Attention, all ye Realm-dwellers who prefer to remain ignorant: this Game of Thrones post contains major potential spoilers about season seven of the series supported by details from the books.
Well this sounds absolutely bonkers in the best way.
We already knew this was going to be a major season for the Mother of Dragons, Dany Targaryen. After years away from her ancestral home in Westeros, the would-be-queen of the Seven Kingdoms has moved away from eradicating slavery (to varying degrees of success) across the Narrow Sea and moved back home. But in a new interview with Time, it seems as though she’ll be moving farther North—and with a bigger bang—than even we thought possible.
Basically: we’re 99.999% certain Dany and her dragons are going to save Jon Snow’s ass in the battle against the White Walkers.
How did we reach such a conclusion? Context clues! Though Time‘s reporter was strictly prohibited from discussing the players involved in a major battle scene he witnessed, there’s enough detail for an obsessive Thrones observer such as myself to make some deductions.
The whole piece is structured around actress Emilia Clarke’s shooting of one particular episode in Belfast, riding atop the mechanical bull that will later be CGI’d into her beloved Drogon. Now, it’s important to note the location because Belfast is largely the home of all the action in the North and not where Clarke’s typically taken up residence when filming the Targaryen storyline. At one point during the story, it is remarked that the director is Alan Taylor.
Taylor is only directing one episode of Thrones this season, the penultimate—traditionally the season’s biggest, most epic, battle-heavy episode where all the action takes place. So it stands to reason that Taylor—who’s also directed season one episodes “Baelor” and “Fire and Blood” and a TON of season two episodes, including “The North Remembers,” “The Night Lands,” “The Prince of Winterfell,” and “Valar Morghulis”—is helming a fairly climactic episode.
Particularly when you consider how long the shoot is taking them. At one point, Taylor remarks that for “thirty seconds of screen time” that Clarke has “been here for 16 days.” But more interesting than that is what he says later on, that Clarke was sitting atop her dragon, “getting blasted with water and fake snow and whatever else they decide to chuck at her through the fans.”
If you’re like us, you probably did a double take at the phrase “fake snow,” right? Because up until this point, Dany has never been anywhere NEAR winter. Which leads one to conclude that Dany is heading North to fight in an epic battle.
…An epic battle to which Time‘s writer may or may not have been privy to more details that lead us to believe Dany shows up in the North to battle the White Walkers.
Take this passage (bolded emphasis ours):
Wandering around the Belfast set, the scope and the orderliness of the enterprise is staggering. The wights, zombie-like creatures with spookily pale faces and dressed in ragged furs, form a tidy line as they wait to grab breakfast burritos. …
One of those big events this season is a battle whose sheer scope, even before being cut together with the show’s typical brio, dazzled me. In order to get on set, I agreed not to divulge the players or what’s at stake. (Thrones has been promising this clash all along, and when the time comes, the Internet will melt.) It will be all the more impressive knowing that the cast and crew were shot through with a frigid North Atlantic wind that whipped everyone during filming and sent them all flying to the coffee cart during resets. (The cold, a prosthetic artist tells me, is at least good for keeping the makeup on.)
It even goes on later to add:
The setting is as grand as the action. The battle was filmed in what was once a Belfast quarry, drained, flattened out with 11,000 square meters of concrete and painted over with a camouflage effect—all of which took six months and required special ecological surveys. This kind of mountain moving, or leveling, is par for the course for Thrones.
Considering the size and scope of the production and the players involved, there is one logical conclusion. That scene with Jon Snow in the White Walker fighting pit? It’s 100% going to end with the sky being lit up by Dany and her dragons riding North of The Wall to protect Jon Snow and defeat the Walkers and their wights. It’s the only way and we are, frankly, 1,000,000% here for it. (And it brings us EVEN CLOSER to a possible White Walker dragon of which I am desperately in need.)
What do you think though? Let us know in the comments below!
Images + GIFs: HBO
Alicia Lutes is the Managing Editor of Nerdist, creator and co-host of Fangirling, and the resident Game of Thrones expert here. Find her on Twitter (if you’re into that sort of thing)!
