A good place to start is with the technical spoilers that HBO has already allowed to be unspooled. As revealed in Entertainment Weekly's exclusive set visit, Game of Thrones Season 8 will begin by echoing the series premiere all the way back in 2011. During those happier days, King Robert Baratheon's procession arrived at a cheerful Winterfell; in April 2019, Queen Daenerys' army will begin the season by getting a cold welcome from Sansa Stark, who will begrudingly bend the knee to the Dragon Queen after her "brother" Jon Snow already surrendered the North's autonomy to the Targaryen. However, EW's James Hibberd hints that Sansa might be soon won over by Dany, as well as stating the obvious: Team Dany meeting Team Stark will cause a lot of overdue reunions in the premiere: the Hound and Arya, the Hound and Sansa, Sansa and Tyrion, Jon and Bran, and (best of all), Jon and Arya.

“It’s about all of these disparate characters coming together to face a common enemy, dealing with their own past, and defining the person they want to be in the face of certain death,” co-executive producer Bryan Cogman says. “It’s an incredibly emotional, haunting, bittersweet final season, and I think it honors very much what George set out to do — which is flipping this kind of story on its head.”



Hibberd also teased he was on the set for the Game of Thrones series finale, and it was in a Westerosi location never previously seen, and one that included characters whose appearance surprised him. Make of that what you will. However, he helped confirm a few more intriguing things, such as the fact that the third episode of season 8 will exclusively be the battle of Winterfell. We already assumed this given that Miguel Sapochnik is directing the third and fifth episodes of season 8 after previously helming "The Battle of the Bastards" in season 6. He's been long spotted on the Winterfell sets in Belfast, filming a battle sequence that took 55 days to shoot (more than double the 25 days spent on "The Battle of the Bastards"). However, this is apparently just exterior shots and that it took even longer to film the interiors and closeups.

Yet all of this means the decisive battle that the series has been building toward since the beginning, the living versus the dead, will occur in the third episode of the season, meaning there are three more chapters of potential cinematic length. If we had to guess the real finale will be a confrontation between the two true unstoppable forces of Starks and Lannisters in episode 5. (That is speculation. It is possible the Army of the Dead will march on King's Landing, where a battle will occur in the fifth episode.)



Of course the final season filmed in Belfast, Ireland, which is its base of operations, albeit some scouts have been spotted at familiar castles in Ireland, as well as the Roman amphitheater in Spain that stands as the "Dragonpit" in the Game of Thrones season 7 finale. It has since been confirmed almost all of the major cast (with notable exception Emilia Clarke) traveled to Spain to film in the Dragonpit for a major sequence that is allegedly occurring in the Game of Thrones series finale. Whether that scene is a wedding, funeral, or trial depends on your own personal theory/favorite rumor (there's a cottage industry of YouTubers who claim to have inside information if you're so inclined/gullible).