A Starbucks Cup in Winterfell: A (Fictional) Tale
Somehow, a coffee cup made it into the latest ‘Game of Thrones’ episode. This is its (imagined) journey.
It wasn’t pumpkin spice season.
Kirk knew this, he did, but it was not his place—was it anyone’s?—to correct Emilia Clarke. The Mother of Dragons, bewigged, befurred, sleepy, imperious, had demanded a pumpkin spice latte, and so Kirk would find her one. The Game of Thrones crew took turns making specialty runs for the cast, which was one thing in Dubrovnik, but quite another here in a village north of Belfast, where the powers that be had ordered some kind of only-filmed-at-night death match whose winner so far seemed to be mud. Kirk had lately seen the cinematographers going camera by camera, taping thick sheaves of blue-black filters over the lenses by hand when they thought no one was looking. Strange, he thought.
It was a 41-minute drive to Starbucks store no. 9,817,910. This one Starbucks was the only one, in all of Northern Ireland, that opened at 3 a.m. Kirk pulled into the parking lot at 2:58. He shivered. The lights were still dark.
In the parking lot, he scratched at his wrist. In recent days, Kirk had developed a sort of rash on his left arm, one that seemed to be spreading, flakily, down to his wrist. I’ll get it looked at when I’m back in L.A., he told himself. He frowned, and a light in the Starbucks flipped on.
Inside the empty store, he sighed. “A pumpkin spice latte, hot,” he said.
In two months in Northern Ireland, his understanding of the local accent had grown progressively worse. Predictably, the woman in the green apron said something he did not understand, something that ended with her scowling and looking at his coat. It was, technically, not a coat—his real coat, a knockoff goose down one that had on occasion kept him nearly warm, had gone missing on set two weeks earlier, and so he’d been gifted one he was told belonged to someone named Eric, who he was informed didn’t need it anymore. It was made of fake leather, with huge studded shoulder pads, and fully coated in synthetic blood. Yesterday, Kirk found a kind of bandanna in one of the pockets. It smelled horrible.
Kirk stared at the barista, who had begun to look slightly alarmed. “Please,” he said. “Please, God, just give me a pumpkin spice latte so I can go back to work.” One of his eyes had developed a twitch, and he felt it twinge now. “Emilia needs this. The queen. Please.”
“For the realm,” he muttered.
“What?” the barista asked. He noticed her glance at the CCTV camera by the door.
“Nothing,” he said.
She pursed her lips, looked again at his coat, and turned to begin making the drink.
Kirk was nearly back when disaster struck. He’d made it to the set, where the great plywood towers of Winterfell loomed. He’d made it through the mud around the crew parking lot. He’d made it past the large field where, for reasons unknown to him, several hundred plastic scimitars had been scattered haphazardly and abandoned. But then, as he tried to navigate the second large trench between him and the castle, one of his studded shoulder pads snagged on a spear—a real one, Jesus, why would they make this thing actually sharp?—and he tripped. He saw it in slow motion: Emilia’s latte leaving his hand, a beautiful white cup flipping through the dark Northern Irish night, a great fountain of pumpkin spice, a splat as the cup, empty, hit the mud.
“No!” he cried, and scrambled to the cup, which lay sideways on the ground. He picked it up and gasped.
The cup, which he had seen spill in entirety moments before, wasn’t empty at all. Instead, as Kirk picked it up, he realized it was full and hot, as if nothing had ever happened. As if it had come back to life. He stared at it. How? Then he straightened himself and continued onward.
Emilia sat at the head table, resplendent in white plastic furs that he worried, privately, were probably flammable. The actors were between takes; his bosses Benioff and Weiss had gone missing somewhere near the makeup trailer. “Emilia,” said Kirk. “Your latte.”
He set it down on the table in front of her. His arm itched. Emilia, smelling sweet not-exactly-pumpkin odors, nodded her thanks.
Kirk dabbed his brow. “Emilia, there’s one other thing,” he said. She raised her well-penciled eyebrows.
“On the way here, I dropped your latte. It fell, and—it was ruined, Emilia. I saw it happen. Ruined. Empty. Gone. But then when I picked it up, it was as though nothing ever happened. All the pumpkin spice was just—it was right there, as before.”
A silence followed. Then she shrugged. “Am I supposed to care?”
Kirk frowned. “I mean, it was gone—dead—and now it’s just … here, totally fine.”
“So?” she asked.
“I, uh,” he mumbled, “Nevermind.”
He turned to go. “Quiet on set!” somebody called.
“Is that a Starbucks cup?” someone yelled out. “Who the fuck brought that in here?”
“No one!” Kirk chirped. “I don’t see anything.”
“Ah, whatever,” the man muttered. And the cameras began to roll.
Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer.
