Throughout its eight-season run, Game of Thrones packed its episodes full of callbacks to earlier scenes. It became an obsession for fans to find the Easter eggs hidden in each episode and share them with their friends…or at least we had a good time doing it.
Enter the series finale, “The Iron Throne,” and one of the show’s most memorable moments: Daenerys Targaryen, fresh off her heel turn as the mad queen after burning King’s Landing to the ground, approaches the Iron Throne. It was an intense scene that ultimately ended with her death at the hands of her nephew-lover Jon Snow, but it was also a phenomenal callback to a moment from season 2.
Let’s set the scene: Daenerys is in Qarth, and the Warlocks of the House of the Undying have kidnapped her dragons. She follows, looking for them, and suddenly finds herself in the Iron Throne room, which is covered in what we now know to be ash. She approaches the Iron Throne, reaches out to touch it, but doesn’t…until she does, six seasons laters. The scenes from seasons 2 and 8 match each other perfectly. Redditor u/gooserobins took notice and made a nifty side-by-side comparison video:
Right out of the gate, it’s glaringly obvious how mad Dany has become. It looks like directors David Benioff and Dan Weiss asked Emilia Clarke to open her red-rimmed eyes as wide as possible, giving her a maniacal look. That’s something I missed when I first watched this episode.
Also, it’s interesting to notice how in season 2, Daenerys never touched the Iron Throne. Instead, the cries of her dragons drew her away to another vision featuring Drogo and her stillborn child. In reality, she gave the chance at that kind of life up so she could pursue the Iron Throne, and she got it.
It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking moment that shows just how connected the earlier seasons were to the latter ones.
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