‘Game of Thrones’: 7 Questions for the Season 7 Finale

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Is the end already here? The seventh season of “Game of Thrones” flew by faster than one of those supersonic ravens, mostly because it only contained seven episodes (compared to the usual 10) but also because it packed an enormous amount of movement and plot development inside them. Dragons, zombie dragons, globe-trotting bastards, reunions, pregnancies, ice battles, fire battles, greyscale cures, lineage revelations — the abbreviated season, which began with Arya eradicating House Frey, has been more overstuffed than the son pie she served Walder last year.

But there are plenty of things that still need to be resolved. So here are seven questions to keep in mind going into the supersized (nearly 80 minutes!) Season 7 finale on Sunday night.

Will the Starks sort out their differences?

For most of this story, the Stark family has been scattered to the winds, by turns slaughtered and persecuted, its members often unsure if any of the others were even alive, much less if they would ever see them again. Which made this season’s long-desired Stark reunion a bummer, because instead of tender homecomings we got Sansa and Arya turning against each other and Bran, in his new three-eyed state, dispassionately vision-questing with a tree. Lurking in the shadows has been Littlefinger, trying to manipulate all of them for his own purposes (and having some success). Bran would seem to have the ability to literally see through both Littlefinger’s current plans and his past betrayals, and such revelations could unite the family against him. But so far he has not done so. Will he get around to it before Sansa and Arya’s face-off escalates into something more permanently destructive?

Will Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen get together?

Seems like a safe bet. You saw the way they were looking at each other in that ship’s cabin last week, and the director of that episode confirmed that Jonerys will be debuting soon. That doesn’t necessarily have to happen on Sunday night, but the show has been building toward a royal coupling for a while now.

Will Jon Snow learn his true parentage?

Probably not, based on the answer above. At least not before, well, you know — unless this show is even freakier than I thought. But I imagine viewers, if not the man himself, will have it confirmed on screen Sunday that Jon is the son of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen — Dany’s brother, which makes Jon her nephew. (Oddly, that will be more than a year after HBO confirmed it online.) The revelation would complicate the burgeoning Fire and Ice romance in at least a couple of ways. The first is the whole incest thing, though that’s less of an issue in this world. (That said, it doesn’t seem like Jon and Dany’s style.) Potentially more tricky is that fact that, because 1) Rhaegar was next in line for the Iron Throne behind his father, the Mad King, and 2) we learned two weeks ago that Jon’s parents were married when they had him — meaning the long-suffering bastard has actually been legitimate the whole time — Jon, not Daenerys, would be the rightful heir to the throne. So at some point their pillow talk will probably get pretty tense, at least.

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Will Cersei join the fight against the White Walkers?

You’ll recall that last week’s wight fight came about thanks to a plan to capture one of the undead to bring back to Cersei, in order to convince her to join the coalition of the living against the army of death. It was a plot point that roughly zero percent of viewers found credible but here we are, and with Sunday’s summit in King’s Landing, glimpsed in the episode trailer, we’ll learn if the gambit worked. A fun side result: Many long-separated characters could reunite at the meeting, including Tyrion and Cersei, Tyrion and Podrick, Brienne and Jaime, and the Hound and his reanimated brother, the Mountain. (Which by the way, clearly Cersei already knows that zombies exist, but a Qyburn science project is conceptually different from thousands of annihilating ghouls from beyond the Wall.)

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