In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Emilia Clarke admitted that she suspects HBO is shooting multiple endings to medieval fantasy hit Game of Thrones, and deliberately keeping cast and crew in the dark to prevent spoilers from leaking online (again).
"There's lots of different endings that could happen. I think we're doing all of them and we aren't being told which is actually what's going to happen … I think that they don't even trust us."
It’s a sound strategy, considering that massive plot twists, and even entire scripts, have been leaked from Game of Thrones many times before. And for a show that relies so heavily on dramatic deaths and resurrections, the element of surprise is integral to success. Although, it seems like there were actually less spoilers in the days when book readers knew every single detail that was going to happen, years in advance.
But those days are long gone, seeing as the show sped past the books a few seasons ago. And given the fact that The Winds of Winter has been delayed, yet again, the finale to HBO’s adaptation might be the only ending fans of the books ever get. George R.R. Martin is busy releasing compendiums of his unfinished story, and hinting that he might even expand the lengthy series beyond 7 books, just to add to the weight of his Herculean task.
If you want to be cynical (and I am), then it isn’t just possible, but extremely likely, that the television series is going to be the only ending to the story, meaning that an eternal online debate about the “true ending” is practically inevitable. We’re going to be hearing about this for years.
And with an epic, multi-threaded, globe-spanning story like Game of Thrones, whatever conclusion the writers come to is guaranteed to be the “wrong” one, for some people. Like Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, the story has had so many poignant “endings” already, that a finale that doesn’t depict total global apocalypse might leave the audience feeling somewhat unsatisfied.
There has to be a mammoth change of some sort, an end to the cycle of violent uprising and cruel tyranny, the breaking of the wheel that Daenerys often refers to, in order to feel like the story is truly over.
Though the show has kind of hinted that Daenerys, with her penchant for burning people alive, is going to fall over to the dark side and become yet another bad ruler, I’m hoping that she and Jon Snow establish democracy in Westeros; such a devastating narrative deserves a hopeful ending.
But no matter how HBO ends the story, many of us will always wonder how George R.R. Martin would have done it. And hell, even if he does manage to write an ending to A Song of Ice and Fire, perhaps a couple of decades from now, it will never be entirely clear if the man was influenced by the television show, even subconsciously.
But hey, if Emilia Clarke is correct, we might get multiple endings to choose from; if HBO includes the alternate endings in the behind-the-scenes features, then the finale will be, in a sense, “customizable.”
Like those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, that might be the only way to keep us all rabid fanboys happy. Star Wars should probably look into it.
