Fifteen Ways HBO Can End The "Game Of Thrones" TV Series

To absolutely no one's surprise, this week HarperCollins announced that The Winds Of Winter, the long-awaited sixth novel in the Game Of Thrones series, would not be released in 2015. According to spokesmen for the company, famed author George R.R. Martin's constant procrastination, TV interviews and globe-trotting have delayed the book until at least 2016.

This means it's now an absolute certainty that HBO's Game Of Thrones TV series will finish before the books do. The upcoming Season 5 will use up the last of the existing book contents, leaving showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss with the unenviable task of completing the storyline without the novels as a guide. 

Benioff and Weiss have already deviated significantly from the books, but it remains to be seen if they'll be able to come up with a compelling and satisfying ending without Martin's involvement.

To help them out a bit, here are Fifteen Ways HBO Can End The Game Of Thrones TV Series:

• Tyrion wakes to find himself in an antiseptic white bedroom, decorated in the Louis XVI style. He slowly transforms into a series of progressively older versions of himself, until he finally appears as an ancient man lying in bed, staring at a black monolith in the center of the room. He reaches toward the monolith and morphs into a fetus, floating serenely inside a glowing ball of light in outer space, gazing at the Earth.

• As Winter finally arrives, it's revealed that Elsa from Frozen is the leader of the White Walkers. She covers the entire continent of Westeros in hundreds of feet of ice and snow and takes over King's Landing. She then sings a rousing rendition of "Let It Go" (complete with White Walkers as backup dancers) as the credits roll.

• Following the success of such stunning events as The Red Wedding, Benioff and Weiss fill the final season with even more shockers, such as The Orange Wake, The Yellow Bris, The Green House Warming, The Blue Baby Shower, The Indigo Bar Mitzvah and The Violet Cocktail Party.

• After years of bitter struggle, Stannis Baratheon finally wins the Iron Throne in the last episode. He puts an orange peel in his mouth and prances around the throne room to entertain his deformed daughter Shireen. He suddenly chokes on the peel and falls to the floor dead. Fade to black.

• Benioff and Weiss create a brand new character named "Georgion R. R. Martinus," who will be brutally mutilated, tortured and kicked for the entirety of every episode of the final season. 

• The White Walker army advances on Westeros, covering the land in ice and freezing the entire populace solid. Every episode of the next two seasons will consist of nothing but shots of the various characters encased motionless in blocks of ice, until Martin's books finally catch up to the show.

• In the final scene of the series, Tyrion Lannister lies on his deathbed. As the maesters tend to him with herbs and boiled wine, he whispers, "Rosebud" and drops a snow globe onto the floor.

• The showrunners fill the last two seasons with a nothing but a series of naked women parading past the Iron Throne, filling the screen with hours and hours of those sweet, sweet jiggling tits.

• Jon Snow finds a book written by his father Ned Stark, titled How I Met Thy Mother. It takes him nine years to read the enormous tome, only to find at the end that his mother Tracy died six years earlier. He's very unsatisfied by this ending and stabs the book repeatedly.

• Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie will improvise an ending to the series, complete with oversized foam props.

• Characters will continue to be killed off at an alarming rate until there's literally no one left, resulting in a final season that consists of nothing but various shots of empty cities and barren landscapes, as the wind howls mournfully on the soundtrack.

• Melisandre, the Red Priestess of the Lord Of Light, uses her powers to open a portal to another dimension, sending Jon Snow and the Night Watch to present day Georgia, which is overrun by a plague of zombies. There they join forces with Rick Grimes and his crew, spending the last season slaying the undead.

• In the final episode of the series, the screen fades to black except for a circle of bright light in the center of the floor. The ghost of Ned Stark walks onscreen with a broom. He then "sweeps up" the spotlight as it gets smaller and smaller until it's a tiny dot. He "sweeps" the dot under a rug and exits the screen.

• In the series ender, Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister ride their three dragons into battle, burning the assembled army of White Walkers below as they retake King's Landing. Suddenly, Bob Hartley awakens in the bedroom of his Chicago apartment. He turns to his wife Emily and quips, "That's the last time I eat Thai food right before bed!"

• In the final episode of the series, the action abruptly cuts to author George R. R. Martin, seated in an overstuffed easy chair and wearing his trademark Greek fisherman's hat. He turns to the camera, winks and says, "How do you think it'll end, audience?