Game of Thrones S8 E1 Data Visualization Recap

4 min readApr 19, 2019

This is the first in a series of recaps I’ll be posting for the final season of Game of Thrones based on work I’ve described in “The Ultimate Game of Thrones Dataset”, “32 Game of Thrones Data Visualizations”, and “19 More Game of Thrones Data Visualizations.”

By now you’ve probably scoured the web and found recaps galore detailing what Game of Thrones’ Season 8 premiere episode “ Winterfell” means for the remainder of the show, the parallels it drew to “Winter is Coming” (Season 1 Episode 1), and all sorts of theories about what’s going to happen next week. This isn’t that sort of article. Instead, I’ll be posting a weekly data update and some representative visualizations that describe the episode.

If you want to see these visualizations for past episodes, you can check out any episode here. And if you want to see/play with the dataset, it’s on github.

When are characters on screen?

Turns out it’s much easier to see co-occurrence relationships like this than in the full series version of the same visualization. I particularly like the exclamation point of Bran waiting for Jaime at the end of the episode.

For how long are characters on screen?

Not surprisingly, Jon and Daenerys are on screen the most, but I was surprised how (relatively) little screen time Arya had. Maybe it’s because she was always lurking…

Which locations are on screen?

No surprise that most of the episode took place within the walls of Winterfell, but it was nice to see some other Northern locales highlighted, too.

How long is spent in each region?

It’s rare for an episode to take place in so few regions. Only “Blackwater” (Season 2, Episode 9), “Watchers on the Wall” (Season 4, Episode 9), and “Battle of the Bastards” (Season 6, Episode 9) have taken place in fewer than 3 regions. It’ll be interesting to see whether this is a trend that continues through the series finale.

How long is spent in each location?

More than half of the episode took place at Winterfell. Makes sense.

What’s the distribution of locations?

Most of the episode took place in the North (light blue), but there were still parallel events taking place on the Narrow Sea (dark green) and in the Crownlands (green).

View the interactive version here.

What’s the gender balance on screen?

It’s a bit surprising to see that time spent with equal female/male representation is only about a third of the episode. Another third was more male, and the last third is all male. Not what I expected…

View the interactive version here.

For how long is each House on screen?

Ok, so Houses Tully, Frey, Martell, and Tyrell are all dead. Sure. And I’m not counting Gendry as House Baratheon.

It’s nice to see the Starks home in Winterfell, that’s for sure. And I guess Jon Snow should start counting as a Stark-Targaryen at some point… but maybe I’ll wait for him to actually accept his parentage first.

Which locations are in the opening sequence?

This was the first episode in the entire series where the starting location of the opening sequence was not King’s Landing. Instead, passing through the broken Wall at Eastwatch the first location was Last Hearth. Then to Winterfell and finally to King’s Landing. Makes you wonder if things are happening in reverse for a reason?

Next week

Next week I’ll be sure to include a few more visualizations, including ones about how many words each character speaks, how many non-Common Tongue languages are spoken (this episode only had a bit of Dothraki), and the gender balance of words spoken. I still need to work up some subtitles I found online for this episode.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this data description of the episode. Let me know if there are other visualizations you think ought to be included or other data that could be collected in general?

Thanks for reading!