Welcome back to Westeros.
HBO brought winter in a little early this year, dropping the first official teaser for the eighth and final season of “Game of Thrones” Thursday. But it’s a teaser full of some really cool graphics — and no actual actors or footage. So a really good teaser.
In the under-a-minute video, fire and ice take over the map of Westeros, though it’s not the one we’ve all come to know and love from the show’s title sequence. Instead, it centers on the table at the heart of Dragonstone, the ancestral home of House Targaryen, which was (finally) reoccupied by the family when Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) sailed over from Esos last season.
The two elements of fire and ice are a nod to a “A Song of Fire and Ice,” the name of the George R.R. Martin novels the series is based on, as well as the the two main supernatural entities at the center of the series: the Night King’s White Walker army (and his fancy new ice dragon, which was last seen burning a giant hole through The Wall), and Dany’s remaining two fire-breathing dragons.
The teaser ends with fire and ice meeting at the center of the board, pointing towards the main conflict that takes up (at least) one full episode of the final season, when our heroes will take on the White Walkers. According to Vladimír Furdík, who plays the Night King, that showdown, which took at least 55 days of filming, will happen in the third episode of the abbreviated six-episode season.
The clip comes a few weeks after HBO announced via a retrospective video that the series will return in April 209.
Watch the teaser above.
The eighth and final season of “Game of Thrones” will premiere in April 2019 on HBO.