HBO exec Casey Bloys promises an “emotionally thrilling” final season of Game of Thrones

Another day, another tease for the eighth and last season of Game of Thrones. This one comes from HBO programming president Casey Bloys, one of the few people outside show creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss to have actually watched the final six episodes, albeit without special effects added in. Speaking to TV Line, he promised that season 8 will live up to the very intense hype:

"Everything I have seen makes me very, very confident that this is a [season] fans are going to be very happy with. It is a dramatically and emotionally thrilling way to end the series. I believe it will live up to the very high expectations."

Now, obviously, we shouldn’t put too much stock in what an HBO executive says — he doesn’t have much incentive to criticize, after all — but I like the bit about season 8 being “emotionally thrilling.” We know the final episodes will melt the eyes right out of our faces with fantastic battle scenes and special effects, and that’s great, but I’m almost more excited for the intense, character-driven moments promised to us by the likes of Entertainment Weekly’s James Hibberd, who visited the set during filming. “If it’s a scene that would normally take a day to shoot, they’d spend several days shooting, because they’re trying to so hard to get every little thing right,” he wrote. “So they’d do take after take, from all sorts of different angles, so that in editing they have different ways to piece it together.”

"There’s been so much focus on the ‘spectacularness’ of the battles, but they’re not skimping on the one-on-one scenes and the character scenes. I think people are going to be surprised about how intimate the final season is, in addition to the spectacular stuff that you’re expecting."

Game of Thrones has always mixed the bombastic with the intimate, and I’m glad to hear that having access to all the money in the world hasn’t dimmed their passion for the human drama that makes the big battle scenes so compelling.

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The final season of Game of Thrones kicks off on April 14, as if you didn’t already know.

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