I Needed Closure After Game Of Thrones Season 8 So I Made My Own Version

My name is Call and I’m a die-hard Game of Thrones and Song of Ice and Fire fan. I came to the books late, after watching the first season of the show, and both have been a big part of my life ever since. Since 2017, I’ve gradually been accumulating tattoos of the different sigils of Westeros’ great houses on both arms and planning a big Night’s Watch crow chest piece in the near future. In 2019 I went on an extended trip through Europe, syncing my travels with the final season so I’d be in King’s Landing (aka Dubrovnik, Croatia) for the very last episode.

Unfortunately, the day fell a little flat: like a lot of people, I didn’t feel entirely satisfied with the way the show ended. Once the wound wasn’t quite so raw, I decided to turn my disappointment into something positive: I’d write my own Season 8, and turn it into a radio play podcast!

I’d written a few bits and pieces previously, including a “Robert’s Rebellion” prequel series, but never anything that made it beyond my laptop’s “Documents” folder.

I chose to write an alternate Season 8 not from a place of negativity or an attitude of “I can do better than that”, but rather as a way of crafting my own sense of closure on a series I love, in a way that more closely aligned with my own understanding of the characters and their story arcs. To paraphrase a late cameo in my own Season 8, this pod is not how I think the show should have ended, just “one of” the ways it could have ended.

When I finished writing the scripts in late summer of 2021, I realised I wasn’t ready just yet to leave the Westeros sandbox and began reaching out in various forums online in the hope of finding like-minded people to join me in seeing how far we could carry things beyond the page. The internet can be a scary place, especially when you’re putting yourself out there with any kind of personal and creative endeavor, so I was hugely but pleasantly surprised to receive a response that was almost without exception positive, enthusiastic, and encouraging. Within a few weeks, I’d put together a wonderfully talented cast of professional actors, amateur-dramatics enthusiasts, first-time performers, and Game of Thrones obsessives.

A few things I’d never done before I started this project: produced anything, directed anyone, used audio editing software, solicited actors on the internet, commissioned a piece of art, built a website, spent an hour deciding between three different “squelch” sound effects, or released a podcast. It’s been a fun, frustrating, exciting, and exhausting experience, but I couldn’t be more proud of the final product and grateful to the talented people that gave their time and creative energies to help bring it to life.

Game of Thrones: Season 8 Redux releases a new episode every Sunday, with ten episodes of roughly sixty minutes each in total.

We have tried our very best to reach as high a quality of production as possible with zero past experience and next-to-zero budget: instead of a recording studio, we had Zoom; instead of an audio tech with top-end gear, we had me and Audacity. I really hope the pod will find an audience that’s forgiving of our rougher edges and imperfections and engage with the pod on its own terms: as a genuine labour of love.

More info: gots8r.com | Facebook | youtube.com