You've never seen the original pilot for Game Of Thrones, and you likely never will. It's such a shameful Hollywood secret that there's a better chance of finding the Black Dahlia killer's confession taped to the inside of a reel of The Day The Clown Cried. Because it's bad. Really bad. So bad that for over a decade, not even the show's cast had been allowed to watch it, with showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss only screening it right before the GOT finale, in what we're assuming was a desperate bid to lower everyone's expectations.

While the reasons for the infamously awful episode have been the topic of gossip and hearsay for years, the truth was confirmed only after the series concluded, during a film festival panel featuring Benioff and Weiss, who were clearly so mentally checked out that their souls had already ordered an Uber Black back to the airport. Their new(ish, looking at you, Seasons 6-8) apathy, combined with the recent bean-spilling release of The Unofficial Guide To Game Of Thrones, freed them to paint an extra-candid image of the show's growing pains. The kind of candid that made hardcore fans of the books snap their keyboard keys rage-posting on social media.

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As legend has it, George R.R. Martin, who had until then been reticent to let his life's work be adapted, was only convinced after the duo correctly guessed who Jon Snow's real mother was -- proving that they were true scholars of his work and/or had spent upwards of 20 seconds on any A Song Of Ice And Fire message board. Maybe instead of asking whether they knew what was going to happen in the books, Martin should've asked whether they knew literally anything about making a TV show.

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During the panel, Benioff and Weiss were honest in admitting that when they got the job, they knew nothing, and noted their surprise when they got a $100 million show despite a total lack of credentials. They were so out of their depth that they basically treated it as the world's most expensive film school, costing roughly $5-$10 million per lesson. In the meantime, they decided to just fake it until they made it with a level of unearned confidence only possible for two upper-class white dudes.

But the duo quickly gave up on understanding the overarching plot, admitting later that from the beginning, they couldn't see the forest for the many trees it takes to print a single edition of one of Martin's novels. Instead they just started cherry-picking scenes that shared a theme of "power." (Ironic, since Benioff would later scoff that "Themes are for eighth-grade book reports.") In the end, a good eye for cool scenes didn't save the pilot from becoming, to quote Craig Mazin (award-winning creator of HBO's Chernobyl and Benioff's confidant and dear friend), "a complete piece of shit."

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The plot was impossible to follow, and the scope of the world felt tiny. They hadn't even made it clear that Cersei and Jaime Lannister were related in any way, let alone twins, turning what should've been one of the biggest dramatic reveals in TV history into a scene wherein Jaime pushes a small boy out of a tower seemingly because he'd taken a peep at his pants-slayer.