Game of Thrones producers discuss last night’s big meeting

Book readers have been waiting a long time for this. The condensing and speeding up of Tyrion’s storyline from A Dance with Dragons this year made an eventual meeting between him and Daenerys “Mother of Dragons” Targaryen all but inevitable. Last night, that meeting finally came to pass, something that has yet to happen in the books. Talking to Entertainment Weekly, David Benioff admitted that he had been looking forward to springing this twist upon us all season.

“We’re really excited to see these two characters we love so much finally set eyes on each other…Creatively it made sense to us, because we wanted it to happen. They’re two of the best characters of the show. To have them come so close together this season then have them not meet felt incredibly frustrating. Also, we’re on a relatively fast pace. We don’t want to do a 10-year adaptation of the books, we don’t want to do a nine-year adaptation. We’re not going to spend four seasons in Meereen. It’s time for these two to get together. It’s hard to come up with a more eloquent explanation, but this just felt right. [Varys] puts Tyrion’s mission out there [in the season premiere] and the mission ends in Meereen.”

My gratefulness that we will not spend four seasons in Meereen watching Dany dawdle aside, I think that for many book readers, reaching this turning point was a bit of light in the darkness after last week’s episode. And with Dany making making decisions that are just as bad as the ones made by her counterpart in King’s Landing (though not with quite such disastrous results—yet), I think everyone agrees it’s high time someone showed up who will actually talk Dany through the reality of ruling a kingdom once’s it’s been conquered.

“There will always be some fans who will think it’s blasphemy,” Benioff noted. “But we can’t not do something because we’re afraid of the reaction. I like to think we’ve always done what’s in the best interest of the show and we hope most people agree.”

We’ll have to check in with our Book Purist later this week to see what he says. Even though I am a book reader, I’ve always taken the TV show as it’s own beast, and I know I personally am thankful to the show for bringing these two together. Especially when EW notes that we can expect next week’s scene between them to “rank among the best scenes of the season.”

• Published on 05/25/2015 at 4:40 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:04 PM CDT