For quite a while now, House of the Dragon has frustrated its fans. Following a disjointed debut season, repeatedly disrupted by time jumps and cast changes, Season 2 of HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel smoothed out the story and slowed down the action—so much so that many grew impatient with its talkiness. (Not me, though. I’ll take character intrigue over combat any day.) A plot that seemed to be escalating toward an epic battle culminated, instead, in a relatively quiet season finale. Plans were hatched. Armies were on the march but not yet in conflict. A new rider met her dragon. We’ve been waiting two years to see what happens next.
Emma D'Arcy, left, and Olivia Cooke in the House of the Dragon Season 2 finale —Liam Daniel—HBO
If the episode had a unifying theme, it was plans going awry. In the Season 2 finale, Alicent threw herself on the mercy of her childhood best friend turned stepdaughter turned mortal enemy, Rhaenyra, whose identification of three new, non-noble dragonriders had already put the would-be queen’s Black faction at a great advantage in a war that would, after all, go down in history as the Dance of the Dragons. When the Blacks marched into King’s Landing, Alicent promised, the sadistic prince regent Aemond and his Green forces would be far away; Rhaenyra could waltz right into the Red Keep and take the Iron Throne. All Alicent asked was an escape into quiet exile for herself and her daughter, Helaena. She even seemed open, when Rhaenyra forced the issue, to giving up her son Aegon—the nominal but irreparably wounded Green king—less because he posed a genuine threat to the queen’s rule than as retribution for Rhaenyra’s son Lucerys’ death at the hands of Aemond. The two women spoke of coming together for the greater purpose of ending the war and, in particular, keeping the bloodthirsty Aemond from killing more innocent people. Yet Rhaenyra’s son-for-a-son bargain suggested that, while preferable to the alternative, she was not exactly a paragon of nonviolence, either.
Harry Collett and Emma D'Arcy in House of the Dragon Season 3 —Ollie Upton—HBO
Meanwhile, at Dragonstone, Rhaenyra can’t even get out the door to King’s Landing. Her bratty heir, Jacaerys, doesn’t trust Alicent; in his teenage wisdom, he decides that his mother has fallen for “a ruse, cloaked in stale friendship” and that what actually awaits her at the capital is a trap. So, with help from the guards sworn to protect and obey Rhaenyra, he locks her inside her chambers, a queen held prisoner by her own son and staff. (After his spirit quest with Alys Rivers, last season, Daemon has become enlightened enough to submit to his wife’s rule. But he’s too busy, now, smashing skulls on the battlefield to help stop the sexist madness at home.) Then Jace and his dragon, Vermax, take off on an unsanctioned mission to help Lord Corlys’ fleet, with a somewhat wary Baela and her dragon, Moondancer, in tow.
Steve Toussaint in House of the Dragon Season 3 —Ollie Upton—HBO
As ever in Game of Thrones world, the violence is vivid. There are swordfights, crossbows, drownings, hand-to-hand combat between warriors up to their necks in seawater, split-second closeups of bloody viscera flayed out on ships’ decks, destruction on every scale. When the dragons enter the fray, it’s devastating not just because they can flame-broil an entire crew with a single breath, but because their hubristic young riders are so unprepared for what they’ve gotten themselves into. Having taken a wild first spin on the feral dragon Sheepstealer in the opening scene of the premiere, Baela’s sister Rhaena spots the chaos in the Gullet and rides in “to help.” Once there, she’s horrified to find that she can’t control Sheepstealer, who starts chasing Vermax, as a confused Jace assumes, until he’s close enough to recognize Rhaena, that this dragon and its rider are Greens. The friendly fire ends with Vermax dead in the water; Jace finds a floating board to cling to, à la Jack in Titanic, but is immediately riddled with arrows.
Abigail Thorn in House of the Dragon Season 3 —Ollie Upton—HBO
By the end of the episode, we’re down countless combatants, umpteen ships, one heir, one dragon, an eccentric admiral, and possibly even a Sea Snake. (I can’t imagine Condal would kill off a character as important as Corlys without actually showing us his final breath, but at the very least, he’s going to be in rough shape.) Rhaena is saddled with a lifetime’s worth of guilt—not to mention the all-but-inevitable wrath of Rhaenyra—over the death of Jace, who, as those who’ve studied the tangled Targaryen family tree will recall, is both her cousin and her stepbrother. Aegon and Aemond are still alive, though each is also in mortal danger. Rhaenyra is no closer, physically at least, to the Iron Throne than she was at the end of Season 2. The irony is that she and Alicent made their secret alliance with the stated aim of saving Westeros from precisely the kind of horror that played out in the Gullet.
So, yeah, we got that battle everyone’s been clamoring for since Biden was in the White House. It had some thrilling moments! But in the end, the Battle of the Gullet was a feel-bad experience, rife with unforced errors and wasted potential, its only real glimpse of heroism a bastard son’s defense of a deadbeat dad who might not even survive to repair their relationship. On a meta level, this might have been a shot across the bow of “bad fans” who come to this franchise not to engage with its characters or political commentary, but to see computer-generated monsters lay waste to computer-generated cities, like a video game that does the playing for you. At the very least, Dragon’s Season 3 premiere was a reminder to be careful what we wish for.
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