When looking at trailers for highly secretive projects, it’s best not to assume you know anything. If Marvel Studios can digitally manipulate footage in its trailers to protect eagle-eyed fans from figuring out too much, so can Game of Thrones. But in these two new, brief promos among the very little fresh footage available, there’s a glimpse of Arya and Jon together for the first time since Season 1. HBO did not release these promos online. So, alas, shaky footage is the best we have.
.
Additionally, we see Beric Dondarrion and his flaming sword which is accompanied by a shot of the notoriously fire-averse Hound wincing. The Hound wince footage we saw in a previous trailer, but the Beric part is new and seems to confirm that our favorite one-eyed, undead swashbuckler will make it all the way down to Winterfell just in time to tell Jon, Dany, and the rest what he saw at the Wall. That is if the all-seeing Bran hasn’t beat him to it.
When last we saw Beric he was fleeing along the top of the crumbling Wall with Tormund. In the previous Season 8 trailer we saw that Beric and Tormund made it safely to Dolorous Edd at Castle Black. But if Beric is in the same shot as the Hound, that means he likely made it even further south to meet up with the Hound who, you might remember, was last seen with Jon down at King’s Landing.
Okay the precarious fate of Beric Dondarrion aside, what else does this mix of old footage and new show us? Well there’s a new glimpse of Tyrion addressing an assembly in the great hall of Winterfell and we see both Daenerys and Sansa sitting at the head table. Perhaps the two have set aside their differences in the face of a larger threat?
We also see Jon walking away from Daenerys who is staring moodily at the fire and rocking, it must be said, a truly gorgeous new braid. Is that the hair of a woman who just found out that her new boyfriend is also her nephew?
And in addition to a few new shots of the big Winterfell battle—the Unsullied is impressively in formation—we get Davos, Tyrion, and Varys looking up in slack-jawed wonder. Now, this isn’t the first shot from Season 8 of someone looking up at the sky in astonishment at a dragon flying overhead. But, previously, the trailers showed us characters who hadn’t seen Dany's brood before: Arya and Sansa. But here we have three men who spent a good deal of time at Dragonstone last season. Dragons flying overhead should be no big deal to them. Is it, perhaps, the person riding the dragon that has them so taken aback? And if Tyrion is on the ground, then it has to be Jon in the sky, right? That’s the theory anyway.
It seems very likely Jon has been digitally erased off the back of Dany’s dragon Rhaegal as it flaps over Winterfell. Tyrion—who long wanted to ride a dragon himself—may feel a twinge or two of jealousy at being left out once again.
