CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Shipping Out
Fewer episodes, but bigger and, hopefully, better—that was the strategy going into season seven. For the first time, Game of Thrones had to make only seven episodes instead of its usual ten. The reduced count came with behind-the-scenes benefits. Making fewer hours allowed Thrones to save money on some things (such as cast salaries, which are paid per episode) and spend more on others (such as visual effects). Season seven took roughly six months to film, the same as previous years, yet every element was labored on with more care. “What we normally spent in ten episodes we spent shooting seven,” as actor John Bradley put it.

In addition, the show’s storyline brought more main characters together for longer stretches than ever before, and many actors were getting an unprecedented amount of screen time. “Before, if you put all your scenes together, it wouldn’t amount to very much,” Kit Harington said. “Now everybody left was left with more to do.” And given that making Thrones can be grueling, much of the cast found themselves working harder and longer. “You would think fewer episodes meant less work,” Nikolaj Coster-Waldau said, “but it was actually more intense than before.”

DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): We imagined the penultimate season would ramp into the final season with less action and more conversations, and we told [producer Bernadette Caulfield] that. Then we started planning and realized all the conflicts that were about to occur.

DAN WEISS (showrunner): We handed Bernie the schedule, and she was like, “What the fuck, this isn’t going to be relaxing, this is going to kill everybody just like last year.”

In the season premiere, Daenerys returned home to Westeros and climbed the ancient stone steps to take the throne of her ancestors at Dragonstone. There she met a delegation from Winterfell led by Jon Snow, as the King in the North attempted to convince the invading Dragon Queen to focus on the impending threat from the Army of the Dead. Finally, fire and ice had come together, and there was a tremendous amount of pressure to get their long-awaited meeting just right—particularly since the characters were destined to become lovers by the end of the season.

EMILIA CLARKE (Daenerys Targaryen): Kit and I are very close. So acting opposite him in the beginning was very difficult because we just giggled our way through it. Our entire friendship had been not acting together. Both of us were going, “Ahhh, what are you doing on my set?!”

KIT HARINGTON (Jon Snow): We were both kind of freaking out. With a movie you meet the other actor for the first time and you develop that chemistry over that time. But if you’ve known somebody for seven years and shared this incredible journey in your own lives together and watched their character on-screen for seven years, it’s a unique experience to be in, and you know the world is watching.

DAVID BENIOFF: That scene wasn’t so much about instant chemistry, it’s about two monarchs coming together and the conflict between them. So it’s fun that there wasn’t chemistry. He’s annoying and she’s annoying, and somehow we’ve got to try and make peace.

EMILIA CLARKE: It felt like the Battle of the Stares.

KIT HARINGTON: You gotta take yourself out of the mind-set of the viewer. As far as Jon knows he’s just meeting this queen he’s heard about and trying to negotiate with her. He’s not meeting the Daenerys who the audience has been watching. That helps with the surprise of it. He walks into the room and doesn’t expect to see such a beautiful young woman of similar age to him. Any young man’s reaction is going to be, “Okay . . .” But he puts that aside because he has to.

BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): That was a seven-page dialogue scene where they just stay put and talk. I think people are so used to the excellence of our cast that they take that for granted. If you really pick apart the last two seasons, we were just as devoted to character and dialogue and human moments as we’d ever been.

LIAM CUNNINGHAM (Davos Seaworth): There’s a streak in Benioff that’s willful. He likes to stir the shit. When we first meet Daenerys, Benioff and [director Mark Mylod] wanted Davos to have a crush on Missandei. And I fought them. “I’m not fucking doing it.” It’s the only thing I ever stood up to them on. The woman is a goddess, but with Davos’s history with Lyanna Mormont and Shireen, you can’t have him getting the hots for a young woman. I’m not 100 percent sure David wasn’t just doing it to annoy me. “You’re not undoing my hard work engendering the sympathy of the audience to have him be a perv.”

Over a succession of scenes at Dragonstone, Daenerys and Jon warmed to each other, while Clarke and Harington found it easier to perform together as well.

