The first episode of the final season of GAME OF THRONES has come and gone, and there only remains five (!!) episodes left in the whole season. During any normal season, we have to get through several more episodes to get to this point, but this is the end, and there’s a lot of ground to cover and even less time to do it, so the show has to get on the road. The get that point across, the trailer for the second episode of the season is here to tease the impending Battle of Winterfell, which finds Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) coming face to face with Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), whose father he killed years and years ago. If the impending battle wasn’t enough to stress everyone out, talk about an awkward dinner conversation.
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We got the runtime breakdowns of all the episodes in the final season, and this first and second are the shortest at just under an hour – which comes before each episode starts pushing well over an hour. Given the immense size and scope of the battle against the Army of the Dead, which is teased to have the longest continuous battle sequence ever filmed, we can expect this next episode will be all preparation for the fight. That means getting character affairs in order, readying the troops, and perhaps setting the stage for the aftermath in episode four.
Truly, this episode looks to be all set up with a bit of action placed in. We have that Lannister-Targaryen stuff at the beginning, but then it’s all characters prepping for battle, like Arya (Maisie Williams) testing out more of her skills, catapults letting loose and all sorts of general mayhem. Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) looks out from the battlements into the cold open land, and as we saw in a previous trailer, could be followed up with that moment of the undead horse’s hoof stomping into the frame – which would be a nice place to kick off the credits.
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This first episode was a great way to kick things off, getting most of the characters under one roof and setting the table for some character conflicts. It seems like much of the first half of this final season will be them setting up the characters to take on the undead horde, but then there are three more episodes to deal with the fallout, and that’s where these character interactions are really going to come into play.
The second episode of the final season of GAME OF THRONES arrives April 21.