Well, it’s finally here. A little more than eight years after Game of Thrones’ first season premiered back in April 2011, the 80-minute series finale that will tie up the whole bloody, dark and — to many fans — thoroughly unsatisfying final season arrives this coming Sunday. Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss wrote and directed the final episode of Season 8 themselves, for which you can watch the briefest of teasing trailers above.
Not that it reveals much in the way of what’s in store, which is probably for the best. It’s also definitely the shortest trailer that’s been released for a Season 8 episode so far. And, at this point, we should go ahead and offer the standard *SPOILERS* disclaimer, in case you haven’t seen Sunday’s … insane penultimate episode, let’s just describe it that way.
Daenerys, of course, has now gone full “Mad Queen,” and we catch a glimpse of her in the Episode 6 trailer looking out over her newly acquired kingdom — the one she basically burned to the ground in a fit of rage, which many of us saw coming, as she flew Drogon back and forth literally scorching the earth.
In the trailer above, you can also see Tyrion and Arya at one point pacing, as well as a group of Dothraki warriors waving their swords triumphantly in the air.
This follow-up to last night’s episode raises all sorts of questions, to say the least. Dany essentially massacred untold scores of innocent people as a result of her beef with Queen Cersei, who died in what many fans took to Twitter to argue was a very unsatisfying end for her character (there’s that word again).
It’s also easy to be angry at Jon Snow for letting things get to this point since it was his incredibly annoying good boy act that let Dany go on, unchecked, to carry out her murderous rampage. Perhaps he’ll step up and seize his claim to the Iron Throne in the series finale. Perhaps he’ll go through Dany to do it, putting an end to her terror. Whatever the outcome, it’s probably a safe bet to assume that it won’t be a Hollywood ending for a series that’s endeavored to show the ugly effects of power and what it does to people from the very beginning.
