For several years, Game of Thrones has suffered the problem of leaks and the last season was a disaster on that front. HBO’s associates erroneously aired/leaked two full episodes even before their scheduled air date, however, the most devastating leak was when the scripts of the season were leaked and that turned out to be nearly a 100% accurate iteration of almost every major thing that was aimed at shocking the fans.
HBO is gunning to ensure that none of that happens this time around during the finale season and they are working hard at producing an absolutely spoiler free season for GOT. The last season has only six episodes. However, the scripts of the episodes are being kept under lock and key, and even the actors playing various characters are not being allowed access to the same.
The talkative Liam Cunningham, a.k.a. Davos Seaworth shared this update.
“I got six of [the scripts], I’ve got them all,” Cunningham told IGN, “but I can’t open them because of all the security, and I can’t walk it out.”
He can’t take them out because those are digital copies accessible to be read-only at the Game of Thrones studio located in Belfast. He requires authorization to access those digital copies, and as per the scenario, they won’t be unlocked till the time filming is set to commence. Such digital scripts can’t be taken out of the studio or copied with ease, though, we hope that they are kept in offline mode to prevent any hacking and avoid what happened last year. It might just be a high-end iPad sort of device studded into a wall in a zone that has no Wifi access, and only the showrunners have a code which they will punch in only when the time for the actors to shoot their scenes comes. That might feel crazy. However, that might be exactly the sort of thing that they have put in place.
The other strategy that HBO has adopted to eliminate spoilers is by misleading the media who might try to sneak into the set personally or through drones, and they have reportedly planned to shoot several fake scenes and misleading endings for the series. This was, however, refuted later by Jaime Lannister himself.
Nikolai Coster-Waldau laughed out loud at such suggestion saying it would be unrealistically expensive for them to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and man hours to create and shoot fake scenes. It could be true that this is just a thought seeded by HBO so that if any scene gets leaked then, fans might not take it seriously considering it to be a fake, despite there being no fake scenes at all.
Let’s just hope that the secure handling of the script eliminates all leakage chances. The next thing to deal for HBO is strictly monitoring the access to episodes in the offices of their global associates as that had led to one of the biggest issues last year when two full episodes went out much before their official air date and that too crucial episodes.
The books are a history now, and it is relatively easier to do away with spoilers since millions of readers are not keen to share what they know, however, leaks are still an issue to deal with, and we hope HBO handles things well this time for the greater good of all.
