anything relevant?), which is not why the show got so popular in its early season. Sure, there were big battles early on occasionally (the siege of King’s Landing), but the best Thrones moments don’t usually come from combat, and that can often result in kind of goofy sequences like (spoilers) Jaime diving into a lake wearing a full suit of armor or Benjen coming to save Jon only to die immediately.
I don’t know, we’ll see. I have no idea how Game of Thrones will ultimately end (minus a few obvious theories about Azor Ahai reborn and all that), but I do hope it’s done proper justice, and we don’t need $50 million battle sequences to make sure the show ends well.
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.
