Game of Thrones premiered on April 17, 2011 and ended eight seasons later in May 2019. Fifteen years after the premiere, one of the simplest ways to appreciate the scale of the series is to look at how far its central characters traveled between their first and final episodes.
This is a spoiler-heavy timeline for the HBO series, not the novels. “Last appearance” means the character’s final on-screen episode in the original eight-season run.
Characters whose arcs span almost the whole series
Jon Snow
First: S1E1, “Winter Is Coming.” Last: S8E6, “The Iron Throne.” The boy introduced at Winterfell ends the series riding north beyond the Wall.
Tyrion Lannister
First: S1E1. Last: S8E6. He moves from sharp-tongued family outsider to Hand under multiple rulers and survives the political machine that destroys much of his family.
Sansa Stark
First: S1E1. Last: S8E6. Her path runs from romantic dreams of court life to ruling an independent North.
Arya Stark
First: S1E1. Last: S8E6. The child resisting court expectations becomes an assassin, survivor and finally an explorer sailing west.
Bran Stark
First: S1E1. Last: S8E6. His fall from the tower starts one of the show’s strangest transformations and ends with him chosen as king.
Daenerys Targaryen
First: S1E1. Last: S8E6. Her story begins in exile across the Narrow Sea and ends after the conquest of King’s Landing.
Two arcs that close before the finale
Cersei Lannister
First: S1E1. Last: S8E5, “The Bells.” She spends most of the series converting family status into direct power, only to die beneath the Red Keep as the city falls.
Jaime Lannister
First: S1E1. Last: S8E5. Introduced as the man who pushes Bran from a tower, he develops one of the show’s most contested redemption arcs before returning to Cersei.
Characters who changed the show after season one
Stannis Baratheon
First: S2E1, “The North Remembers.” Last: S5E10, “Mother’s Mercy.” His claim to the throne grows into a military and moral collapse.
Oberyn Martell
First: S4E1, “Two Swords.” Last: S4E8, “The Mountain and the Viper.” In only a handful of episodes, he becomes one of the series’ most memorable arrivals and exits.
The show was built on distance
First-and-last images are powerful because Game of Thrones constantly reassigns identity: hostages become rulers, heirs become exiles, killers become protectors, and characters who seemed central vanish abruptly. The before/after is not just cosmetic aging — it is geography, power and allegiance.
The biggest transformation is how few characters end where they began
Game of Thrones repeatedly used movement — across houses, continents, loyalties and identities — as character development. Seeing the first and last episodes side by side turns eight sprawling seasons into ten compact journeys.