At a public meeting in Sevilla, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss said that, five seasons into Game Of Thrones, they would finally be adding the third of the narrative devices they’d wanted to avoid after prophecies and dreams: flashbacks.

Most of the news on the interview reports their answers in Spanish–here’s Los Siete Reinos in their native tongue, and the Google translation. We’ve yet to find a site that reported what D+D said in English directly, so some of the subtler questions and answers are difficult to parse, but “Así que sí, esta temporada por fin habrá flashbacks” translates fairly directly.

In other news from the meeting, Benioff and Weiss described the bridge in Cordoba as a model for the Long Bridge of Volantis, as opposed to a shooting location in and of itself. Other Spanish newspapers, meanwhile, reported primarily on Benioff and Weiss’ coy, mildly evasive but also somewhat positive responses about whether they’d film in Spain for Season 6.

Flashbacks are the big news, though. This is a massive structural change for Game Of Thrones. From the beginning, the show has preferred to rely on error-prone human memory and cognitive bias to frame the past. King Robert is utterly convinced that his rebellion for Lyanna was justified, and the Targaryens pure evil; Thoros of Myr describes himself as a terrible priest, given the blessing of resurrection as an accident. Flashbacks, on the other hand, have to be explicitly depicted as subjective or else they’re treated as true depictions of the past. Game Of Thrones hasn’t just ignored that in the past, it’s deliberately shoved it away.

But what might those flashbacks be? Some more pics and a bit of speculation below the jump….



This is the Susana Diaz, the President of Andalusia and James Costos, the U.S. Ambassador to Spain meeting with Benioff and Weiss.

In terms of speculation….

Two possibilities spring immediately to mind. First, Brandon Stark is still appearing in Season 5, but he’s doing so without his companions Hodor and probably Meera. Many have speculated that this means he’ll be learning how to use his magic, and doing so detached from his body’s specific place and potentially time as well.

The other choice, and certainly not mutually exclusive, is that we’ll be seeing flashbacks from Cersei about life as a young Lannister. There’s been a bit of evidence to support this: the casting call for Maggy the Frog, a flashback character in the novels, and Charles Dance’s hints that Tywin Lannister wasn’t done on Game Of Thrones.

Both of these seem plausible, but I’m not sure they’re necessary–the show has done quite well with actor monologues beforehand. We’ll have to see how it turns out….