Game On

New Game of Thrones Season 7 Report Seems to Confirm Two Massive Bombshells

This year promises to deliver a few things we’ve all been waiting for.
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Courtesy of HBO

Anyone who follows Game of Thrones closely knows that it’s a safely guarded show that rarely lets journalists on set. With the exception of an annual Entertainment Weekly cover story, TV news writers are often left in the dark when it comes to the second-most-popular show in the world. But as Thrones begins its slow-and-steady climb towards its eighth and final season, HBO is easing back the curtain—and Time’s Daniel D’Addario has just published a lengthy report from the Season 7 set in Belfast.

D’Addario describes creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as increasingly “possessive” of a story they now consider theirs rather than George R.R. Martin’s, so it’s no surprise that most teases of what’s to come are communicated discreetly here. Still, the Time article does drop a few tantalizing hints if you know where to look, hints that seem to promise a couple of long-anticipated events in the Thrones universe. I’m not sure it’s accurate to consider the following “spoilers,” but I’ll throw up a warning just in case you’re hoping to head into Season 7 completely pure. As Benioff put it when talking about spoiler culture in Entertainment Weekly, “some of this is on people who watch the show [to avoid posted spoilers].” So with that in mind, here is your warning.

The first revelation D’Addario casually drops in the Time cover story is the mention of a wolf pack joining the fray this year. “During my visit,” he writes, “wolves described in the script as ‘skinny and mangy’ showed up to the shoot looking fluffy and lustrous.” Wolves haven’t appeared on Thrones in pack formation, well, ever. And with the Stark direwolves dropping like flies (R.I.P. Summer, Grey Wind, Shaggydog, and Lady), there really only seems to be one option for these particular “mangy” mammalian guest stars. In the books, this pack belongs to Nymeria, the direwolf Arya sent away in Season 1.

Throughout Martin’s novels, news of the pack’s Nymeria-led attacks (usually perpetrated against Stark enemies) circulate via rumor or the occasional Arya dream. In the show, Nymeria was driven off (for her own protection), never to be heard from again. But readers (and perhaps show-watchers, if they remember Season 1) have always anticipated that one day Arya would reunite with her direwolf and see Nymeria’s pack in all its (apparently mangy) glory. Though the direwolves have been somewhat sidelined or killed off prematurely in the HBO adaptation, their supernatural link with the Stark kids is massively important in the novels. Arya’s reconnection with Nymeria would signal a significant return to her familial roots, which was teased in her dramatic exit from the House of Black and White in Season 6. Some dialogue from the Season 7 trailer—“the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives”—also hints that this potential reunion will carry weightier thematic significance for the upcoming Stark plot.

And as Weiss and Benioff themselves told Entertainment Weekly, the Season 7 elements (other than battles) viewers can most depend on are a “whole bunch of reunions” (like the one, potentially, between Arya and Nymeria) and “first time meetings that people have been waiting for for a long time.” And here is where the Time article gets very interesting. D’Addario writes:

One of those big events this season is a battle whose sheer scope,

even before being cut together with the show’s typical brio, dazzled

me . . . (Thrones has been promising this clash all along, and

when the time comes, the Internet will melt.) It will be all the more

impressive knowing that the cast and crew were shot through with a

frigid North Atlantic wind that whipped everyone during filming and

sent them all flying to the coffee cart during resets. (The cold, a

prosthetic artist tells me, is at least good for keeping the makeup

on.)

O.K., a mysterious battle fought up north. We already knew that much from the latest Season 7 trailer, anyway.

D’Addario explains, “While I’m in Belfast, my plan to watch Jon Snow in action is canceled because of inclement weather (that same wind) that makes filming from a drone hazardous.” That, also, isn’t too much of a surprise given the footage we’ve seen and Jon’s fondness for fighting in snowy locations.

But immediately after that line, D’Addario writes: “At this point, [producer Bernadette] Caulfield will grab onto any small comfort. ‘Now the dragon doesn’t get any bigger,’ she says, ‘so we know that much.‘” We could write that off as an unrelated observation, completely independent of the fight up north—were it not for the fact that the rest of D’Addario’s article is peppered with observations about watching Emilia Clarke film on the back of her dragon rig. “Thirty seconds of screen time, and she’s been here for 16 days,” director Alan Taylor observes in the article. “It probably feels a bit less amazing to Emilia [Clarke], who sits on it for eight hours a day, six weeks in a row, getting blasted with water and fake snow and whatever else they decide to chuck at her through the fans.”

Now this is something new. Emilia Clarke has been on the back of that dragon a number of times in the series, but never once in icy conditions. And if Time was on set to observe one episode (or one battle from one episode), then should we conclude that this fight will include both Jon Snow and a dragon-riding Daenerys Targaryen? Is this our first official hint of a meeting of ice and fire?

Maybe so, and maybe not. Tune in to Game of Thrones Season 7 on July 16 to find out.