Tonight, ahead of the season premiere of True Detective, HBO shared a new teaser trailer for Game of Thrones Season Eight. Not a full trailer, mind you. This is just a teaser. Though brief, this teaser is much longer than the five seconds we got last week, and also includes the premiere date for the final season of Game of Thrones, which will return on April 14.
Now about this teaser. It's unclear if this is actual footage from the show or just a fun little advertisement to announce the premiere date. But we do see Jon, Arya, and Sansa walking through the crypts of Winterfell, hearing the voices of their dead family members as they walk by their graves and statues. The three Stark children arrive at the end of the hallway, where they see three statues of their own, hinting at their doom. But before they can really take it in, a snowy fog settles in, signaling the arrival of the White Walkers and their undead army.
It's like a haunting fever dream. And it can't mean anything good.
This comes just one week after HBO revealed the first footage of the upcoming season during the 2019 Golden Globes. In said footage we see Sansa greet Jon and Daenerys at Winterfell. Although only a brief, precious five seconds of real footage, it was still somewhat consequential. Fans noticed that this interaction mirrors King Robert Baratheon's first meeting with Ned Stark back in Season One, a similarity that has pretty important implications.
As has been outlined in early reports the season will open at Winterfell with Daenerys and her army arriving to prepare for the coming war with the White Walkers. In early descriptions, Sansa is not pleased to meet Daenerys, and the war with the undead army—which took 55 nights to film outdoors and weeks more in studio—will be one of the biggest action sequences ever shown on television.
The final season of Game of Thrones will consist of six feature-length episodes, which have been described as mini-movies. This means the Game of Thrones series finale will air on May 19 at the earliest.
