Game of Thrones season 7: news and episode reviews

Editor’s note, June 17, 2024: This story was first published in 2016 and updated following the season seven finale of Game of Thrones. Click here to read about how the Targaryen family tree relates to HBO’s prequel series House of the Dragon, and get caught up for its second season here. Also, Maryon is no longer active on DeviantART, but you can follow her on Instagram, where she has shared excerpts from the tree.

In Game of Thrones’ season seven finale, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen finally consummated their slow-burning passion — even though the season six finale’s confirmation of the “R + L = J” equation surrounding Jon’s parentage renders their love an incestuous one between aunt and nephew.

It looks like Game of Thrones’ Jon and Dany will have a lot of cabin time to themselves and plenty of idle days on their hands — much like audiences awaiting the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, which we’ve long known won’t be returning until 2019.

But as of this week, there’s good news for fans clamoring for a season eight premiere date that falls sooner rather than later: While speaking to reporters at the Television Critics Association summer press tour on Wednesday, HBO programming president Casey Bloys narrowed the season’s debut window to the first half of 2019. Hey, it’s something!

Cersei Lannister ended the seventh season of Game of Thrones much like she started it — at the top, and with a seemingly foolproof plan to hold onto her power. The season finale, “The Dragon and the Wolf,” saw the queen seemingly outsmart Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen by pretending to join their alliance. But Cersei later revealed that she plans to sit out the war against the Night King, and let him decimate her foes.

On one level, Cersei’s plan is smart; everyone else in this fight has at least one dragon on their side, and one could see how Cersei would want to stay out of such a fray. Currently, she foolishly doesn’t seem too concerned about what will happen if the Night King and his undead army best Jon and Dany and come marching into King’s Landing. But until then, her biggest challenge was teed up in the finale’s last moments: Cersei’s plans to renege on her word rankled her closest and most significant ally, her brother Jaime. The episode ended with him leaving her side.

Game of Thrones is going to disappoint us in the end.

Not because its seventh season wasn’t its strongest or because of its pretty damn mediocre season seven finale. Not because of the struggles the show has faced since it outpaced its source material.

The most significant line in “The Dragon and the Wolf” — the seventh season finale of Game of Thrones — is one that underlines what might be the knottiest, most intriguing theme of both the TV series and the books it’s based on.

“Robert’s Rebellion was built on a lie,” reveals Bran Stark as he and Sam discuss the truth of Jon’s parentage. The war that led Robert Baratheon to sit on the throne of the Seven Kingdoms, that led to the squabbling tensions among the great houses of the country, that essentially built everything the series stands upon — all of it was based on the idea that Rhaegar Targaryen kidnapped Lyanna Stark.

As Game of Thrones enters its final season, the show’s fans will finally get to see the onscreen resolution of a plot point they’ve been waiting on for over two decades. And we’re not talking about who will ultimately sit on the Iron Throne, though that outcome may have a lot to do with the plot point in question.

Rather, we’re talking about what was for nearly 20 years the central mystery of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire book series, on which the HBO show is based: the question of Jon Snow’s true parentage. It’s a riddle that was finally answered at the end of season six (and then more fully at the end of season seven), as the show confirmed the fandom’s most prominent and popular theory on the subject: “R+L=J”.

Here’s a question I keep asking myself: What happened in the seventh season of Game of Thrones?

By that, I don’t mean what were the series of events that transpired on the show. It’s easy enough to compile a plot summary that makes season seven sound reasonably coherent. I mean what was the purpose of anything that happened? What were the deeper themes or character dynamics being explored?

Before there was A Song of Ice and Fire (the books), before there was Game of Thrones (the TV show), before the go-to water cooler topic of conversation was, “Did you see what happened with the dragons on Sunday night,” before all that — there was Dragonlance.

Dragonlance is a series of Dungeons & Dragons tie-in novels that came out starting in 1984, with Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Since then, they have become a rite of passage of sorts for lonely, nerdy, fantasy-loving kids across the country: After you outgrow Animorphs and Redwall and Narnia and Prydain, before you graduate to Tolkien and Le Guin and Martin, you go through a Dragonlance phase.

“The Dragon and the Wolf” is the worst season finale Game of Thrones has ever cooked up.

This doesn’t mean it’s a bad episode. It just means that even in seasons I’ve liked far less than season seven, Game of Thrones tends to bring its A-game for the last couple of episodes. Even the greatly flawed season five ends with Jon Snow (I’m sorry — Aegon Targaryen) bleeding out into the snow. Game of Thrones’ finales generally sum up all that’s come before, while teasing the direction the story will head next.

