Details You May Have Missed From The Series Finale Of ‘Game Of Thrones’ — ‘Iron Throne’

*Warning: Game of Thrones spoilers Ahead!*

Sunday night marked the final episode of Game of Thrones ever. That’s right, after eight sexy and violent seasons of television, the show is officially done. Episode 6, “The Iron Throne,” wrapped things up quite nicely, killing off even more of our favorite characters and exiling others. As we’ve come to expect from season finales, the big action sequences were all used up in the penultimate episode with this last installment being a bit more calm and devoted to heartfelt moments and connections between characters rather than endless dragonfire and destruction.

It still featured a pretty heart wrenching moment: Jon Snow plunging a dagger through the chest of his queen, Daenerys. You could tell he really didn’t want to do it, but after what she did to King’s Landing he had no choice. If that scene early into the episode left you feeling numb and out of sorts, you may have missed some of the fine details, Easter eggs, and straight up gaffes that were hidden in the background of the series finale. So we’ve compiled ten of our favorite examples.

As usual, the opening credits sequence was tweaked to show the effects of Daenerys’ dragon rampage through King’s Landing. The city isn’t shown as razed to the ground because HBO’s extremely tight leak prevention process kept extreme changes like that from the credits VFX team, but you can see some damage to the stairs leading up to the Red Keep. The map room also has a big crack running through it.

That same crack can be seen when Tyrion is crossing the map room courtyard.

At the very end, the stained glass Lannister lion above the Iron Throne is now gone, marking the end of Cersei’s short reign.

When Dany talks to her Dothraki army, she mirrors a speech given by her former sun and stars Khal Drogo in season one. “You killed my enemies in their iron suits,” she declared. “You tore down their stone houses. You gave me the Seven Kingdoms.” Above you can watch Drogo hype up his khalasar with similar talk. And then in season six, Dany once again brings up the “iron suits” and “stone houses” line. Hey, it’s pretty hype. Makes me wanna go pillage.

When Daenerys enters the throne room in the Red Keep, the shots used mirror those used during her vision of the throne room from the House of the Undying at the end of season 2.

In that vision she walks up to the Iron Throne and puts her hand out to touch it but can’t bring herself to actually make contact. In this final episode, she once again holds out her hand and hesitates before laying her hand on the pommel of a sword making up an armrest.

And that’s as close as she gets to sitting in the damn thing she’s been working hard to win for years!

https://twitter.com/theresheygoes/status/1130461773746692101

Daenerys’ comments to Jon Snow about how she thought the Iron Throne would look actually mirror comments made by George R.R. Martin as to how the Iron Throne is presented in the books. “When I was a girl my brother told me it was made with one thousand swords from Aegon’s fallen enemies,” she said. “What do one thousand swords look like to a little girl who can’t even count to twenty? I imagined a mountain of swords too high to climb. So many fallen enemies you could only see the soles of Aegon’s feet.”

That’s pretty much exactly how GRRM describes it. Above you can see the image he shows people of the Iron Throne as he originally envisioned it.

https://youtu.be/7h2B6roXenQ?t=259

Did that whole Arya “going west” thing confuse you? Well, it’s not completely out of the blue. During one of Arya’s short stints where she wasn’t killing people, she hid from the Waif with a theater actress named Lady Crane. While recovering from injuries, Arya described her interest in the unknown side of the world. “Essos is east, and Westeros is west,” she said. “But what’s west of Westeros? Nobody knows. It’s where all the maps stop.”

We’re pretty happy that Game of Thrones gave Brienne of Tarth a better ending than standing in the mud of Winterfell sobbing over Jaime. Instead, she ends her character arc as the Lord Commander of King Bran the Broken’s kingsguard. Sitting down in front of the book that keeps records of all past kingsguards, you can see Bran’s chosen sigil — a raven — on her breastplate.

Brienne takes a look at the entry for Jaime Lannister …. a pretty sad looking page, but as Jaime said back in season 4, he still had time to get some more accolades in.

So Brienne went ahead and filled his pages out for him. Lost h- … lost what?? I guess we’ll never know.

This reads “Took Riverrun from the Tully rebels without any loss of life. Lured the Unsullied into attacking Casterly Rock, sacrificing his childhood home in the service to a greater strategy. [He took his army south to take Highgarden.] Outwitted the Targaryen forces to seize Highgarden. Fought at the Battle of the Goldenroad [Also known as the Loot Train battle … you know, the one where Drogon wrecks a whole Lannister army] bravely, narrowly escaping death by dragonfire. Pledged himself to the forces of men and rode north to join them at Winterfell.”

“Faced the Army of the Dead and defended Winterfell castle against impossible odds until the defeat of the Night King. Escaped imprisonment and rode south in an attempt to save the capital from destruction. Died protecting his Queen.”

During the first meeting of the new small council, Samwell presents Tyrion with a tome entitled A Song of Ice and Fire by Archmaester Ebrose. Back in season 7, Sam can be seen seen suggesting Ebrose choose a more “poetic” name for his new book, A Chronicle of the Wars Following the Death of King Robert I.

https://youtu.be/2segM3PA6AI?t=230

So the last line we get to hear from Tyrion Lannister to close out his run on Game of Thrones was pretty strange if you don’t get the reference. “I once brought a jackass and a honeycomb into a brothel,” he said. It’s the start of a joke Tyrion has tried to tell several times over the various seasons, first during his trial at the Eyrie and then again in season six while drinking with Grey Worm and Missandei in Meereen. He never manages to get very far with it, but we’ve managed to track down the full joke with punchline.

“I once brought a jackass and a honeycomb into a brothel. The Madame said ‘What can we do for you?’ I said ‘I need a woman to lay with, for mine has left me.’ ‘Whatever for?’ the Madam asks. ‘And what’s with the honeycomb and the mule?'”

“I said ‘My woman found a genie in a bottle, and he granted her three wishes. The first was for a house fit for a queen, so he gave her this damn honeycomb. The second wish was that she have the nicest ass in all the land, so he gave her this damn donkey.’ The Madame says ‘So what about the third wish?’ And I reply ‘Well… she asked the genie to make my cock hang down past my knee.’ The Madame says ‘Well that’s not so bad eh?’ Not so bad!? ‘I used to be six foot three!'”

Game of Thrones used to be perfect when it came to keeping anything modern out of all its shots, but season 8 was so big and elaborate that a few things have slipped through. Much hay was made when a coffee cup was left on a table in between Daenerys and Jon Snow, and now we have another minor slip up. Eagle eyed viewers noticed two plastic water bottles tucked away under chairs during the Kingmaker scene in the Dragonpit.

And to wrap things up, forever I suppose, is this nice little bit that takes us from the end right back to the start. The final shots from Game of Thrones of the Wildlings returning north of the Wall match up to the first shots from the very first episode where the Night’s Watch goes ranging.

If you’re still in the mood for more Game of Thrones details, don’t forget to check out our archive of past episodes!