EMILIA CLARKE: After we eased into it, Kit became the one person who I truly felt like I’d met my match with. As actors we spoke exactly the same language, as opposed to being like, How can I . . . ? Do you need me to . . . ? It became the easiest thing in the world. Working with Kit was like sliding on your favorite jacket.

KIT HARINGTON: I would ask, “What’s the sexual tension in this scene?” and she would be like, “Stop talking about sexual tension!”

EMILIA CLARKE: Then Jon decides to go off and fight the White Walkers, she’s like: “Why don’t I want you to go? Why don’t I want you to—don’t fall for him, don’t do it!” There was a battle going on in herself.

As Daenerys and Jon Snow were trying to resist each other, Grey Worm and Missandei were giving in to their passions and had their first love scene.

JACOB ANDERSON (Grey Worm): When I first auditioned, the role’s description said Grey Worm and Missandei were siblings. So [their romance] was definitely a surprise. I wondered if this was going to be another incestuous situation. I’m just glad they didn’t suddenly reveal they were related.

NATHALIE EMMANUEL (Missandei): You’re like, “Okay, I’m getting naked.” And that was really strange for Jacob and me, because we’d danced around that scenario and we’d become good mates and now we got to be naked around each other. It was fine and done really respectfully. But whether you’ve done it many times or none at all, it’s a big deal. You feel like you’re giving something quite vulnerable, and yes, it’s hard. It helped to feel vulnerable and exposed in that scene, so it was good to use that energy, and it made it better.

Before filming, Jacob Anderson asked Benioff and Weiss a question fans had long wondered: When Grey Worm was mutilated as part of his indoctrination into the Unsullied, which of his parts were removed, exactly?

JACOB ANDERSON: I’m not sure they really knew. I’m pretty sure they hadn’t decided when I asked. It seemed they were having a bit of debate about it while they were answering the question. Not that it matters in the end.

For whatever it’s worth, Anderson said their answer was: “He still has the pillar, not the stones.”

For a show that had become somewhat notorious for its graphic content, the Missandei–and–Grey Worm coupling was the most widely praised sex scene in the show.

NATHALIE EMMANUEL: It was kind of beautiful. These two have always hidden behind their duty. And there’s something unique about it because of Grey Worm’s situation. There’s a real sense of trust there. This is a really big deal for him, and Missandei knows that and doesn’t really care. She just loves him, and that intimacy they’ve shared comes to a head.

JACOB ANDERSON: There was something really lovely and sweet about those two characters finally saying things to each other that they hadn’t been empowered to say before. But the main reason I’m proud of it is it felt like something I haven’t ever seen on TV. They were two people of color and one of them is a man in a show where people are always talking about their dicks. He has a physical disability and is accepted by this person that he loves. Whether intentional or not, the scene felt like it said something about masculinity and how bodies are seen.

The scene was also a relief for Emmanuel and Anderson after spending so many filming days over the years standing rigidly at attention beside Daenerys while she held court.

JACOB ANDERSON: The stuff in audience halls was always intense because I had to stand really, really still through sometimes ten pages of dialogue. A lot of the time I was just trying to not move and not lose my mind through fourteen hours of standing still. I’d get a bit delirious.

As Missandei and Grey Worm consummated their relationship, Daenerys dispatched a fleet led by Theon, Yara, Ellaria, and the Sand Snakes to attack King’s Landing. Their ships were ambushed by Cersei’s forces during an intense sea battle the likes of which the show never could have pulled off during season two’s “Blackwater.” The frenzied sequence was also an opportunity to showcase the legendary Iron Islands pirate culture in action, as demonstrated by Euron Greyjoy (Pilou Asbæk).

Asbæk first joined the Thrones team as Theon and Yara’s mad uncle in season six (oddly enough, the Danish actor had once worked as Coster-Waldau’s nanny). His character didn’t make much of an initial impression, and the producers cut some of Euron’s early material. For a while, it seemed that Euron—like the Sand Snakes—was destined to become another latecomer struggling to stand out amid a sprawling cast of fan favorites. As the production prepared for season seven, Asbæk pushed to give his character a makeover.

