Warning: The following post contains spoilers for Game of Thrones all the way through, leading up to Sunday’s series finale.
• NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation made a prediction about the Game of Thrones finale back during the show’s final season in 2015.
• That season took place in the then-future year of 2017.
• Ben Wyatt, Adam Scott’s character, is a Game of Thrones super fan.
Fans of NBC’s beloved sitcom Parks and Recreation probably recall that the final season of the show saw Leslie, Ben, Ron Swanson, and everyone else jump forward three years into the future. With that setup for an entire season, the Parks writing team had some fun with predictions, even managing to correctly predict the Chicago Cubs winning their first World Series in 108 years. As it turns out, the show took a shot in the dark at the Game of Thrones series finale that may have had a few speckles of truth to it as well.
As the clip from Parks’ Season 7, Episode 4 episode “Leslie and Ron” shows, the ever-optimistic Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) is discussing the Game of Thrones finale with her superfan husband, Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott).
“Game of Thrones is on tonight, it’s the series finale!” Leslie proclaims. “Khaleesi is marrying Jack Sparrow. God, that show has really gone off the rails.”
“Look,” Ben says, wiping his head in exhaustion. “It makes sense if you’ve read the books!”
While this prediction isn’t entirely accurate to what we’ve seen play out on screen, the mere mention of Jack Sparrow has to count for something. Back in 2015, no one particularly expected the undeniably Sparrow-esque Euron Greyjoy of HBO’s Thrones to exist—and while he’s not marrying Khaleesi, he did come close to marrying Cersei.
By almost any measure, good or bad, the “off the rails” part is pretty accurate. If Thrones were on the rails, it would be pretty boring! Execution aside, Daenerys going full ‘Mad Queen’ is definitely more fun to watch play out than an orderly succession of power between Cersei, Jon Snow, and Dany. I don’t think anyone wanted that. But things sure are going awry, just as Leslie and Ben predicted.
This isn’t the first time recently that Parks and Recreation has found its way into the blockbuster pop culture conversation. Amy Poehler recently said that she was “Avengers-style ready” to once again don her Leslie Knope blazer.
“Mike Schur, our captain, is working on, like, 50 shows right now but I have my suit ready. I’m Avengers-style ready to put it on at any time,” she said in an interview with EW. “Again, I should probably play harder to get but that’s really not me or Leslie’s style so you know, I’m avail.”
Credit to Michael Schur and the rest of the Parks writing team for the foresight—honestly, back in 2015, if they wrote half the stuff that we’ve seen happen over the course of Seasons 7 and 8, the laughs probably would’ve hit just as hard as the Johnny Depp pirate name drop did.
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