Game of Thrones Cut a Finale Scene That Explains That Littlefinger Twist

Isaac Hempstead-Wright shot a deleted scene with Sophie Turner for the HBO hit that makes a whole lot of sense

By Lauren Piester Aug 31, 2017 2:00 PMTags
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It's been four days, and we still haven't stopped thinking about that Game of Thrones scene.

Not the one with the incest and Jon Snow's butt (though that's up there in our minds, too), but the one where we thought Sansa (Sophie Turner) was about to have her sister executed until she turned the tables on the table turner himself, Petyr Baelish (Aiden Gillen).

After Sansa convicted him of his many, many crimes, Arya (Maisie Williams) slit his throat, bringing Littlefinger's evil fine tuning of the Stark sisters' relationship to a swift end. While it was a much-deserved ending for the sniveling a--hole and a perfect way to bring the sisters back together, it came completely out of nowhere.

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We had last seen Sansa offering her sister a horrified "WTF" face while Arya brandished a knife in her direction, threatening to kill her and steal her face after explaining that she is now a person who kills people and steals their faces when they betray her. There was a brief moment at the end of that scene where Arya handed Sansa the knife instead, but we didn't see them again until Littlefinger was trying to insinuate to Sansa that Arya really did want to steal her face so she could become Lady of Winterfell.

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Then, Sansa was calling Arya in front of her as if to convict her, until suddenly she was instead convicting Littlefinger of murder, mayhem, and also that time he sold her to a horrible sadistic rapist. It was awesome, but out of the blue. There was no indication that Sansa had stopped trusting Littlefinger, no hint that she and Arya had mended their relationship, and while that surprise was fun, it felt like some potentially gratifying character development opportunity was totally missed.

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In an interview with Variety this week, Isaac Hempstead-Wright revealed that there was another scene that was filmed but cut from the finale, in which Sansa went to Bran and asked him to use his Three-Eyed Raven skills to tell her what Littlefinger was really up to.

"We actually did a scene that clearly got cut, a short scene with Sansa where she knocks on Bran's door and says, 'I need your help,' or something along those lines," Wright said. "So basically, as far as I know, the story was that it suddenly occurred to Sansa that she had a huge CCTV department at her discretion and it might be a good idea to check with him first before she guts her own sister. So she goes to Bran, and Bran tells her everything she needs to know, and she's like, 'Oh, s--t.'"

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While we would have loved another moment with Arya, it is nice to know that Sansa would have realized she had the means to check to make sure she was about to execute the right person. (Sure, her siblings are weird AF now, but she can't deny they're super useful.)

Keeping that full scene in the show might have made the execution scene slightly less impactful, but it would have at least given us some kind of a hint that Sansa knew what she was doing and wasn't being totally manipulated by the realm's master manipulator. It was such a satisfying end to such an awful man that it would have still been good even if we knew it was coming, especially since the whole lead up was so completely unsatisfying. Sansa and Arya should never have gotten that close to murdering each other, no matter what Littlefinger did.

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And for those of you who don't think Littlefinger deserved what he got, allow Sophie Turner to clear that up for you. A fan on Twitter described Littlefinger as a "heartbroken man" and called his execution "fan service," explaining that the way they saw it, "he wanted justice on the society for his humiliation, they looked down on him out of his poor background. He never hurt Sansa."

That's when Turner jumped into the convo.

"Nah.. just willingly sold her to the Boltons…. Who killed her family… who ended up torturing her…. But ur right.. no harm done," she wrote with a big sarcastic thumbs up.

All hail the Lady of Winterfell, who is correct as usual.

Game of Thrones will most likely return to HBO in (shivers) 2019.