With its eighth and final season prepared to premiere in two months, it is hard to believe Game of Thrones had such a troubled production history at HBO to get off the ground. With an estimated 90 percent of its original pilot episode re-filmed, the episode's original script has surfaced teasing a much different start to the popular fantasy series.

At Texas A&M's Cushing Memorial Library in College Station, Texas, author George R.R. Martin has stored his original manuscripts and, among them the original pilot episode script written by showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. The draft contains sequences that were unused by the final version of the episode that premiered in April 2011.

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Among the scenes included in this early draft was an altered opening where surviving Night's Watch ranger, Will, overhears the White Walkers conversing amongst themselves and launching into a prayer, much different encounters between Cersei Lannister and her brother Jaime and Daenerys Targaryen and Khal Drogo, a drunken sequence between Jon Snow and Tyrion, an early meeting with Prince Joffrey and Catelyn Stark actively positioning her daughter Sansa to become Queen of Westeros.

Perhaps most interestingly, the original script contained a sequence with Cersei secretly following her husband Robert Baratheon and Ned Stark into the crypts of Winterfell. After witnessing Robert leave a feather on the grave of his former betrothed, Lyanna Stark, Cersei takes the feather after they've left and has it burned. Given the feather's prominence in the first trailer for Season 8 of the series, this may have changed things considerably for the final season's character dynamics.

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Returning on HBO Sunday, April 14, for its eighth and final season, Game of Thrones stars Kit Harington as Jon Snow, Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen, Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, Lena Headey as Cersei Lannister and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Jaime Lannister.

(via The Huffington Post)