Possible Game of Thrones Season Finale Spoilers Leaked

Game of Thrones Season 5: A Rash of Leaks may have just come to a spectacular ending. Overnight, four (extremely spoilery) images purportedly from the season finale, “Mother’s Mercy, ” appeared on 4chan, and have started to spread like wildfire. Are they real? Are they photoshoped? Even as fans try to determine their veracity, SpoilerTV announces that it looks like the entire episode itself has leaked.

Tyrion: More leaks? Darrio: I know, man. This season. What even?

But wait. The description, from the 4channer who leaked these pictures, lists the images as coming from “an episode ten screener.” But that isn’t a thing that exists. Screeners, for those that don’t know, are episodes given to reviewers prior to the show going on the air, and usually only cover the first few episodes of a season. It’s a tradition harking back to a time when TV writers didn’t do recaps, but instead had to be able to put up a review of an upcoming show ahead of time, in order for viewers to decide if it was worth adjusting their rabbit ears and sitting down to watch at an appointed time. Game of Thrones only handed out screeners for the first four episodes this season. Moreover, if you head to Pirate Bay (or one of the other usual suspects), there’s nothing for “episode 10.” And if you start scrolling down the SpoilerTV article into the comments, the site admins admit that the episode “isn’t actually available online.” It’s just that a detailed description and a few pictures have appeared, and it’s been claimed they came from a “leaked screener.”

Now, to be clear, there is a chance episode 10 could leak early, due to the fact that “Mother’s Mercy” will be shown in Canadian movie theaters. But without the episode actually being on line for us to see, this is all assumptions and speculation. So what are these pictures, and what are these spoilers? Are they legit? There is in fact, a very good chance they are. As obsessives will know, overseas HBO partner channel OSN has been releasing the “Inside the Episode” clips prior to the Sunday airing, billing them as “an advanced preview” of the episode. If that’s the source of these pictures and descriptions, as it has been in the past, then these are the real thing. Also, having seen the “Inside the Episode” would give someone enough information to sound as if they saw the entire episode, even if they haven’t.

The pictures are below. There are four of them. Two of them offer potential spoilers for the episode. The other two are not just spoilers for the episode, but are potential spoilers for the books as well.

Book readers, if you don’t want to be spoiled for The Winds of Winter, go back now.

Unsullied, just turn away.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS BELOW… POTENTIAL SPOILERS BELOW… POTENTIAL SPOILERS BELOW…

EDIT: We’ve taken down the actual pictures within the body of the post, but you can still see all four of them them by clicking this link.

The first image if a close-up of Cersei with short-cropped hair. We’ll start here because we know this one is almost certainly real. Much like the Sparrows are made to shave their heads, Cersei, as part of the “mercy” she receives from the High Sparrow, will have her beautiful golden wig hair chopped off. This is a known detail from the books, and confirmed from the filming of this scene in the streets of Croatia. (Entertainment Weekly even obliquely referenced it prior to the season in an interview with Lena Headey, where they say “describing her right now would be a spoiler.”)

Next, there’s a shot of Selyse hanging, apparently dead, from a noose. Oh, Selyse. If this shot is legit, it’s not just a show spoiler. My feeling is that this is a plot point that will be coming in the books, as Selyse’s guilt and pain from losing her daughter will make her take her own life. Some are speculating that Stannis will hang her for rebelling against him post-Shireen’s death, but this to me looks like suicide.

Moving on, we have two canted shots of Jon Snow. He has a long cut down the right side of his face, and the background is awash in blue. In the first shot, his eyes are open. In the second, his eyes are milky white, not unlike how Bran’s eyes get when he’s warging.

Back in the day on LiveJournal, there was a meme (though I don’t believe they were called that at the time) that went like this: “Everytime You Ask About The Next Book, GRRM Kills a Stark.” And yet, somehow, despite the fact that we had a surprise murder happen twice in Books 1 and 3, somehow the Caesar-like moment involving Jon being stabbed by mutinous members of the Night’s Watch still came as a shock on par with the Red Wedding and the death of Ned.

But Jon’s black-out is the end of the scene, and with only two chapters and an epilogue coming after it, that’s all we know. For four long years, that’s all us Book Readers have known. He passes out. What next? Is Jon dead? (Some theories say no, it’s a fake out!) If he is dead, will Jon be reborn? (Some theories say yes—that’s why he would no longer bound by his Night’s Watch vows!)

In the last four years, I’ve considered a lot of theories, but my first instinct at the end of that chapter (after I went and picked the book up from where I’d thrown it across the room) was “Ghost is right there, and in this extreme moment, Jon might just warg into him, right?” (For the record, though in the show Bran is the only Stark we’ve seen warg, in the books, other story lines—ones that have not progressed as far on screen—indicate that it’s a trait shared by more than one of the Stark clan.) If these images are real, we know this is the show’s “tell” that the person in question is warging. It looks like after all those tinfoil theories, we may finally learn how Jon will survive this Sunday.

After all, as Sam says, don’t worry. Jon always comes back.

EDIT: Again, you can see these images by heading to imgur.

• Published on 06/12/2015 at 8:00 AM CDT
• Last updated on 06/12/2015 at 8:00 AM CDT