Game of Thrones writer breaks down the big moments from the season 8 premiere

Dave Hill has been writing on Game of Thrones since season 5, and working on it a while before that. “Winterfell,” the season 8 premiere, is the last episode of the show he’ll ever write. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, he breaks down the big moments.

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Let’s start with the opening sequence, where Jon and Dany and her entourage arrive at Winterfell. As many fans have pointed out, it mirrors the arrival of King Robert Baratheon and his entourage at the Stark castle in the first-ever episode of the show. “Instead of the king’s arrival, we have the queen’s arrival,” Hill said. “We now have the budget and the crew to do it properly with a lot of crowds.”

"We start off with a little orphan boy, to see what to a commoner, to the people on the ground where it’s the most exciting thing they’re ever going to see in their life — a Targaryen queen who also has dragons. Everyone can’t help but look even though what they see makes them afraid. They have a new monarch with monsters to fight other monsters."

And the commoners aren’t the only ones a little unnerved by the Dragon Queen. “Sansa sees her as the foreign interloper,” Hill said. “She trusts her family and no one else. You can see from Sansa’s view that Jon went to meet with this southern queen who burned her grandfather and uncle alive and suddenly Jon bent the knee to her. She’s also very pretty, and how much does that factor in? Sansa starts off this season very suspicious and not at all friendly with Dany.”

If she “starts off this season” that way, maybe their relationship improves? We’ll see.

Then there’s Sansa’s reunion with Tyrion Lannister. “You have to address the elephant in the room of her abandoning him,” Hill said. “What did she know and when did she know it? There’s that awkwardness and yet also Tyron realizes how far Sansa has come, she’s no longer that scared little girl, that she’s very much a player.”

Okay, I don’t know how fair it is to characterize Sansa’s escaping the glorified prison that was King’s Landing as “abandoning” Tyrion. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not fair at all. But addressed it was.

Arya and Jon’s reunion was a little more straightforward, although apparently it was tricky to write around certain things:

"They’re the two Starks that had the clearest connection in the pilot. He gave her Needle. He knew she was back last season but couldn’t do anything about it. Those scenes are always interesting and fun to write but also tense because you want to do right by these characters, but you can’t have them do what they would naturally do — ‘tell me what happened to you’ because it would be boring for everybody. You have to emotionally convey that information without having to detail it. The first two episodes, in particular, are tough because they’re so contained and have so many characters. It’s hard to script when you sometimes have six or seven characters all in the same room and to give each their due while having it progress organically and not be 10 pages and a lot of recapping information just because there are some things some characters don’t know."

You know, I feel like I hear this from writers a lot, that they don’t want to have characters tell each other what happened to them because it’ll be boring for the audience. That’s fair enough, but you’ve gotta at least imply that they tell each other some stuff, right? I mean, Arya in particular had some really weird experiences. I think seeing characters react to her past specifically might be worth the redundancy.

Let’s move on to Jon finding out about his true parentage: “One of the things Jon always clung to is that at least his father is Ned Stark — this incredibly honorable beautiful man.”

"Ned was his idol growing up. Now ‘my father is not my father, my father lied to me, and I’m actually the thing I want to be least in this world — an heir to the Iron Throne and a rival to the woman I love.’"

It’s gonna be good, isn’t it?

And finally, there’s the final moments of the episode where Jaime Lannister arrives at Winterfell and locks eyes with Bran Stark. “You’re watching the premiere and the question is: How are we going to end it? It’s an emotional punch that works really well. I knew it was a scene that [Nikolaj Coster-Waldau] was absolutely going to nail.”

Personally, I loved this ending. We went in expecting fireworks, and we got them, but the final button is a pretty quiet scene that reaches back to the end of the series premiere. Brilliant!

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