Now the patchy penultimate season is no more, here’s what must come next in HBO’s paean to incest, violence and dragons – and how the final series can bow out on an agonisingly brilliant high

Warning: this article contains spoilers for season seven of Game of Thrones. Do not read on unless you have watched

The blood’s drying, the dust from the Wall’s collapse has settled, and Jon and Dany are sleeping it off in short-lived but blissful ignorance. Yes, season seven of Game of Thrones is done. So now, as we face the end of HBO’s paean to incest, violence and creative profanity, it’s time to turn our attention to what comes next.

The bad news is that we’ve got a fair wait ahead of us. Due to the increasingly vast nature of the production and its profligate deployment of fire-breathing CGI dragonry, the final season may not see the light of day until 2019. Still, as it approaches the finish line, the main hope is that the eighth run can avoid the panoply of errors made by the downright patchy seventh.

While ultimately a success – this week’s finale was superb, like the imperial, beard-stroking Thrones of old – few could argue that all criticism of the season was unfair. It was, at various points, weirdly tame, utterly daft and sometimes even total nonsense. More than anything, though, it felt rushed. Season eight had looked destined to suffer the same fate, trimming itself down to just six chunks. But the remaining episodes are each likely to be feature-length 80-minute mini-movies in their own right, which is fortunate because there’s still plenty of knotty plot to get through.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Here be dragons … Peter Dinklage as Tyrion and Emilia Clarke as Daenerys. Photograph: HBO

Now the Wall has been breached, we’re finally going to see the long-mooted war between the living and the dead. Encouragingly, the one area in which later series of Thrones improved is in the impossibly humongous battle scenes. With the army of the dead shuffling southward and the dragon-riding Night King able to resurrect any of the millions of corpses left littering Westeros after years of inter-house squabbling, it’s safe to assume the show will raise the bar for television spectacle once again. How to top the Battle of the Bastards or the dragon attack in this season’s the Spoils of War is the showmakers’ problem to solve. All we have is the pleasant duty to wait and see what they come up with.

In theory there is still plenty of time to allow the story to breathe. Because that is the one area where season seven really fluffed it. Things happened at such a lick that logic and character motivation were abandoned to lead events mechanically into the next battle. David Benioff and DB Weiss would do well to remember that it’s not the war-to-end-all-wars audiences are looking forward to; what we’re waiting for is the Hound’s revenge on the Mountain. For Jaime to betray Cersei. For Theon to die heroically. For the inevitable rift between Dany and Jon when she finds out that the nephew she just slept with is the rightful heir to her throne.

Season eight needs to remember that the best scenes of season seven came in the feature-length finale, and they were tiny, intricate, dramatic affairs: the terse exchange between Cersei and Tyrion; Theon rediscovering his courage; a blindsided Littlefinger’s eventual undoing. It’s moments like these that make the show. Battles, zombie dragons and explosive dismemberments are just the window dressing.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The ‘valonqar’ prophecy … will Jaime or Tyrion kill off Cersei? Photograph: HBO/2017 Home Box Office, Inc. All

What will happen is pure speculation at this point, but certain prophecies exist that give us a fair idea. In a flashback in season five, a young Cersei visited a sooth-saying witch who told her she’d marry a king, that the king would have 20 children while Cersei would have three, and that hers would die. All of that came true, which suggests the witch’s further prophecy that Cersei would have her crown taken by a younger, more beautiful queen is worthy of note. The witch also said Cersei would die at the hands of a “valonqar”, or “little brother”, which could either mean Jaime or Tyrion. But with an enemies tally longer than a list of Robert Baratheon’s love-children, almost anyone could kill Cersei. So, a war, with Jon and Dany pretending that awkward “thing” never happened and Jon honouring his bending of the knee to Dany and renouncing his claim. Cersei loses and Dany is crowned. Job done.

Doesn’t that feel a bit obvious, though? Too conventional? The whole point of Westeros has always been that good doesn’t prevail. More than anything, the final season needs to subvert expectations in a way the seventh didn’t, giving us the bittersweet ending George RR Martin has always promised. Good people need to die, the more pointlessly and painfully the better. Tragedy needs to ensue. Baddies need to win sometimes. Imagine the furore if Cersei, with the help of her mercenary army, won the battle of the dead, killed everyone, claimed the Iron Throne and Euron’s hand in marriage, and the series ended on a Sopranos-esque note of things just carrying on. That would be awful. Which would make it agonisingly brilliant.

If the final season can take the best elements of every season up to now, everything will be just fine. But it might be tempting for the producers to give audiences a neat, happy ending where Brienne and the Hound ride off into the sunset bickering adorably and Jon and Dany make dozens of mini Targaryens in marital bliss. But that wouldn’t be the Thrones we fell in love with.

Game of Thrones season eight: please, you have to punish us. Honestly, it’s what we want.