Hey, everybody. The Game of Thrones Weekly podcast is back and a bit early. I'm James Hibbard with Entertainment Weekly, and the final season is still a few months away, but my co-host, Darren Franich and I figured we would do a season eight preview. The first of a few preview episodes, actually, we're going to talk about my final set visits to Belfast, get into some of the stories that have been circulating around out there about the new

episodes. We're going to talk a bit about the Game of Thrones prequel series, since some news

has been made on that in recent months. And Darren recently read all 700 pages of George R.

Martin's new book, Fire and Blood.

So he's going to run down some of the most intriguing nuggets he found in that.

Well, welcome back, Darren.

James, so great to be here.

Welcome back to you, really.

You've been all over Westeros, possibly even to Esos and the lands beyond, for all I know.

You know, James, listeners of this podcast like me, we've all become connoisseurs of the James

Hibbard Game of Thrones cover stories, but your latest Entertainment Weekly cover story

was a true wonder, I thought. You went to the set of the final season of Game of Thrones.

You were there, wherever it is in the realm of the fictional season of Game of Thrones. You were there.

Wherever it is in the realm of the fictional world of Westrose, you were there in Belfast.

Just so many great nuggets from the story to dig into.

But I guess can we start with like the big battle that everyone's kind of been talking about?

Because there was a part of your story where you kind of mentioned all these rumors about how,

oh, you know, it's this big and they filmed for 55 days.

And it turned out actually that was even close to how long they actually had been filming

for.

A lot of big numbers attached to this season, it seems like, James.

Is that fair to say?

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