THIS IS NOT OKAY.
Game of Thrones executive producers D.B. Weiss and David Benioff have confirmed that we’ve got a mere 13 to 15 episodes left of the series.
In an interview with Deadline about the season finale, they confirmed that they’d been working to a timeframe of around 73 hours, and we’re pretty much hitting that now.
“It’s two more seasons we’re talking about,” said Benioff. “From pretty close to the beginning, we talked about doing this in 70–75 hours, and that’s what we’ll end up with. Call it 73 for now.”
They don’t mention how many episodes will be in the new seasons, but it confirms speculation back in April that the seventh and eight season would have just seven and six episodes respectively.
However, Benioff does make a fairly compelling case for ending the show sooner:
“We’re trying to tell one cohesive story with a beginning, middle and end,” he said. “As Dan said, we’ve known the end for quite some time and we’re hurtling towards it. Those last images from the show that aired last night showed that. Daenerys is finally coming back to Westeros; Jon Snow is King in the North and Cersei is sitting on the Iron Throne. And we know the Night King is up there, waiting for all of them. The pieces are on the board now. Some of the pieces have been removed from the board and we are heading toward the end game.
“The thing that has excited us from the beginning, back to the way we pitched it to HBO is, it’s not supposed to be an ongoing show, where every season it’s trying to figure out new story lines. We wanted it to be one giant story, without padding it out to add an extra 10 hours, or because people are still watching it. We wanted to something where, if people watched it end to end, it would make sense as one continuous story. We’re definitely heading into the end game now.
The seventh season will air at a yet-to-be-determined date in 2017. And now our wait has started.
