‘Game of Thrones’ Showrunners Respond to Whether White Walkers Will Return Before Series Finale

Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live Thursday night to provide cryptic answers to the host’s biggest questions, including whether or not the undead White Walkers will make another appearance on the show before it is all over.

Most of the executive producers’ answers to Kimmel’s questions were “it’s possible,” but Kimmel then asked if viewers have really seen the last of the White Walkers.

“We’re not going to answer that,” Benioff replied.

The White Walkers all surprisingly shattered at the end of last week’s epic episode “The Long Night,” which covered the Battle of Winterfell in 82 minutes. In the end, Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) was the one who shoved a dagger into the chest of the Night King, instantly destroying his Army of the Dead. The scene surprised everyone, including the actors who star on the show.

“I immediately thought that everybody would hate it; that Arya doesn’t deserve it,” Williams told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published after the episode aired. “The hardest thing is in any series is when you build up a villain that’s so impossible to defeat and then you defeat them. It has to be intelligently done because otherwise people are like, ‘Well, [the villain] couldn’t have been that bad when some 100-pound girl comes in and stabs him.’ You gotta make it cool. And then I told my boyfriend and he was like, ‘Mmm, should be Jon though really, shouldn’t it?’”

However, Williams said that when she filmed the scene with Carice van Houten’s Melisandre, she realized that Arya did deserve to be the one to kill the Night King, considering all she had been through in the first seven seasons.

“When we did the whole bit with Melisandre, I realized the whole scene with [the Red Woman] brings it back to everything I’ve been working for over these past 6 seasons — 4 if you think about it since [Arya] got to the House of Black and White,” Williams told EW. “It all comes down to this one very moment. It’s also unexpected and that’s what this show does. So then I was like, ‘F— you Jon, I get it.’”

With the Night King and his Army of the Dead seemingly out of the way, Jon Snow (Kit Harington), Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and the other survivors of the Battle of Winterfell will turn their attention to King’s Landing to take Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) off the Iron Throne.

Harington recently teased that the upcoming episode is his favorite, describing it as “Shakespearean.”

“One of my favorite episodes is 4 because the characters have seemingly got what they needed,” Harington told Entertainment Weekly. “The world is safe now. They’re celebrating and saying goodbye to lost friends. But as an audience you’re going, ‘This is only episode 4, something’s going to happen.’”

Game of Thrones airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO. There are only three episodes left.

Photo credit: HBO