PILOU ASBÆK (Euron Greyjoy): It’s weird to be a fan of something and then to be a part of it. I watched every second of the first five seasons. It’s like seeing a beautiful girl in class for five years and then one day you talk to her and end up kissing her and then all of a sudden you’re married and then you’re in an old relationship and you try to make it work as best you can.

When I did season six, I had some great lines at the [Iron Islands’ leader-selecting ceremony, the kingsmoot] that they took away. He was talking to Yara and had twenty more lines where he was being ruthless. He was doing a comedy show for the Iron Islands. Dan and David said, “This is too much.”

So I had an idea for season seven. I said, “What if we made him a bit more like a rock star, where you don’t know if he’s going to kill you or fuck you?” The costume designer was totally into that and made his outfit more rock star–ish.

And that’s how Euron Greyjoy went from looking like just another grumpy, scraggly ironborn brute to a darkly charming leather-and-guyliner-wearing buccaneer.

JEREMY PODESWA (director): Pilou had strong ideas about Euron being really dangerous but also having this kind of sexy-funny veneer. The script suggested that, but Pilou brought a lot more. It was a great example of how characters are never just one thing on the show.

MARK MYLOD (director): I was worried about losing Ramsay because he was such a great baddie, just like people were worried about losing Joffrey in season four. With Euron, we got a new great baddie, but in a totally different way. It was “big,” but it worked. Pilou managed to make it real, which is difficult to do.

PILOU ASBÆK: When I was talking to Cersei and Jaime in the throne room, I said, “So here I am with a thousand ships and two good hands.” Dan and David came up and said, “Take away ‘two good hands,’ it’s too much.” Because I had more confidence in season seven and felt like I belonged more, I went, “Guys, don’t take it. I know exactly how to be this. He’s gotta be charming, he’s gotta be arrogant, he’s gotta look Jaime right in the eye and say it with the biggest fucking smile—because he’s an idiot and a prick, and that’s what I like about the character.” They said, “Let’s try it out.” We did it, and then they said, “We’re so fucking happy you insisted on that.”

DAN WEISS: We really haven’t had somebody in the show who has a kind of rock-star swagger, who just doesn’t give a shit. Everyone else in this world cares very deeply, whether they’re awful, wonderful, or, like most of them, somewhere in between. To have somebody traipse onto the stage with the swagger and attitude that Euron had was a lot of fun because it lets air into the room. There aren’t many people who could do that convincingly.

Which brings us back to that sea battle. Just before Euron attacked Daenerys’s fleet, Theon watched as his sister, Yara, made out with Ellaria. It was a scene that underwent a couple of changes at the last minute.

GEMMA WHELAN (Yara Greyjoy): Originally in that scene it was meant to be Ellaria kissing Alfie—a different dynamic. Then it was changed to Theon, once again, watching.

INDIRA VARMA (Ellaria Sand): In the script, Yara invited Theon to join them, saying, “He might not have the tackle but I’m sure he can give pleasure.” They had to change it because there’s so many eunuchs in the series that they’ve already used that line on someone else! So there was a little rewrite.

GEMMA WHELAN: Indira and I are quite fearless. It wasn’t directed that we would kiss. It was just meant to be a suggestion. But it just seemed like something we should do. So we led it, very much so, and then it became much more sexual than we anticipated. But it just felt right. Who wouldn’t want to kiss Indira? I mean, come on! Yara looked at Theon as if to say, Well, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. And then things go tits-up, to use an appropriate expression.

The boat was violently jolted by Euron’s attack. But Whelan had previously injured her back during filming, so a stuntwoman briefly stepped in to play Yara for the impact shot.

INDIRA VARMA: So I had to start kissing this poor stunt double, and she was so terrified! It was quite funny, bless her. I don’t think she’d ever been put in that situation before. She’s used to falling over and being attacked and all the rest of it, but to be kissed by an actress was a bit beyond her.

