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With less than 48 hours to go before the finale of Game of Thrones’ penultimate season airs on Sunday, details of the upcoming longest ever episode of the HBO blockbuster have appeared on online from individuals claiming to be connected to the recent hack of the premium cabler.
However, despite recent threats from “Mr. Smith” and crew to drop the nearly 80-minute “The Dragon and The Wolf” itself before tomorrow’s much anticipated Season 7 ender, the actual episode itself has not shown up anywhere as of this afternoon.
Claiming to be a detailed outline of the David Benioff and D.B. Weiss penned episode, the material that was online popped up on Friday on a Reddit subthread. Additionally, the hackers have made what seems to be at least a portion of an early draft of the finale script available too. The material seems to originate from pre-production work conducted in early 2016 on the Emmy-winning series based George R. R. Martin’s books.
The fact is that portions of alleged info about the finale has been out online for weeks.
Still, even as details tend to dribble out every year, Game of Thrones episodes are treated like state secrets by HBO — finales even more so. Having said that, HBO itself offered a few nuggets of what is to come on Sunday with a tease for the Jeremey Podeswa-directed finale that they released last week after the game-changing penultimate episode of the season aired. Among other snippets, there are scenes of a big meet-up to between Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), Jon Snow (Kit Harington),Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) and other major remaining characters on the show to unite against the now dragon accessorized Army of the Dead.
Contacted by Deadline, HBO referred to its last comment on the hackers when episodes of the upcoming return of Curb Your Enthusiasm and other shows were posted online back on August 13. “The hacker may continue to drop bits and pieces of stolen information in an attempt to generate media attention,” said the Richard Plelper run outlet in its statement of two weeks ago. “That’s a game we’re not going to participate in.”
Having not received the $6 million they initially demanded after penetrating HBO’s systems earlier this summer, the Mr. Smith hackers have lashed out at the cabler with corporate correspondence, dumped GoT scripts and production info as well as episodes of Curb, Ballers and Insecure, among others.
Added to that unfortunate circumstance, HBO has seen a couple GoT episodes leaked online by material garnered from an Indian distributor and its Spanish and Nordic platforms. Taking a hit while its down, the Time Warner owned cabler also saw its Twitter and Facebook pages hacked by another attacker on August 17. Playing off the hack, emails with the subject line”Wanna see the Game of Thrones in advance?” have been appearing in inboxes too over the last week. Opened by the obviously affirmative responding, those emails look to contain Malware that quickly corrupts the curious.
Still, revealing how limited the leaks’ reach really is, GoT has also hit record ratings and viewership numbers on several occasions during this seven-episode season – including the leaked epic “The Spoils of War” episode of August 6.
The eighth and final season six-episode of Game of Thrones is expected to debut mid-2018.
