LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, TAKE YOUR (GIGANTIC IRON AND/OR WOODEN) SEATS: The end of Game of Thrones has begun. The first trailer for the series’ seventh (and second-to-last) season is here.
There’s no new footage, per se, but there is lots of walking, which is a good and healthy activity: Contenders for the Iron Throne Cersei Lannister, Jon Snow, and Daenerys Targaryen spend most of the teaser strolling through chilly hallways. Look at Cersei getting those 10,000 steps in:
There’s also some sitting, which is not as good. Your office chair will kill you, whether it’s a large hunk of rock (which the internet suggests is located at Dany’s ancestral home of Dragonstone):
Or a giant pile of swords that grant you immeasurable power and unimaginable danger:
Or just a simple arts-and-crafts-style wooden chair in Winterfell you glower at (but don’t sit in, even though the song explicitly tells you to) for the duration of a promotional trailer:
But a bad back is probably worth it, if the outcome is, y’know, being the ruler of the world.
The trailer reminds us what’s at stake as Thrones hits its final stretch. Westeros has one throne, and three (major) players in pursuit of it: Jon along with sister Sansa has laid claim to the north, Dany is sailing across the world with dragons (and Theon and Yara Greyjoy) in tow, and Cersei is mostly solo, having straight-up nuked the members of her family she’s not sleeping with. In case you needed a reminder, the trailer’s accompaniment, a song that is literally called “Sit Down,” is here to provide helpful instruction to our champions (“sit down”) and context for their behavior:
The battle for power among Cersei, Jon, and Dany will presumably occupy much of Season 7. But the trailer’s final moments remind us of the actual stakes. Cersei takes a deep, visibly frosty breath. Winter has come, and things are going to get very, very cold. You didn’t forget about the White Walkers and their army of demon ice-zombies, did you? The mystical beings who are hell-bent on turning every living, breathing creature into a sentient, bloodthirsty can of Natty Ice? Amid the hype from all that chair-sitting, I kind of did, and so I found it both helpful and terrifying that the trailer concludes with this shot:
There is a game afoot that’s way bigger than the question of which house will occupy the Iron Throne; it’s the one that’ll determine the fate of human (and dragon) civilization in this strange world we’ve enjoyed for the better part of a decade. Time to play.
Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer.
