Is Cersei still pregnant in the new Game of Thrones season?

This post contains frank discussion of several plot points from Season 8, Episode 1 of Game of Thrones. If you’re not all caught up or would prefer not to be spoiled, now is the time to leave. Seriously, this is your last chance and you won’t have another so get while the getting is good.

The Season 8 premiere of Game of Thrones added a curious wrinkle to one of the most hotly contested questions in the fandom. Is Queen Cersei Lannister, first of her name, really pregnant with Jaime Lannister’s baby? A big clue that she was, at least for Tyrion, was the fact that the notoriously wine-soaked monarch was abstaining from her favourite Dornish reds and Arbor golds last season. But when her new bedfellow, Euron Greyjoy, promised he’d put a prince in her, the queen looked thoughtful and teary-eyed before taking a deliberate swig. Fans will already be familiar with this shot from the Season 8 trailer.

Was the queen actually pregnant last season? Or was she, as many fans wondered, actually lying about the Lannister bun in her oven in order to manipulate both Jaime and Tyrion? If she was actually pregnant, is she not anymore?

The Season 7 scripts, at least, certainly seem to indicate that Cersei was, at one point, carrying Jaime’s baby. When Cersei first tells Jaime about her pregnancy, the script reads: “She nods, it’s true. […] Her happiness is contagious. They get another chance at family. This time with no one standing in their way.” And when Tyrion later deduces her secret, the script makes it clear that Cersei is caught off guard. Him finding out was apparently not part of some master plot: “Tyrion sees what he sees and knows what it means. He can hardly believe it, but knows it to be true. […] She stays silent for too long, long enough to tell him that he’s right. And once she knows he knows, she can think of nothing else to say.”

Some book details also back up the notion that Cersei was telling the truth in Season 7. In the George R.R. Martin novel A Feast for Crows, Cersei notices her clothing has gotten tighter. “Her wretched washerwomen had shrunk several of her old gowns so they no longer fit… Cersei had ordered the value of the gowns deducted from the women’s wages, a more elegant solution.” Close readers have been arguing over whether this means Cersei is pregnant (likely not with Jaime’s baby, given her book infidelities), or just gaining weight due to her excessive fondness for wine. (Nobody but a delusional Cersei blames the poor washerwomen.)

Since Feast came out in 2005, this debate has been the 14-year-long version of Season 6’s contentious “Is Sansa Pregnant” theory. But another book detail means that even those readers who thought she might be pregnant never thought Queen Cersei would carry this new baby to term. In the context of both the book and show, a very young Cersei received the following prophecy from a fortune teller, Maggy the Frog, when she was just a girl:

Cersei: Will the king and I have children? Maggy: Oh, aye. Six-and-ten for him, and three for you. Gold shall be their crowns and gold their shrouds, she said. And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.

O.K., so three kids for Cersei—Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen—right? So Cersei can’t have another kid, right? There’s a portentous passage in Feast that many take as foreshadowing a miscarriage for Cersei:

So even those who have believed for over a decade (or even just an off-season) that Cersei was actually pregnant, also believed she wouldn’t stay pregnant. There was even a very strong rumour that Season 7 would end with her on-screen miscarriage. What seems to have happened, instead, is that the miscarriage happened off-screen and between seasons. But why is the show being so oblique about it?

One reason may have to do with Tyrion. He is staking his reputation with Sansa, Dany, Jon, and the rest that Cersei can be trusted. We already know that not to be the case given Cersei’s avowal to betray the North last season. But Tyrion seemed to believe his sister based largely on the notion that her pregnancy had changed her. As he put it while making his case in Winterfell, she now has something to “live for.” It’s possible the writers want to keep things vague as they pertain to Tyrion, Cersei, their behind-closed-doors deal, and the state of play in the uneasy Lannister alliance.

In a behind-the-scenes interview last season, show-runner DB Weiss said: “All that’s ever mattered to Cersei is her children and, in relatively short order, Cersei has lost all of her children. She now is in a very dark place, and all she really has left is power for the sake of power.” Show-runner David Benioff went even further, explaining that, from their point of view, Cersei’s entire humanity was bound to her motherhood: “What is Cersei without her children? What prevents her from being a monster? The answer is nothing.”

So if Cersei is not now (or maybe never was, if the writers decide to be revisionist) pregnant, then that probably puts her firmly in monster territory. So what does that make Tyrion? A monster’s unwitting accomplice? Oh my.

This article originally appeared on Vanityfair.com

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