If you don’t have time to go on a marathon Game of Thrones binge before the first episode of the eighth and final season airs on Sunday, you could always try and get your hands on as much recap and summary material as you can. Barring that, though, there’s also a much easier way to get caught up.
It’s not a perfect solution and certainly leaves out a lot, but the roughly 2-minute clip at the top of this post does an admirable job of condensing all seven of Game of Thrones’ previous seasons into one quick bit of footage you can easily absorb ahead of the grand finale.
The video recap comes via the folks at Winteriscoming.net, which is a great source of news on all things GoT and which has provided a great service here, since most people likely don’t want to start an epic 67-hour watch party between now and Sunday. (Specifically, Sunday at 8 p.m., which is when HBO will air episode 1 of the final season). The recap above does leave a lot of key characters and details out — we don’t see, for example, The Hound, Brienne of Tarth, Varys, or the scheming Littlefinger, not to mention locales like Oldtown and Dorne.
But it does give you a sense of the high-level stakes here and sets up some of the big questions that remain as we head into the final season. Like, who will survive the coming confrontation with the Army of the Dead? Will Cersei definitely stay put and let everyone else deal with the White Walkers, and what happens to her after that? What are Jon and Daenerys going to do when they find out they’re related, who will sit on the Iron Throne when it’s all said and done, and — okay, we should probably stop there for now, because there are still a ton of other major, game-changing questions for which we’re all awaiting answers.
If you want more than a quick 2-minute refresher ahead of Sunday, Rolling Stone has also put together a comprehensive rundown of all the important highlights you need to know at this point in the series. The main benefit of its refresher, which you can read here, is that it helps you keep straight who’s fighting who and where the key alliances are, such as the reminder that when Daenerys and Jon teamed up, the North inherited all of the following: The clever, diminutive Tyrion Lannister; Varys, the eunuch with all those great lines; freed slave Missandei; the Unsullied commander Grey Worm; and the “Red Woman” also known as Melisandre.
