As season 4 of ‘Game of Thrones’ comes to an end, the show runners behind the wildly popular HBO series start looking towards the final three seasons and how the show will conclude….
When David Benioff and Dan Weiss started plotting the course for season 4 of ‘Game of Thrones’, they looked at the adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s source material as the halfway point for their epic fantasy saga.
With seven seasons total planned for the show, it gives Benioff and Weiss a total of 30 more episodes in three seasons to finish out ‘Game of Thrones’ and while there’s still a lot of work to be done before landing on the final episodes, some of the broad strokes of how we’re going to get there have started to appear in the series.
Season 5 will likely combine elements from both books four and five from the ‘Song of Ice and Fire’ series, which means things are starting to get closer and closer to uncharted territory unless Martin rushes to get book six ‘The Winds of Winter’ out into stores by next year. Even if he does, the series will surpass the books by season 6 and season 7, so Benioff and Weiss have started thinking about that final year and how to get there.
“We have talked to George extensively about where he’s going with the books, and will continue to do so,” Benioff told EW. “His books are the blueprint for the world we’re building. Ultimately the show needs to work on its own terms, and keep on moving. Our job is to square that necessity with George’s work to the best of our ability.”
For the first three seasons of the show, ‘Game of Thrones’ worked really hard at spreading out the universe of characters as families like the Starks were blown apart with members going in every which direction except back towards one another. But as witnessed in the season 4 finale as Stannis Baratheon finally met Jon Snow for the first time and Arya Stark encountered Brienne of Tarth, the characters in the ‘Game of Thrones’ universe will be clashing together more and more often as the series reaches the final season.
It’s a calculated move by the producers to begin condensing things down to the central story that will be told in the last year of the show.
“It almost feels like this is the midpoint for us. If we’re going to go seven seasons, which is the plan, season 4 is right town the middle. It’s the pivot point, as you say. It’s been an expanding universe and will now start to contract,” Benioff said. “Which doesn’t mean we won’t meet any new characters in season 5, because we will. But it’s going to start to shrink for sure.”
With a show as popular and huge as ‘Game of Thrones’ has become, it also amps up the pressure on the show runners to ensure the series ends in a satisfying way. Both Benioff and Weiss already know Martin’s end game after meeting with the author for several weeks in New Mexico ahead of season 4 just so they’d have some story points to move forward with as some of their characters are already reaching the end of the material in the books.
Both say the ending as conceived by Martin will be ‘100-percent’ satisfying to fans, but Benioff and Weiss know that an entire show can be judged on how it ends. Whether it’s fair or not, a series needs to have a great final year or it mars the whole run of the show.
So Benioff looks towards one of his favorite shows — ‘Breaking Bad’ — as a guide for how a show can end on a brilliant note. The AMC series was critically acclaimed and hailed as one of the best series of all time and when it finally came to a close, there may not be a better ending than the one creator Vince Gilligan pulled off when he brought his story of Walter White to an end.
“I feel we have so many conversations about later seasons. And this year we’ve started talking about the very end,” Benioff said. “One of the lessons of Breaking Bad, which had a phenomenal final season, phenomenal entire series—you really get the sense (Vince Gilligan) went into it with a story in mind and achieved that. We want this to work.”
For now, Benioff and Weiss will start plotting ahead for season 5 of ‘Game of Thrones’ which is expected to start production this July including a stop for the first time ever in Dorne — the home to murdered Prince Oberyn Martell.
