With the epic Battle of Winterfell out of the way, the countdown until the final episode of Game of Thrones feels close enough to induce a panic attack. Let’s be real; no fan will be happy to see the fantasy series go off the air. But will we at least be satisfied with the way it ends? In a new interview with Esquire, John Bradley (aka Samwell Tarly) hints that the end of GoT might not be what fans envisioned — but, on the plus side, it does sound dramatic.
As for how dramatic, well, suffice it to say that Bradley compares the end of the series to one of the most infamous slaughters in GoT’s history: the Red Wedding. “One word that I always use to describe how people feel about the show is satisfying. Happiness isn’t something that this show goes about too well, because they’ve never bothered about keeping an audience happy. So, when people say, ‘Am I gonna be happy with the ending?’ It’s like, well, maybe not. Because everybody’s got a different way that it wants to end,” Bradley told Esquire before dropping an ominous analogy. “The Red Wedding is a hugely satisfying, dramatic moment, but you don’t want it to happen. And I think that with Sam, I’m happy with the ending, but mainly because I’m just satisfied with it.”
In case you need a quick refresher, the Red Wedding took place during season three’s “The Rains of Castamere” episode. The wedding belonged to Edmure Tully, who was marrying Roslin Frey to make up for the fact that Robb Stark had married a woman named Talisa instead of one of Walder Frey’s daughters (as he’d previously promised). Hoping to repair the alliance between the two families, the Starks and the Freys gathered for the nuptials. Little did the Starks know, though, it was a trap. By the end of the evening, Robb and his pregnant wife Talisa, his mother Catelyn, most of his bannermen and men-at-arms and even his direwolf, Grey Wind, are dead. In an EW interview posted right after the episode, creator George R.R. Martin admitted that the Red Wedding is “probably the most powerful scene in the books.”
So, yeah, yikes. If you thought the Battle of Winterfell was tense, you better brace yourself — based on Bradley’s comments, we can only assume the final few episodes of Game of Thrones are going to be bloody suspenseful (and perhaps quite literally bloody, too).