Euron’s boat the Silence latched on to its target. Three of the ship’s defenders were whip-snapping Nymeria, spear-stabbing Obara, and dagger-throwing Tyene. It was the beginning of the Sand Snakes’ final appearances on the show, but Nymeria almost didn’t come back at all. After shooting Thrones season six, actress Jessica Henwick was snatched up by Marvel’s Iron Fist (an example of why Thrones producers were wary of adding more actors than they could afford to keep on a constant payroll). Marvel agreed to lend Henwick to Thrones for just two weeks of filming during her December holiday break. While her time on season seven was brief, and the sea battle was staged on the show’s mundane-looking parking lot ship set, Henwick said the experience was “the most insane set [she’d] ever been on.”

MARK MYLOD: You read it on the page and think, “Oh great, a water battle!” Then you have to shoot in a car park in Northern Ireland. There’s no book you can read on how to direct a sea battle; you can only watch other sea battles. So you try to find your way through it. Euron had such a messy viciousness to him that that seemed like a good way into the treatment of the fight—make it really nasty, the opposite of ordered and nice. We also took a little influence from the style of Mad Max: Fury Road.

GEMMA WHELAN: We rehearsed our fights in a tidy tent, very slowly, no costumes, and it was all very easy. Then you got on set and there was fire everywhere—real pyrotechnics going off and embers being fired on us. You’re wearing a heavy costume, everything’s wet and moving, and there were all these stuntmen. You didn’t have to do any acting because it was terrifying. You just had to remember your badass face.

JESSICA HENWICK (Nymeria Sand): It was a clusterfuck. It was more intense on set than on-screen. Normally there’s a lot of CGI [when filming action scenes] and you watch it on-screen and you see a massive, epic battle, but when you’re filming it’s all quite tame. The Thrones audience couldn’t feel the heat on their face from the pyrotechnics going off, or feel the wave machine trying to knock us off our feet, or the sweat dripping off our faces.

MARK MYLOD: It was slightly torturous. After every shot we needed to let the boat cool to a certain temperature. So it was, “Light the torches, go water, and go action!” You get thirty seconds of action, then you have to cut. Then you extinguish all the fire, take down the water, refill the water tanks, and let the boat cool down. Everything was so methodical, it was difficult to get momentum going. It took a lot of patience on very cold nights. But the Sand Snakes actors were brilliant at latching on to that physical work.

JESSICA HENWICK: Obara’s stunt double’s wig caught on fire—wigs are full of hairspray and highly flammable. At least three crew members fell through the floor because some of it was balsa wood so you could smash through it, but it wasn’t marked off, so occasionally you’d just hear this yelp as another crew member fell through.

PILOU ASBÆK: Whenever I would [hold back during the fighting], there was a guy who would come down and go, “Why the fuck you faking it? I got three hundred guys standing behind you giving three hundred percent and you’re standing in front of the camera fucking faking it!” So you couldn’t fake it. I was almost breaking ribs on those guys.

Euron viciously turned the Sand Snakes’ own weapons against them, spearing Obara and strangling Nymeria with her whip.

JESSICA HENWICK: There was an accident when Pilou almost freaking choked me out with my own whip. Then they were shoving me onto a forklift and hoisting me up there [for Nymeria’s death shot]. It was cold, windy, and I don’t do well with heights. They wanted to tie me there and put pressure around my neck. As soon as they put it on I was like, “Get it off, get it off, get it off!” Even just the slightest pressure around my neck was really awful.

For a few moments amid the fighting, Theon finally found his heroism. But faced with Euron holding Yara hostage, his “Reek” alter ego was once again triggered, and Theon jumped off the ship. It was arguably a wise decision, as Euron would have surely killed Theon, yet the move felt like it was inspired more by cowardice than strategy.

BRYAN COGMAN: Trauma runs deep. Even though Theon acquits himself in the battle, Reek resurfaces when he comes up against Euron. And a huge, expansive fight scene shrunk into one that’s very personal.

PILOU ASBÆK: Honestly? I don’t think Euron gave a shit. For Euron his main focus is power, and Theon doesn’t have any. Yara and Theon are nothing to him. They’re not a concern. I think he was just keeping Yara for fun.

The finished sequence was a uniquely frenetic set piece. Like just about every action scene on the show, the sea battle had its own style and told a character-driven story while still feeling like part of the Thrones world.

