House of the Dragon is not making a habit out of quiet finales. Viewers who grumbled over the anticlimax of Season 2 must have been pleased with Sunday’s Season 3 finale, which one-upped the previous episode’s Sunfyre resurrection and brûléeing of many soldiers loyal to Rhaenyra with a Battle of Tumbleton that torched the city; left thousands of casualties Black, Green, and civilian; and ended both Ormund Hightower’s (James Norton) kingmaking ambitions and his life. Major character deaths weren’t even limited to the battlefield: RIP Helaena, for one, too good for Westeros and for her family. I’ll miss Phia Saban’s quietly resolute performance.
The finale opens with Rhaenyra waking to the news that Aegon is alive, and that his return—with a still-quite-lethal Sunfyre, no less—after she declared him dead makes him some kind of messiah. Understandably, she panics, cursing the memory of Viserys (Paddy Considine) for putting her in such a terrible situation. “His prophecy has tested me again and again, and I have met its every challenge!” she complains to Daemon. He takes the opportunity to remind her of her Targaryen supremacy. So, how should she wield it? “The only quality the realm understands is strength,” Daemon says. It’s enough to get him dispatched to Tumbleton.
It isn’t just Baela who rips into Rhaenyra in her own home. Helaena’s force-feeding comes after a heated encounter with the Queen. “You cannot think I would harm you,” says Rhaenyra, who must still see herself as a merciful person. (That she has thugs shoving gruel down Helaena’s throat seconds later suggests an alarming lack of self-awareness.) Helaena’s retort: “Do you think life is nothing more than not being dead? Our father would hate you for this.” She’s right. But Rhaenyra is also correct when she points out to her half-sister that Viserys’ dithering over succession is what put them in this predicament in the first place. Then again, there’s truth to Helaena’s scathing final blow: “All the things you care about are ugly. This place is ugly. You, yourself, are ugly.”
Rhaenyra doesn’t think so. And unlike Aegon or Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), whose kingly ambitions don’t seem grounded in anything more than entitlement and will to power, she is actually taking Westeros’ future into consideration when she clings to her birthright. Not only does she ascend the Iron Throne with the intention of helping the small folk, but she also sincerely believes in the Song of Ice and Fire prophecy—a prophecy that Thrones viewers know will, whether self-fulfilling or not, both lead to great destruction and, ultimately, prove instrumental in saving humanity from extinction via White Walker. This is why we see her, in the finale, demand to be anointed by the High Septon (Gary Raymond) and order Alyn (Abubakar Salim) to kill him when he refuses. She isn’t betraying the Seven, exactly, because her fealty is to the prophecy and to her Valyrian ancestors. She believes she’s answering a higher calling.
Tragedy lies in the gulf between beliefs or intentions and reality. In the Battle of Tumbleton, it’s Daemon rejecting Gwayne (Freddie Fox) and Daeron’s (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) plea for peace, taking offense at Corlys’ further attempts at diplomacy, exhorting his army to avoid excessive casualties because “the Queen’s moral standing must remain absolute”—and then presiding over a grisly mass slaughter against an enemy that makes terrified children cannon fodder. Because he is carrying out her order to decimate the Hightowers, in defiance of Corlys’ plan for victory without bloodshed, Rhaenyra is just as responsible for these atrocities as Daemon. A tragic hero has the most noble aims but, due to some intrinsic character flaw or external factor (a sexist society, say, or misplaced faith) ends up doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Rhaenyra seems to be heading in this unfortunate direction, but she’s no villain. We’ll find out in the show’s last act whether her heroism proves to be triumphant or tragic.
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