The Iron Throne may be no more, but other artifacts will endure forever. A water bottle appears to have joined the Coffee Cup of Ill Repute in the annals of Game of Thrones bloopers, peeking out from behind Samwell Tarly’s left leg as he attempted to invent representational democracy in Sunday’s series finale. (If you want to look for yourself, it’s around the 46 minutes in.) Archmaester Ebros is painting it into the Song of Ice and Fire as we speak!
Twitter user @bethisloco first pointed out the water bottle hiding out in “The Iron Throne,†and her name will also reverberate in the hall of heroes.
It makes sense that Sam was parched. Dude came up with voting; that takes it out of you. But why do we care when these pieces of the real world invade our fantasy spaces? There is something funny about a disposable water bottle in Westeros. Maybe it’s not as out of place as a coffee cup, but you have to assume the water quality in scorched-earth King’s Landing can’t be great. The Great Fire of London destroyed much of the city’s plumbing, and something even worse probably happens when dragons are involved, so you can’t really blame Sam for bringing his own water to the dragonpit.
Anyway, don’t let this make you forget about the show’s most iconic gaffe of all time: The coffee cup that appeared next to Dany in the final season’s fourth episode. HBO would go on to remove it from future airings, also noting (in pretty good humor) that “the latte that appeared in the episode was a mistake. Daenerys had ordered an herbal tea.â€