MARK MYLOD: I’m very proud of the sequence, and the special effects guys did an excellent job of making it not feel like a car park, giving the whole thing texture and making you feel like you’re really at sea.

Euron captured Ellaria and her daughter, Tyene, and took them back to King’s Landing. Then Cersei got revenge for her daughter Myrcella’s murder in one of the most devious ways possible: poisoning Tyene while forcing a chained and gagged Ellaria to watch, unable to comfort her dying daughter. Ellaria and Tyene’s desperate agony, combined with Cersei’s slightly conflicted gloating, made for a deeply disturbing sequence.

INDIRA VARMA: What I love about that scene is you’re reading it, and from one sentence to the next you don’t know what’s going to happen—how Cersei is going to treat her victim. I just thought the delivery of that information was so clever. Especially since the kiss [of death] comes before the information.

MARK MYLOD: The most obvious thing would be for Cersei to just bathe in her revenge. But there’s almost this self-loathing about her character—that she was giving in to this, and on some level hated herself, but was doing it anyway.

Lena always made that left-field choice. She always played the black notes on the keyboard and surprised you with her choices, they were so smart and almost counterintuitive. She never played her character like a baddie but a character trying to do the right thing from her point of view.

INDIRA VARMA: It was a lot of blood and snot and sweat and tears. Rosabell [Laurenti Sellers] and I had to be shackled. They very kindly put some felt inside the handcuffs so we didn’t get bruised and battered, though we ended up [bruised] anyway because your acting takes over. The shackles kept coming off, so they had to tighten them, and then we couldn’t get them off.

Ellaria hasn’t had quite the screen time, so people are inevitably more invested in Cersei. But obviously, nobody wants to see somebody’s child killed in front of them. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare, beyond worst nightmare. It was quite a challenge from an acting perspective to be interesting with no lines. It was fun trying to play anger, resentment, and impotence in that situation but still wanting to fight. At what point do you give up wanting to fight? It’s a parental instinct where you just want to keep fighting for your child.

Daenerys dispatched yet another fleet to the Lannister homestead of Casterly Rock to seize the Lannister fortress. But Jaime had already taken his forces and departed to attack Daenerys’s allies at the Tyrell seat of Highgarden. Jaime was using the same ploy Robb Stark used on him at the Battle of the Whispering Wood.

At Highgarden, Jaime personally executed Olenna by commanding the Queen of Thorns to drink poison. The unruffled Olenna still got the last word by revealing she had been the one who’d arranged Joffrey’s assassination. “Tell Cersei,” Olenna said in one of the show’s all-time best final lines. “I want her to know it was me.”

NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU (Jaime Lannister): Finally, Jaime got something right. He was this man who you’d heard so much about, but you’d never seen him do anything that worked. Here he succeeded in a clever outmaneuvering of Daenerys, and then he’s up against this powerhouse, Olenna Tyrell. She was like Cersei, just from our point of view she’s on the good side. She goes out with bite.

MARK MYLOD: Nikolaj walked into this scene with all the power in the world. He just decimated this army, he’s a god, a conquering hero, and yet this little old lady takes him apart him in fifteen seconds. She takes every bit of power from him even though she’s dead. That’s so Game of Thrones to me. And Nikolaj’s directness and not milking the moment—yet showing the underlying humanity that’s been growing in him—was so brilliant.

NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: Jaime Lannister finally kills a major character—and it’s a grandmother with poison! He was trying to be nice about it, but he’s still killing her. She’s an old lady, but has to go. She got the final word and it was devastating. She was never going to beg.

And Diana Rigg did an amazing job. It was fun to be there when we wrapped and the showrunners came out and said a few words. She had a huge impact on the show.

DAN WEISS: Olenna was probably the only character to win her own death scene.

MARK MYLOD: My one regret was there was some confusion over how we wanted that scene to end. I wanted to end by stealing a shot from The Godfather. So when Nikolaj leaves you can still see Lady Olenna through the cracked doorway as the camera pulls back. The door ended up being built in a different spot, which was a heartbreaker at the time.

