The final 6 'Game of Thrones' episodes might end up feeling like a full season, thank the gods

As Game of Thrones Season 7 approaches, we can't help but look ahead to the show's final year -- which may not air until 2019, if we truly are trapped in the Darkest Timeline, which is what it feels like right now.

Season 8 will only be six episodes long (following on from Season 7's seven installments), and that's just not enough Game of Thrones for our liking, even if HBO is already hard at work on potential spinoffs.

But at the Con of Thrones convention in Nashville this past weekend, the show's sound designer, Paula Fairfield, gave us some hope about those six precious episodes -- namely, that they could all be feature-length.

For comparison purposes, most Game of Thrones episodes average around 55 minutes. The longest episode to date is the Season 6 finale, "The Winds of Winter," which clocked in at 68 minutes, and rumor has it that the Season 7 finale will easily beat it, with HBO's schedule currently indicating that it will be 81 minutes long.

At Con of Thrones, Fairfield seemed to confirm this -- ish -- telling the audience that the Season 7 finale is expected to be 82 minutes (close enough), despite the rest of the episodes sticking to the hour mark for the most part.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

But even better, she said that the producers are considering making every episode of Season 8 "feature-length," essentially giving us six movie-length episodes.

If that ends up being accurate and every episode is at least an hour and 20 minutes -- and it's impossible to tell at this stage, given that Season 8 hasn't started filming yet, let alone been edited down to a final version -- we could end up with eight or nine hours in Season 8, despite the shorter episode order. That's almost like having a full season!

It won't stop the series finale from coming around far too soon, of course, but we'll take any silver lining we can get right now.