We have officially survived more than one year without Game of Thrones. It was hard. We thought it would be impossible, but we have managed to pull through. There are still 8 months left before we see Game of Thrones Season 8, but key details about the upcoming season have started to make their way to the Internet now. Hopefully, these 8 months will also fly by us pretty soon.
Recently Steve Kullback, the VFX Supervisor of the show appeared in an interview post-Emmys, and there he slipped out a potential Spoiler for Tyrion’s fate as he said, “And we can’t tell you in what episode Tyrion dies…or doesn’t.” That’s a huge bomb on the ones who may have fallen in his trap, but at the end, “All men must die,” so it may not be that big of a deal.
Moving ahead of that, another VFX Supervisor of the show Joe Bauer has finally given us worthy of a discussion. Season 7 was big on the thrill, but the only complaint that people had with the show was the pace it went at. Earlier seasons spent quite a lot of time on certain elements of the show, but the plot ran as fast as Gendry this time around. Amidst all that pace, the fans were left wondering about one certain character, Jon Snow’s Dire wolf Ghost.
The show gave us a heartfelt reunion of Arya and her dire wolf Nymeria who had been missing for 5 seasons, but made her grand entrance with her super pack of wolves only for a cameo that sets up Season 8. We all know that her spontaneous entrance and exit was written because of the budget cut that the show had to make, as making dire wolves is extremely costly, especially when you have 3 dragons to portray and CGI cities to create. So, the show chose to leave the Dire Wolf out for the rest of the season.
But what felt strange was the absence of Ghost from the entire Season. He was there in Season 6, but his absence in Season 7 was surprising. Perhaps the show doesn’t have much to do with him or Nymeria until Season 8, so that is understandable. But just one little scene could have been added to the mix. As it turns out, writer Bryan Cogman revealed that he did not leave Ghost out of the picture as he did write a scene for the beloved dire wolf. But again due to budget cuts, the scene was never shot. Here’s what the writer said:
“There was a bit here where Jon came out of the crypt, and Ghost came up to him and he petted him and said, “Take care of [Sansa], watch over her for me.” But I guess those direwolves are expensive. I guess it got cut. Oh, well. Ghost is there somewhere roaming around.”
So it is safe to say that both Nymeria and Ghost will appear in Season 8, and they will be the part of the War which ends all wars. Well, talking to the Huffington Post Joe Bauer has confirmed the return of Ghost when asked about it. He then went on to talk about how hard it is for them to bring in the dire wolves due to the difference in their sizes compared to the actual wolves. So he said:
“Oh, you’ll see him [Ghost] again. He has a fair amount of screen time in Season 8…He does show up. The direwolves are tough because you don’t want to get them wrong, so we end up always shooting real wolves and doing a scaling trick with them, but the real wolves only behave in certain ways. I think that has something to do with why the direwolves are in the show but they’re not maybe as integral as they are in the books.”
He did not give a confirmation on Nymeria though, but he does tease the big part that Ghost is going to play in the plot of Season 8 as he says:
“Ghost does show up, and he does some … he’s very present and does some pretty cool things in Season 8.”
Well, I bet that Nymeria will also be returning with her pack of wild dogs and the Dire Wolf team up is going to be epic to witness! Game of Thrones Season 8 will presumably return in June 2019.