Having looted some spoils of war from Highgarden, Jaime led a Lannister army wagon train back toward King’s Landing. But an enraged Daenerys was finished playing nice and ambushed the Lannister forces with her Dothraki bloodriders and dragons. Finally, we saw the nuclear potential of Daenerys’s full-grown children with a sequence that set an industry record for the number of stuntmen set on fire.

DAVID BENIOFF: Our stunt coordinator really wanted to get in the Guinness book of world records for that.

ROWLEY IRLAM (stunt coordinator): We had seventy-three fire burns, and that itself is a record. No film or TV show has ever done that in a whole show, let alone in one sequence. We also set twenty people on fire at one time, which was also a record. In Saving Private Ryan they had thirteen on a beach, and on Braveheart they had eighteen partial burns. Because of the nature of our attacking animals, we had the liberty to expand on that.

As you might expect, setting a person on fire and then watching them burn for a while is a rather tense business. Each stuntperson is covered with fire-resistant clothes, a cooling gel, and a mask, but the process is still dangerous. Once aflame, a stuntperson has to hold their breath until the shot is complete and all the flames are extinguished. Even a shot lasting just thirty seconds can feel like an eternity when you’re engulfed in flames, unable to see, and weighed down by heavy protective gear and a costume, all while running around waving your arms.

ROWLEY IRLAM: It’s totally different than going underwater in your bathtub and counting the seconds in your head. If somebody bumps you and you breathe in by accident, you will breathe in flame. The most dangerous thing is reignition. There’s a good minute of everybody staying down afterward as you’re still very flammable at this point.

Getting a unique performance out of each stuntperson is also difficult, because when a person is on fire, their focus is pretty strongly fixated on not dying. Back in season one, a scene at Castle Black required setting a stuntperson on fire when Jon Snow threw a lantern onto a wight, except the take originally didn’t go as planned.

DANIEL MINAHAN (director): We had to figure out what does a wight do when it burns, and wanted to avoid the zombie trope. The one thing I knew I didn’t want was for him to run around and wave his arms—because that’s what people always do when they’re in a burn. So we rehearsed with the stuntperson, “This is what you we want you to do.” We got everything ready with the mask and the chemical on him, and then we threw the fire on him. And what did he do? He ran around and waved his arms!

One victim of Daenerys’s dragons in the Loot Train attack may have been a character who wasn’t shown on camera during the sequence. Earlier in season seven, pop singer Ed Sheeran had a cameo as a singing Lannister soldier. Later, season eight would include a curiously specific throwaway line of dialogue describing the fate of a Lannister soldier named “Eddie,” “a ginger” who “came back with his face burnt right off”—“he’s got no eyelids now”—following the Loot Train dragon attack. The showrunners never revealed whether the dialogue referred to Sheeran’s character, who was the object of considerable discussion when the season aired.

JEREMY PODESWA: One thing that Game of Thrones never did was stunt casting. Everybody in the world wanted to be on Game of Thrones, and Dan and David never rose to that bait. With Ed Sheeran, it didn’t feel like a weird thing to anybody on the show because Maisie knew him, he’s in the UK, we needed somebody who could sing, it was a small part, and he had acted before. Then when he got there he was the loveliest, most grounded guy you could ever meet. It was really cold, and we were out in the wilderness all day long. He didn’t run back to his trailer. He sat down with all the extras playing the Lannister army and was happy to be there. And he did a lovely job. If he wasn’t Ed Sheeran, pop star, nobody would have ever batted an eye at the person playing that role.

Daenerys’s firebombing attack also sparked a debate between the showrunners, one they say is a typical example of their occasional disputes.

DAVID BENIOFF: There was a long argument over when the dragons fly over the Dothraki. Should their horses be afraid? And Dan is like, “You know they’ve been with her for a long while. . . .”

DAN WEISS: Why would they be afraid?

DAVID BENIOFF: Because they’re horses and they’re fucking dumb and dragons are big and scary. So we spent like an hour on that.

DAN WEISS: An hour discussing literally four seconds of film that probably will happen when most people are looking at their watch or checking their messages.

