LOS ANGELES: “Game of Thrones” fans will have to wait until 2019 for the planned final season of the award-winning medieval fantasy series, a gap of more than a year since the end of season seven.
Cable channel HBO said that “Game of Thrones” would return in 2019 for a six-episode final season. It did not specify the month.
The series is HBO’s biggest hit ever with some 30 million viewers in the US alone and an army of devoted fans worldwide.
The final season of the Emmy Award-winning show is expected to reveal which of the warring families in the fictional Seven Kingdoms of Westeros will win the multigenerational struggle for control of the Iron Throne.
Production on the final season started in October, and filming is expected to last until mid-2018. HBO’s head of programming, Casey Bloys, has said multiple endings will be filmed to avoid leaks or hacks of how the saga ends.
Show creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss told Entertainment Weekly in 2016 that they wanted to make the series finale as spectacular as possible. HBO said on Thursday that Benioff and Weiss will also direct the final season.
The seventh season ended last August with an average of more than 30 million US viewers per episode across multiple platforms. Some of its seven episodes were more than an hour long.
The long gap until the final season would give author George R. R. Martin the chance to finish one or two new “Game of Thrones” books that he said in July he was working on.
The television series has already advanced beyond the events of Martin’s five published “A Song of Ice and Fire” series of novels.
‘Game of Thrones’ last season set for 2019
‘Game of Thrones’ last season set for 2019
Fans bid farewell to Japan’s only pandas
TOKYO: Panda lovers in Tokyo said goodbye on Sunday to a hugely popular pair of the bears that are set to return to China, leaving Japan without the beloved animals for the first time in half a century.
Loaned out as part of China’s “panda diplomacy” program, the distinctive black-and-white animals have symbolized friendship between Beijing and Tokyo since the normalization of diplomatic ties in 1972.
Some visitors at Ueno Zoological Gardens were left teary-eyed as they watched Japan’s only two pandas Lei Lei and Xiao Xiao munch on bamboo.
The animals are expected to leave for China on Tuesday following a souring of relations between Asia’s two largest economies.
“I feel like seeing pandas can help create a connection with China too, so in that sense I really would like pandas to come back to Japan again,” said Gen Takahashi, 39, a Tokyo resident who visited the zoo with his wife and their two-year-old daughter.
“Kids love pandas as well, so if we could see them with our own eyes in Japan, I’d definitely want to go.”
The pandas’ abrupt return was announced last month after Japan’s conservative premier Sanae Takaichi hinted Tokyo could intervene militarily in the event of any attack on Taiwan.
Her comment provoked the ire of Beijing, which regards the island as its own territory.
The 4,400 lucky winners of an online lottery took turns viewing the four-year-old twins at Ueno zoo while others gathered nearby, many sporting panda-themed shirts, bags and dolls to celebrate the moment.
Mayuko Sumida traveled several hours from the central Aichi region in the hope of seeing them despite not winning the lottery.
“Even though it’s so big, its movements are really funny-sometimes it even acts kind of like a person,” she said, adding that she was “totally hooked.”
“Japan’s going to be left with zero pandas. It feels kind of sad,” she said.
Their departure might not be politically motivated, but if pandas return to Japan in the future it would symbolize warming relations, said Masaki Ienaga, a professor at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University and expert in East Asian international relations.
“In the future...if there are intentions of improving bilateral ties on both sides, it’s possible that (the return of) pandas will be on the table,” he told AFP.
