HBO/Helen Sloan(LOS ANGELES) — Who will sit on the Iron Throne? We’ll find out Sunday night at 9 p.m. as HBO’s Game of Thrones airs its final episode. After last week’s shocking turn of events, it’s anyone’s guess as to what will happen, but Entertainment Weekly‘s James Hibberd, who got a sneak preview, says it’s going to be memorable.
“I was on set 13 months ago and I think I know how it ends,” Hibberd tells ABC Radio. “I don’t know for sure…but I can say the final episode deals with the aftermath of Dany’s devastating attack on King’s Landing and how that impacts all the characters.”
“Plot-wise, I can’t really say much more than that,” he notes. “But I do think it’s an episode that fans won’t wanna miss and will be talked about for a very long time.”
Hibberd says the ending won’t be like The Sopranos finale, which baffled and enraged fans, but it won’t please everyone.
“I think it’s going to be a bit more of a traditional, satisfying ending in a lot of respects,” he says, adding, “I don’t expect the divided reactions to end with the finale.”
As for the legacy of Game of Thrones, Hibberd believes that the show made TV networks realize that series in genres previously deemed “too geeky or too niche” — like adult fantasy — could actually work. In addition, he says the Emmy-winning series changed TV with its scope and its bravery.
“It certainly blew apart the notion that TV shows have to have a limit to their scale of production,” he explains.
“And I think its bold storytelling moves…make difficult for a standard TV drama nowadays to do the usual TV thing of telling basically the same story week after week without any consequence…to the characters.”
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