When Game of Thrones premiered on HBO in April 2011, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had a staggering amount of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire source material to work from. There were five books covering 344 chapters and 4,273 pages. Plus, by the time they got around to season three, surely Martin would have finished his next novel, The Winds of Winter, and by season five, maybe even A Dream of Spring. About that…
Not only has Martin not completed book seven, he’s still working on book six, which is “months away.” To work around this, Benioff and Weiss sat down with Martin in 2013 to “talk through where things are going… If you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it. And so we want to know how everything ends.” At that fateful meeting, Martin revealed “three holy sh*t moments,” according to Benioff in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. We’ve seen two: Stannis burning his daughter Shireen at the stake, and the origin of Hold the Door, er, Hodor’s name. But what’s the third?
“[It’s] from the very end…,” Benioff teased. (Via Entertainment Weekly)
Well, that’s not very helpful. All Benioff would add is, “People are talking about whether the books are going to be spoiled — and it’s really not true. So much of what we’re doing diverges from the books at this point. And while there are certain key elements that will be the same, we’re not going to talk so much about that — and I don’t think George is, either.” We will!
What could the third moment be? Confirming R+L=J seems too obvious — at this point, it would be less “holy sh*t,” and more “it’s about damn time.” Maybe something to do with the dragon with three heads, or Maggy the Frog’s prophecy? We won’t know until the “very end” of the series — which is probably in two more seasons — at which point Gendry will return from the world’s longest rafting trip to claim the Iron Throne. Spoiler?
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