Game of Thrones’ seventh season, one defined by the show’s most central characters all coming into conflict for the first time, is over. Daenerys, Jon, Cersei, Tyrion, Sansa, and all the rest spent the entire season struggling with one another for power and control over Westeros, each employing different strategies to strengthen their faction and accomplish their objectives.

Which makes the season’s end a perfect time to take stock: to assess each player’s strategy, and judge which character did the best with the tools they had available. Who played the Game of Thrones best?

“We both wanted to be other people when we were younger,” Arya Stark said to her sister Sansa in the sixth episode of Game of Thrones’ seventh season, “Beyond the Wall.” “You wanted to be a queen, to sit next to a handsome young king on the Iron Throne. I wanted to be a knight, to pick up a sword like Father and go off to battle.”

Few storylines are as revealing of the show’s gender politics as this one: Arya, the tomboy, fighting her way across Westeros, and Sansa, the lady, enduring her disastrous marriages. The show’s writers, frequently criticized for their treatment of female characters, have in the past seemed to favor Arya over Sansa, masculinity over femininity. But as the sisters came back together in season seven, the show began to develop a more nuanced view of female strength. And rather than privileging one way of being a woman over another, the show closed out the season with a portrayal of two very different heroines, as Arya and Sansa used their complementary powers to fight those who would drive them apart.

After seven seasons, Game of Thrones has reached the point where dragons are burning people to crisps on one hand and the army of the dead is marching south on the other, making it hard to tell which way this epic battle between fire and ice will ultimately tip.

But in terms of its color, at least, Game of Thrones is more fire than ice — for now.

Game of Thrones concluded its abbreviated seventh season with a supersize episode featuring a whole lot of talking, as what seemed like half of the series’ cast held a very lengthy series of negotations.

But with the end of “The Dragon and the Wolf,” showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss capped off the season with a triple whammy of very big, long-in-the-making moments.

Reactions to the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones’ seventh season were not as universally laudatory as they’ve been in years past. Vox highlighted the rich tapestry of nonsense that was the White Walker battle; the Atlantic asked, “Does this story still know what it’s doing?”; and the Ringer claimed that at this point, the show has become the sort of ho-hum fantasy it once consciously tried to subvert.

But while “Beyond the Wall” left many dismayed about the show’s future, this weekend’s season seven finale, “The Dragon and the Wolf,” has a chance to make up for that icy misstep. It promises the most dramatic collision of characters we’ve seen thus far, as all three Lannister siblings, as well as Jon Snow, Brienne, Jorah, Davos, and more, are set to converge for a loaded meeting in the fabled dragon pit, where the Targaryens kept their fiery beasts when they held the Iron Throne.

As every Game of Thrones fan knows, Sansa Stark has come a long way since her unimpressive beginnings — but that might not last. Alan Taylor, the director of Sunday’s upcoming season seven finale, recently suggested to the Huffington Post that the dark fight between Arya and Sansa in the previous episode, “Beyond the Wall” — in which Arya appears to make a direct threat to her sister’s life — could result in only one Stark sister left standing.

There’s good reason to be skeptical of this teaser, especially since the sisters’ fight may not have been what it seemed. But it does give us an opportunity to look more closely at the show’s narrative direction — which tells us that it’s ultimately Sansa, not Arya, whose survival matters more to the show’s overall arc.

“Beyond the Wall” was one of the most purely spectacular Game of Thrones episodes to date, but if you think about it for more than a few minutes, the whole thing comes crashing down faster than King’s Landing under a scorned queen’s wildfire siege. More than any other episode of season seven — or really, the entire series so far — the hour glossed over so many logistical hurdles and relied on so many convenient twists to arrive at its ice dragon endgame that it didn’t make much sense at all.

The ridiculousness began as soon as Jon Snow and his merry band of wight-hunters began their trek north of the Wall in search of a reanimated corpse to capture and bring back to Cersei. The plan was ill-formed from the start, and they made some baffling decisions along the way. Yet their mission was ultimately successful, give or take a dragon death.

This season on Game of Thrones, characters have been poisoned, left to rot in a dungeon while watching their daughters die, torched like the crispy top of a crème brûlée, and mauled by ice zombies. But the only death I really cared about was that of a CGI dragon.

