Saying Goodbye to Game of Thrones and Preparing for Spinoffs set 5,000 Years Earlier

We didn’t get a single new episode of Game of Thrones in 2018, but it’s ever-present in our hearts and minds. After winning Best Drama Series at last night’s Emmys the waterworks have started. (You can read our interveiw with GoT‘s Emmy-nominated sound designer here.) It’s setting in we really only have one more season in Westeros. It turns out that the cast is in as much mourning as their fans. Gwendoline Christie, who was among those celebrating the show’s win at the Emmys, confessed she was bummed to say goodbye.

Christie plays the incredible Brienne of Tarth who is brave, brilliant and has never shed a tear on the show (she’s come close). In fact, in a moment of great frustration Brienne says in season 5, “’Don’t let them see your tears.” However, Christie wasn’t able to follow that rule when filming on the show ended. She told the Evening Standard what it was like to wrap shooting:

The triumph of Brienne of Tarth was, she says, both professional and personal. ‘I know how generic it sounds but it just was, in every sense of the word, incredible that that part should come along, made for me in a way that none of my friends would’ve identified for a second. They saw all of the fighting, the physicality, the fact that it was a character who was constantly being described as ugly. None of the people who knew me could understand why I would want to play that part.’ When the book of Christie is finally written, this will be her Damascene moment. ‘I had to cut my hair, change my body, strip off my make-up. This is not the person I have presented to the world at all.’ She graduated, in that moment, to the woman she always wanted to become.

Christie was certainly not the only one who lamented the ending of the series. Author George R.R. Martin told Variety he would have kept the series going if he could:

“We could’ve gone 11, 12, 13 seasons … David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] have been saying for like five seasons that seven seasons is all they would go. We got them to go to eight but not any more than that,” Martin said. “There was a period like five years ago when they were saying seven seasons and I was saying 10 seasons and they won, they’re the ones actually working on it.”

Luckily, this is not the end of Martin’s works. HBO is still hashing out the details on GoT spinoffs, but one will supposedly reveal the true origin of the White Walkers. Martin’s comments to Variety support this timeline:

“Five other shows, five prequels in development that are based on other periods and the history of Westeros — some of them just 100 years before ‘Game of Thrones,’ some of them 5000 years before ‘Game of Thrones.’”

Can we please incorporate some time travel to bring Brienne back in the sequels?

Featured Image: Episode 64 (season 7, episode 4), debut 8/6/17: Gwendoline Christie, Maisie Williams.
photo: Helen Sloan/courtesy of HBO