Game of Thrones season 7 plans revealed

Fresh after the conclusion of the sixth season of Game of Thrones, the showrunners discuss their plans for the next season.

“The Winds of Winter” was the most watched episode of Game of Thrones, bringing in a historic 8.9 million viewers to HBO, according to IGN. The finale, which saw the rise to power of the three great houses of Westeros, concluded a fast-paced season filled with major revelations and crucial developments in the overarching story.

But there are only two more seasons left to conclude the epic saga and the showrunners, David Benioff and D.B Weiss, have already begun discussing details about the seventh season. In an interview with Deadline, Benioff and Weiss talked about the challenges of making the last two episodes of the season (with the penultimate episode featuring the show’s biggest battle scene to date), as well as the characters they want to focus on in the next season.

Cersei Lannister, who finally ascended to the Iron Throne after torching King’s Landing with wildfire, emerged as one of the main players at the end of this season. Benioff and Weiss revealed that fans will be seeing more of her character in season seven. They said:

“Not to give a frustrating answer, but that’s what so much of next season is going to be about; finding out what Cersei’s mind-set is. Who is she? While Cersei has certainly done a lot of horrible things in her life and she could be a very cruel person, the one thing that was redemptive about her was that she genuinely loved her children. Now they’re all gone, and I think that is very interesting for us. Who is she without her children? The answer is something you’ll find out next season. That’s so much of what is to come that I’ll just give it away if I start delving into it now.”

They also talked about how Game of Thrones has become very much a female-centric show, with complex and compelling female characters such as Cersei Lannister, Daenerys Targaryen, Olenna Tyrell, Arya Stark, and Sansa Stark.

Image credit: EW

They said:

“The world of the show is one where women’s prospects would seem severely limited, compared to our own world. It’s based on medieval reality, where women were often considered the property of their husbands. They were very sharply circumscribed a set of activities and possibilities for their lives. One of the things that has been most fun about the characters we work with in the world George created, was that so many of the most interesting and formidable characters are women. The obstacles that stand between them and what they want are so much more formidable. It was lots of fun and rewarding to think about the ways they could overcome obstacles and press their advantages and interests the way men would. You’d be hard pressed to call Cersei a heroine; she just blew up several thousand people, few of which had done her any particular wrong. But she’s a formidable, severely flawed and damaged person.”

Game of Thrones : Books vs. Show

They also went on to discuss the challenges of writing seasons that no longer have any source material, since Game of Thrones caught up with George R. R. Martin’s books in its fifth season. All subsequent seasons had the added challenge of exploring unknown territory and fans of the show who were book readers no longer had any idea of what was to come. And considering the massive scale of the fantasy epic, reaching a satisfying conclusion was always going to be a struggle. Benioff said:

“We’ve been talking about the ending, from the beginning. It’s a strange phenomenon, we’re in this territory where you are walking on your own and can’t rely on the written material anymore. As we get close to the ending, we’ve been talking about that for so long, things come into better focus. Once we get to the final end game, we’ve got very specific ideas that have grown organically over the past six plus years about where everything will end up.”

Both showrunners have had a clear idea of the show’s endgame and the finale set the board for the last stages of the story.

“…Daenerys is finally coming back to Westeros; Jon Snow is king of the North and Cersei is sitting on the Iron Throne. And we know the Night King is up there, waiting for all of them. The pieces are on the board now. Some of the pieces have been removed from the board and we are heading toward the end game. The thing that has excited us from the beginning, back to the way we pitched it to HBO is, it’s not supposed to be an ongoing show, where every season it’s trying to figure out new story lines. We wanted it to be one giant story, without padding it out to add an extra 10 hours, or because people are still watching it. We wanted to something where, if people watched it end to end, it would make sense as one continuous story. We’re definitely heading into the end game now.”

Watch this space for more updates on Game of Thrones season seven. Read our reviews of season six HERE.