HBO’s episode descriptions for Game Of Thrones are like beautiful little haiku, rendering tense moments and fiery confrontations into bite-sized chunks and simple sentences:
“Bran learns great knowledge.
Tyrion drinks, smirks, and jokes.
Everybody dies.”
(Okay, so that one wasn’t real. But it could be.) Sadly, the network announced yesterday that it would be denying fans its customary cryptic wit for the last two episodes of the season, titled “Battle Of The Bastards” and “The Winds Of Winter,” respectively. To avoid spoilers, the premium network is foregoing the usual descriptions, so as to get the rest of us worked up into a windy, bastard-battling froth.
But not even the mighty Westerosi hordes can stand against the secret-prying skills of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. HBO has submitted both episodes for Emmy consideration, a process that requires written descriptions of the episodes in question. Eagle-eyed GoT fans were quick to find the entries on their respective ballots (writing for “Bastards,” cinematography for “Winds”), and so we’ve got a couple of precious nuggets of information to keep us going for the next two weeks. (A warning, though: these are even more terse than usual.)
First up: “Battle Of The Bastards,” in which “Terms of surrender are rejected and accepted,” which is pretty good in terms of suggesting a lot and confirming very little. It’ll be followed by the slightly more concrete “The Winds Of Winter, where “Cersei faces her trial,” a description that’s pretty subtle for what we can only assume will be 60 minutes of a gold-plated Frankenstein’s monster smashing a bunch of people’s heads like overripe grapes.