As dribs and drabs of information come in about the closely guarded eighth season of Game of Thrones, what was once an almost endless sea of possibilities for the final six episodes has started to narrow. Last month, some minor casting news blew a hole in one particularly fun fan theory—and this month, the news that a significant character likely won’t be back at all has effectively killed another. In case you’re keeping yourself pure for the final stretch, we’ll hide this latest news behind a spoiler wall. But if you are keeping yourself pure, perhaps it’s best not to click on links like these in the first place.
In a two-part interview with the Metro (first spotted by fan site Watchers on the Wall), Meera Reed actress Ellie Kendrick reveals we’ve likely seen the last of the girl who helped drag Bran to the end of the world and back. When asked if she was returning for the show’s eighth and final season, Kendrick said: “Not as far as I know. I don’t know. It’s funny because I always get asked, ‘What’s going to happen? Are you in it?’ Genuinely the truth is I don’t know. I wait for the phone to ring and then I find out, but it hasn’t rung so I don’t know. I’ll find out whether I am or not at some point, but for now I haven’t been notified so I’m yet to discover.”
There’s some wiggle room in that answer, for sure—but given that Season 8 has already started filming, it seems as though Kendrick would most likely know one way or another at this point. Her frankly painful Season 7 goodbye with the artist formerly known as Bran did have an air of finality to it. For Kendrick, though, there’s a silver lining: “It was a sad day to say farewell to young Isaac [Hempstead Wright]—not so young now and also very tall, which means he was so difficult to put on the sled, which I actually did, although he’s a lot taller than me. So while I was sad to say farewell, I was also slightly relieved for my spine because I no longer have to be dragging him across any wintered land.”
With Meera unlikely to return, that puts the final nail in the (frankly always unbelievable) fan theory that Meera Reed is secretly the twin sister of Jon Snow. Those of us who always disliked this Skywalker-esque twist believed its popularity was based largely on the fact that Ellie Kendrick and actor Kit Harington have similarly curly mops of hair. Kendrick agreed in a 2016 interview with the Radio Times: “I think it’s just because we both have curly hair man, because if you’ve read the books they’re not really that similar.” But the theory still had its strong believers, even after the Season 6 reveal of Jon Snow as the only baby in the Tower of Joy with a dying Lyanna Stark. Now, with Meera most likely gone for good, we can call it a day on this one, yeah?
Meera’s probable Season 8 absence also means one more disappointment for a certain segment of the Game of Thrones book fandom. Some readers have long hoped that Meera’s father, Howland Reed, would appear on both page and screen to spill some of the secrets of the battle of the Tower of Joy and Jon Snow’s birth. Howland, show watchers may remember, was the enterprising friend who saved young Ned Stark outside the Tower in a Season 6 flashback. As a fun nod for book readers, that young version of Meera’s dad was even wearing a lizard-lion insignia—the sigil of House Reed.
Because Howland was there when Ned Stark found out about and took responsibility for his nephew, book readers believed he would be the one to tell an adult Jon Snow all about his true parentage. This belief was so strong it gave rise to satellite fan theories, like the notion that the High Sparrow (played on the TV series by Jonathan Pryce) was actually an older Howland Reed in disguise. But now, without Meera coming back, it seems likely that the older version of the Reed patriarch will never appear on the show at all. Now that Bran knows all, the story doesn’t need the last surviving Tower of Joy witnesses to spill the dirt to Jon.
That doesn’t, however, mean that an older Howland Reed will never appear in the books. There are so many changes between page and screen at this point that Howland’s book fate will only be set in stone once George R.R. Martin finishes his saga. So keep those crackpot Howland Reed theories coming, book readers. We‘ll need something to occupy us all during the long off season.
