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To say Game of Thrones’ story — especially however things go down in season eight — has been a closely guarded secret would be the understatement of the year. Even the trailers for previous seasons have been cut in order to misdirect audiences, and imply character deaths that never actually come.
But that will be a little different for the final season. Thanks to an Entertainment Weekly cover story, we know a little bit about its first scene and first episode in general.
[Ed. note: the rest of this post contains spoilers for Game of Thrones seasons one through seven]
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The EW story doesn’t get too spoilery, but the magazine was able to crack how the season will begin. Much like the first non-prologue scene in the series, season eight will open with a royal procession entering Winterfell. In episode one of season one, it was the procession of then-king Robert Baratheon, whose arrival would set the events of one-half of the show in motion. This time, however, it’s Queen Daenerys Targaryen that takes the stage. This royal entrance is also a homecoming for Winterfell’s ruler, Jon Snow.
The first episode’s story is going to center largely on the intermingling of characters — which is probably going to be most of the remaining cast — at Winterfell, according to EW. New characters will meet, old characters will reunite for both good and bad, and one story in particular will focus on Sansa Stark’s displeasure that her brother would bend the knee to a foreign Queen, just after he had pledged to lead his people.
If this sounds a little too much like last season’s Sansa plot, don’t worry. It seem like this is something that gets resolved fairly quickly, based on what we know thus far. Keep in mind that this will also likely be the first time that Sansa and Tyrion reunite since she fled King’s Landing during Joffrey’s wedding/death. With Tyrion as the only person in King’s Landing who was kind to Sansa when he didn’t need to be, it’s likely their reunion could be instrumental in Sansa trusting Daenerys, her dragons and her army.
For now, those are all the details we can get out of the Game of Thrones crew, and likely the only ones we’ll have until a trailer for Game of Thrones season eight is officially released by HBO.
The final season of Game of Thrones will premiere on HBO sometime in 2019.
