Information about the final season (okay, second half of the final season, whatever) of Game of Thrones is better protected than most of America’s own state secrets, but as that season approaches sometime in the first half of next year, the first few details have started to spill out like White Walkers creeping past the Wall. EW has a big cover-story report from the show’s set, which manages to hint at a lot, but confirm little, other than “Season 8 opens at Winterfell with an episode that contains plenty of callbacks to the show’s pilot.†There, instead of King Robert and his coterie arriving, it’s Daenerys and hers, leading to a “thrilling and tense intermingling of characters†(whatever that means!) as everyone prepares to face the invasion of the army of the dead. One other tidbit that you might have guessed would be a sticking point: “Sansa isn’t thrilled that Jon bent the knee to his fancy new Targaryen girlfriend, at least not at first.†Someone bring on whatever Westeros’s equivalent of Jerry Springer is to help everyone sort this out.
In addition to those early season details, EW also promises that “the drama builds to a confrontation with the Army of the Dead that’s expected to be the most sustained action sequence ever made for television or film,†including one episode of “wall-to-wall action†directed by Miguel Sapochnik. “It’s brutal,†Peter Dinklage said. “It makes the Battle of the Bastards look like a theme park.†You gotta spend that giant budget somehow!