No, don't rush to blame Jon Snow this time, though we could conceivably blame him for many things including climate change, England's dismal Euro football performance and Brexit. Instead, the writer-producers, talking on, of all places, Ultimate Fighting podcast UFC Unfiltered (as caught by the team from Hitfix) say that they need to wait for chillier, moodier weather now that winter has well and truly come to Westeros.
“We don’t have an air date yet,” Benioff and Weiss said. “We’re starting a bit later because at the end of this season, ‘Winter is here’ – and that means that sunny weather doesn’t really serve our purposes any more. So we kind of pushed everything down the line, so we could get some grim, grey weather even in the sunnier places that we shoot.”
Viewers were already preparing to accept the idea that Season 7 will be shorter (potentially seven episodes), but now it looks like we'll all just need to keep waiting, potentially another month or two longer. Maybe we should all just chip in for a fake snow machine?
Meanwhile, why not check out our reviews of the most recent Thrones season and our speculation for the episodes to come?