Season 7 will be the penultimate season of the show, and Benioff and Weiss have clear plans in mind for the show’s endgame. “We’ve been talking about the ending, from the beginning,” said Benioff.
"It’s a strange phenomenon, we’re in this territory where you are walking on your own and can’t rely on the written material anymore. As we get close to the ending, we’ve been talking about that for so long, things come into better focus. Once we get to the final end game, we’ve got very specific ideas that have grown organically over the past six plus years about where everything will end up."
Speaking of not being able to rely on written material anymore, Weiss fingers the stuff on the Iron Islands and Hodor’s death as things that have appeared or will appear in the book, but implies that much of the rest of what happened in Season 6 was invented, or greatly augmented, for the show. “At this point, after so many years writing for these characters and spending time in George’s world, we had to be able to walk on our own feet,” he said.
"A lot of people go in and have to create their own characters and they do fine with it. At a certain point, if we weren’t able to do it, then shame on us. George gave us an incredible gift with probably more fantastically drawn characters than I’ve seen in pretty much any book ever. If we weren’t able to do that, we weren’t the right people to be running the show here."
He doesn’t mention the stuff at Riverrun, which also stuck pretty closely to the books, so it’s hard to be sure what, if anything, from Season 6 will eventually show up in George R.R. Martin’s novels.
Going back to what’s coming in Seasons 7 and 8, the Night King will surely play a part. Weiss talked about how the Night King represents something new for the show.
"I don’t think of the Night King as a villain as much as, Death. He is not like Joffrey, or Ramsey. He’s not really human anymore. To me, evil comes when you have a choice between that and good, and you choose the wrong way. The Night King doesn’t have a choice; he was created that way, and that’s what he is. In some ways, he’s just death, coming for everyone in the story, coming for all of us. In some ways, it’s appropriate he doesn’t speak. What’s death going to say? Anything would diminish him. He’s just a force of destruction. I don’t think we’ve ever been tempted to write dialogue for the Night King. Anything he said would be anticlimactic.” Benioff doesn’t give much away about what the Night King will be doing, but emphasizes that they’ve established the Wall has spells woven into its foundations."
Finally, Benioff talked a bit more about the plan for the end of the show.
"It’s two more seasons we’re talking about. From pretty close to the beginning, we talked about doing this in 70-75 hours, and that’s what we’ll end up with. Call it 73 for now. What Dan says is really true, but it’s not just trying not to outstay your welcome. We’re trying to tell one cohesive story with a beginning, middle and end. As Dan said, we’ve known the end for quite some time and we’re hurtling towards it. Those last images from the show that aired last night showed that. Daenerys is finally coming back to Westeros; Jon Snow is king of the North and Cersei is sitting on the Iron Throne. And we know the Night King is up there, waiting for all of them. The pieces are on the board now. Some of the pieces have been removed from the board and we are heading toward the end game. The thing that has excited us from the beginning, back to the way we pitched it to HBO is, it’s not supposed to be an ongoing show, where every season it’s trying to figure out new story lines. We wanted it to be one giant story, without padding it out to add an extra 10 hours, or because people are still watching it. We wanted to something where, if people watched it end to end, it would make sense as one continuous story. We’re definitely heading into the end game now."
Note that Benioff says that the show is aiming for a total of 73 episodes “for now.” So far, the line has been that Season 7 will be seven episodes long and Season 8 will be six, but Benioff’s comment implies that we could get more. We’ll keep you posted.
In any case, it’s an exciting time to be a Game of Thrones fan.