Every game must come to an end, and for the Game of Thrones it looks like that end will come in about three or four more years. That is, according to series showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who said in an interview with Vanity Fair that the show will be wrapping up after season seven or eight.
“It doesn’t just keep on going because it can,” Weiss told Vanity Fair. “I think the desire to milk more out of it is what would eventually kill it, if we gave in to that.”
It’s certainly admirable that they don’t intend to beat a dead horse, although that is not something HBO is generally known to do anyway, so it’s not likely the network would have let the show run past its prime. The big question is how they would end the show if George R. R. Martin has not finished the book series, which is a very real possibility with all the side projects he has going on lately.
Well, it turns out there’s a plan for that. Benioff said in the interview that Martin has already laid out his vision for how the rest of the series unfolds:
“Last year we went out to Santa Fe for a week to sit down with him [Martin] and just talk through where things are going, because we don’t know if we are going to catch up and where exactly that would be. If you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it. And so we want to know how everything ends. We want to be able to set things up. So we just sat down with him and literally went through every character.”
It would certainly be nice if Martin could get the final books written already. You can’t rush greatness and all that, but maybe greatness could sit down and concentrate for a little while instead of getting distracted by other projects that are not A Song of Ice and Fire? Even though the Game of Thrones TV series will have its ending regardless, having the books as an accompaniment would make it all the better.