Viserion’s death in “Beyond the Wall” is the only time so far this season that I’ve gotten legitimately emotional over Game of Thrones. It’s like the show reached into my mouth, down into my chest, and pulled out my heart. I screamed at my screen, shaking my fist, and cursed the Night King and his dragon-killing spears and bionic Peyton Manning arm. I grunted a manly negative grunt, then I screeched a screech at a frequency that would put Janet Leigh to shame.

“Beyond the Wall” is basically a heist gone horribly awry.

After teasing the sight of Jon, Jorah, the Hound, Beric, Thoros, Tormund, and Gendry setting off into the frozen wilderness at the end of “Eastwatch,” season seven’s penultimate episode details their scrappy efforts to find, subdue, and transport a wight back to the Wall so they can convince Cersei that the army of the dead exists and is coming to kill them all. (Cersei — and everyone else involved in the King’s Landing plot — remains offscreen.) Like any good heist movie, each of the men has his own skill set, resentments, and reasons for being there; and like any good heist movie, shit goes seriously sideways once they’re caught in the act of stealing what they came for.

It’s clearer than ever that Game of Thrones is hurtling toward its endgame, as this week’s episode, “Beyond the Wall,” showed fans something they’ve been waiting years to see: Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons battling the White Walkers.

But due to a thoroughly impressive spear toss from the Night King, the White Walkers have taken round one. That spear killed one of Dany’s three dragons — Viserion — which forced the rest of her party to retreat.

There are two unaired episodes left in Game of Thrones’ seventh season, and due to a flub, one of them is now living on the internet. According to an HBO statement obtained by The Verge, HBO Nordic and HBO España mistakenly released the show’s upcoming sixth episode ahead of its scheduled debut.

“We have learned that the upcoming episode of Game of Thrones was accidentally posted for a brief time on the HBO Nordic and HBO España platforms,” an HBO spokesperson said. “The error appears to have originated with a third-party vendor and the episode was removed as soon as it was recognized.”

In Game of Thrones’ seventh season, we’ve seen Cersei take major steps toward asserting her power and tightening her grip on the Iron Throne.

She sent her army to Highgarden and had her brother Jaime dispatch her longtime foe Olenna Tyrell. She personally ordered and oversaw the death of the last living Sand Snake and holds the Snakes’ mother, Ellaria Sand, captive.

After the spectacular dragon battle of “The Spoils of War,” this week’s episode of Game of Thrones, “Eastwatch,” paused to take a breath and set things up for what looks to be the show’s next big conflict.

But amongst Jon Snow’s departure for a mission beyond the Wall with a motley crew of supporting characters and Tyrion Lannister’s attempt to arrange a summit between Queen Daenerys and Queen Cersei, we saw intriguing developments in several of the series’ long-running subplots.

“Eastwatch” is a curious episode of television, because it mostly functions as a brand new season premiere. Call it the first episode of Game of Thrones, season 7A.

With most of the conflicts that have defined the season so far largely thrown into relief by last week’s cataclysmic battle, the show now has to come up with some new ones. That means “Eastwatch” is yet another table-setting episode of Game of Thrones (though one with quite a few fun moments and scenes), but also one where the storytelling keeps setting up quests and goals that should be easily resolved but can’t be because the season has a few more episodes in it.

Shortly after the latest Game of Thrones episode — the one that ended in that massive dragon battle — Daily Beast writer Ira Madison III riled up some corners of the show’s fan base by arguing something that, to me, seemed pretty self-evident: Game of Thrones is structured more like a soap opera and less like one of the prestige dramas of the 2000s.

(You should click through to read Madison’s entire thread, which is smart and delves into several topics I won’t touch on much here.)

Even for Game of Thrones, the moment in “The Spoils of War” when Daenerys swept onto the battlefield astride a dragon was particularly spectacular. It marked a pivotal moment when the series finally cashed in its chips and — after six-plus seasons of teasing how fearsome dragons are and how ambitious the Dragon Queen is — showed us how one-sided and unrelenting an attack by dragon can be. Daenerys, Drogon, and the Dothraki army unleashing bloody hell beneath them has now decimated Jaime Lannister’s army, to the point where Cersei will almost certainly have to rebuild her forces from scratch.

But for a battle whose entire purpose was to show off the devastating power that Daenerys can tap into if she truly wants to dominate the war for Westeros, it sure avoided killing — or even significantly injuring — any character of actual consequence.