(The Dothraki horses, by the way, were fearless.)

Just four episodes into season seven, the Martell and Tyrell families had been wiped out and the Lannister forces had been attacked during an epic sequence that normally would have served as a season’s climactic battle. Behind the scenes there was some debate about the show’s quickening narrative urgency.

NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: I had been lulled into a different pace. Everything was happening quicker than I was used to. Storylines met and clashed, and it was very surprising—“Already? Now? What?!” A lot of things that normally took a season took one episode.

KIT HARINGTON: Thrones had been a plodding, slow machine, and it was turning into a classic drama, like a thriller. I was worried about that, if I’m honest. “Will changing what Thrones is work?” Because it was so different than what everybody is used to.

DAVID BENIOFF: For a long time we’d been talking about “the wars to come.” Well, the war was pretty much there. So it was really about trying to find a way to make the storytelling work without feeling like we’re rushing it and give characters their due.

DAN WEISS: It’s urgency from within the story that drove the pace rather than any external decision. It wasn’t “Let’s make things move faster.” Things were moving faster because in the world of these characters the war that they’d been waiting for was upon them, the conflicts that have been building the previous six years were upon them, and those facts gave them a sense of urgency that made them move faster.

BRYAN COGMAN: We made a choice to “just get on with it” that season. You can sit at home and do the math for how long it took boats to get from point A and point B and whatever that was, yeah, that’s what it was. There was always something everybody had got to graft on to, and I guess that outrage was better than others.

The epicenter of the pacing debate was “Beyond the Wall,” the visually spectacular sixth episode of the seventh season, following Jon Snow as he led an expedition with Tormund, Beric (Richard Dormer), Gendry, the Hound, Jorah, and Thoros (Paul Kaye) to capture a wight in order to obtain proof of the Army of the Dead’s existence.

On the set in 2016, Alan Taylor directed the bulk of the sequence in a Northern Ireland quarry that had been dressed to match a real-life location in Iceland. The set’s “frozen lake” looked unnervingly real; when you stepped on the “ice” you expected your foot to slide right out from under you.

The actors trudged across the set against paper “snow” getting blasted into their faces from a trio of giant fans. It might not have been Iceland, but the set was still freezing. “You can tell when people are really cold; they get this look,” said co-producer Dave Hill, noting the ruddy, braced expression on the faces of the cast.

Between takes, the actors coughed up paper, rubbed their eyes, and made jokes about getting “white lung” from the fake snow. Harington attempted to crack up Joe Dempsie before one shot as they prepared to look deadly serious on camera. “I’m gonna tickle your balls later,” Harington intoned gravely. “I’m going to reach under and give them a little tap.”

The group then came under attack by an undead polar bear, a creature the showrunners had wanted to wedge somewhere into their tale since season four. Taylor had the actors circle up for a cinematic Magnificent Seven shot where the reluctant band of brothers began to work together for the first time. “It should feel like a shark attack on dry land,” Taylor said. The director infused the scene with a sense of dread that the bear could strike from any direction (though on set, the creature was simply a stuntman pulling a green sled).

The trip beyond the Wall was a solution to a puzzling creative problem: How do you get the Night King and his Army of the Dead south of a seven-hundred-foot ice wall that was constructed eight thousand years ago specifically to keep them out?

DAN WEISS: We were talking about breaching the Wall and trying to figure out what pieces we already had on the board without introducing new deus ex machina pieces. What was in the world already that could conceivably knock down the Wall? Just getting the Night King past the Wall didn’t do it; just getting the White Walkers past didn’t do it. You needed to get an army of a hundred thousand dead men past the Wall, which means a giant hole. We were racking our brains as to what could do that. Then we realized there would be something massive in the show—they weren’t massive at the time we thought of this—and that was the dragons. But getting a dragon north of the Wall was tricky.

There were other benefits to the plan as well. If the Night King captured a dragon, it would boost his formidability and make the seemingly unstoppable Daenerys more vulnerable going into the final season.

