Fast travel on Game of Thrones: How bad is it, and when did it start happening?

Game of Thrones has a ton of moving parts, and some of them occasionally get tangled with each other. For example, some fans dinged season 7 for the number of characters who seemed capable of zipping around the map with little regard for time or distance. Think about Euron Greyoy traveling from King’s Landing to Casterly Rock in the space of an episode, or Daenerys flying from Dragonstone to beyond the Wall while Jon Snow and crew waited on an island in the middle of that frozen lake.

How often does this kind of fast travel occur, and how long has it been going on? Megabus, of all things, decided to investigate. It came up with a few charts that, while flawed, provide some insight into this phenomenon.

Of the characters considered, Theon seems to have traveled the most over the course of the series, mostly due to his intercontinental trips during seasons 6 and 7 (had Yara, who made those same trips, been included, she would have surely placed high on this chart). According to Megabus, Theon’s journey clocks in at 20,387 miles, with Daenerys right behind him with 19,714. Jon Snow’s exhausting season 7 journey, wherein he repeatedly traveled up and down the east coast of Westeros, gave him a big bump, too.

As you can see, the amount of miles covered increased considerably as the seasons went on, particularly in the last two years. The hefty travel times in season 6 probably have a lot to do with Theon and Yara’s trip, whereas Jon Snow’s trip south and then north and then back south probably contributed to the total for season 7.

This last graphic sums things up, although there are some factual errors. For example, it says that Theon travels 4,500 miles from the Iron Islands to “Meeren” in season 6’s “Blood of My Blood.” But really, Theon doesn’t arrive in Meereen until three episodes after that. After “Blood of My Blood,” we next see him in Volantis, in “The Broken Man.”

And y’know, quick as that journey was, it seems snail-slow compared to Daenerys’ flight north in “Beyond the Wall.”

Will this lightening-fast travel continue in season 8? We’ll have to wait to find out, although the production is certainly taking long enough to shoot it.

Next: George R.R. Martin discusses SyFy's Nightflyers TV adaptation

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