SPOILER ALERT: Do not keep reading unless you’ve seen “Game of Thrones” Season 8 Episode 2, titled “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”
Veteran “Game of Thrones” writer Bryan Cogman has confirmed that his potential spinoff series from the HBO epic will not be going ahead.
“This is it for me in terms of Westeros,” Cogman told Variety. “It’s been a beautifully cathartic thing re-watching the series recently, it’s been ten years of my life.”
The most recent episode of the show, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” was Cogman’s last as a writer, and he says he “couldn’t think of a more beautiful episode to go out on.”
In the episode, Daenerys and Jon are interrupted in the middle of a rather important conversation. Jon had just told her that his real name is in fact Aegon Targaryen, and that therefore he is the rightful heir to the Iron Throne and, seemingly less important to Dany, her nephew.
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However, just as she is getting to grips with the consequences of this enormous revelation, Jon is saved by the horn.
“If you’re Jon and Dany, you’re probably the only two in that castle who are glad that the White Walkers just showed up. He would be saying to her, ‘OK, good talk let’s go, the end of the world is here, phew,’” jokes Cogman
Cogman reveals that when he submitted his first draft of the episode it came back from showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss covered in red pen, which is when he realized the magnitude of the episode and how much work there was to do.
“It was a sea of red like blood dripping from my soul because it was a mess and they were right,” he says. “It was a lot of talking about stuff that had happened and asking questions the audience already knows.”
Eventually Cogman managed to wrangle the complicated script together, and he also adds that he and the showrunners had been “working towards” the heart-melting scene in which Jaime Lannister knights Brienne of Tarth “for quite some time.”
“David and Dan were pretty adamant, kicking ideas around in the writer’s room, that it not be on a hill at sunrise with their capes billowing in the wind,” Cogman says. “We wanted it to be the antithesis of that and subvert that trope.”
Cogman signed an overall deal with Amazon last year, where he will now focus his attention. He was one of one of five writers, along with Max Borenstein, Jane Goldman, Brian Helgeland and Carly Wray, chosen to develop a new show in the “Game of Thrones” universe. HBO ordered the show being developed by Goldman to pilot in June, 2018.