So when Jon Snow’s group got trapped by the Army of the Dead on the frozen lake, Gendry ran to get help from Daenerys back at Eastwatch, who then flew her dragons to the rescue. While the Mother of Dragons saved Jon Snow along with most of his men, Viserion was killed by the Night King, who transformed the beast into a creature who would serve the forces of death.

The action was rivetingly shot yet nonetheless drew complaints over the practicalities of the rescue and how fast Daenerys arrived on the scene.

DAVE HILL (co-producer): You obviously don’t want any criticism of any kind. But with all the things we were balancing to set things up for season eight, sometimes we had to speed things up within episodes. We had a lot of time cuts that the vast majority watching didn’t catch. Sometimes when moving pieces around, you’re going to cheat a little bit.

ALAN TAYLOR (director): I thought we were covered by the fact that in the North it’s this eternal twilight up there. It was never clear on how much time was passing up there. So I thought we had wiggle room for saying what the timeline was. That turned out to not be the case for most of the audience, who had a very clear idea of what they thought the timeline was and that we weren’t sticking to it.

So my first response was to be glib and say, “Um, you know, we have a show where giant lizards the size of 747s are flying around and you’re concerned about the airspeed velocity of a raven.” I thought I was pointing out the absurdity. On the other hand, it’s absolutely true that people love the show because they think they can depend on us to be accurate about the airspeed of a raven. It’s the underlying realism that is critical to the suspension of disbelief in the big thing. I learned a lesson about that. That was chastening.

KIT HARINGTON: There were natural problems. I could see them going north of the Wall to get proof, because having that proof was important and there’s only one way to get it. And a fantasy is a fantasy at the end of the day, and there are things that have to happen which are not in a real world. But we drew people into the fact that it’s a very real fantasy in earlier seasons. You do trick an audience a bit if you say, “The dragon flew this far back. . . .” Some of the timings of things, some of the speed at which people met, it was difficult. But it was also necessary to get us to the end point.

The surviving heroes sailed back to the Seven Kingdoms. During the voyage, Jon Snow knocked on Daenerys Targaryen’s cabin door and they wordlessly acknowledged their undeniable mutual attraction. In the passageway, Tyrion could hear what was going on in the cabin and looked rather grave. The scene was intercut with Samwell at the Citadel discovering evidence that revealed Jon’s parents were Ned Stark’s sister, Lyanna Stark, and Daenerys’s older brother Rhaegar Targaryen. The show’s biggest mystery, the one Martin had quizzed Benioff and Weiss about over lunch all those years ago, was finally solved. Jon Snow was Daenerys’s nephew and the true heir to the Iron Throne.

PETER DINKLAGE (Tyrion Lannister): “Keep it down over there, I’m trying to get some sleep!” No, ah, it was complicated. Like a lot of things with Tyrion, it was professional and personal. Obviously he had feelings for Daenerys. He loved her, or thought he did. She was awe-inspiring. He was questioning that because he didn’t have a good track record falling in love. There was jealousy wrapped up in there. And he loved Jon Snow too; they’re the two he had the most in common with, in a way—outsiders in their own families who refused to follow the path their family had taken. He was wondering how smart of a move [their coupling was], because passion and politics don’t mix well, and he knew the two getting together could be very dangerous.

JEREMY PODESWA: That was an interesting scene because Kit and Emilia are really good friends and they’re having to do something friends don’t normally do. But they’re also actors and know they had to do it. For them it was goofy fun. But at the same time they were very aware of not wanting to cross a boundary with each other or make the other uncomfortable. So they asked me to be really specific about how we were going to shoot it. “How are we going to do this, exactly? What’s going to be shown, exactly?”

Also, from a storytelling point of view, that Dany and Jon are making love is a huge thing. So I felt very strongly they need to stop in the middle of it and have a moment where they’re just looking at each other. It’s a moment of, “Should we be doing this? Is this a terrible idea? Is this a good idea?” And then decide, “This force is greater than us and we can’t not do it.” And that gave the scene an extra loaded quality. That there was something going on that had a sense of epic fatality or inevitability about it. We didn’t know yet what it was, but we knew there was a force bigger than both of them, and they couldn’t stop it.