According to Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the next two seasons of Game of Thrones may be radically shorter than previous seasons.
“I think we’re down to our final 13 episodes after this season. We’re heading into the final lap,” Benioff told Variety. “That’s the guess, though nothing is yet set in stone, but that’s what we’re looking at.”
Their current thinking for the remainder of the show is a seven-episode Season 7 and a six-episode Season 8.
This will probably come as a shock to Game of Thrones fans used to the show’s seemingly infinite capacity for narrative expansion. There’s a lot to wrap up in 23 episodes, including the fates of multiple factions.
The shortened schedule is particularly astonishing in light of the two burgeoning threats that have yet to begin their invasion of Westeros: the White Walkers from the North and Daenerys and her dragons from the East.
This truncated timeline for the remainder of the series is also our best evidence yet that the narrative arc of Game of Thrones will end up radically truncating George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire book series, which still has two monumental books to go before wrapping up its version of the narrative: The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring.
So this means that Tyrion and Daenerys will fly dragons over Westeros at the end of this season, right?
