You’d think that with House Of The Dragon trimming its later seasons to a svelte eight episodes, there’d be little time to tarry with the Dance of the Dragons underway. Yet after its blistering first two installments—episodes clearly meant to conclude last season—season three has settled into the character- and lore-saturated rhythms that so often slow this fiery dance to a shuffle. Is HOTD ever going to get to the fireworks factory? No doubt, and with pressure-cooker episodes as thorny as this, I’m fine with the longer fuse—though viewers who don’t savor every lore dump and weirdo Green Man sighting may find their patience beginning to wane at this late hour.
Restlessness has plagued HOTD almost from the start. The series rushes from one chatty, plot-bearing scene to the next, repositioning its cyvasse pieces for the next big dramatic move. Yet the journey to these series-defining moments can sometimes feel oddly interminable. To its credit, this season has been more adept at infusing even its most transitional episodes with spirited humor, violence, and eccentricity. But with so much of George R.R. Martin’s histories yet to dramatize before Ryan Condal’s self-imposed season four finish line, it’s hard not to feel the series is trapped in another mid-season cycle of hurry up and wait. This scramble to nowhere fast is acutely felt this week, with its most affecting sequence occurring before the episode even has a chance to begin: the death of Ser Criston Cole, a moment that so poetically distills this season’s fascination with inevitability and doom that it nearly overcomes this week’s subsequent inertia.
Nearly, but not quite. The realm squirms as Queen Rhaenyra’s reign settles into its new normal. Civil war has destroyed trade routes, burned crops, and left the people starving and penniless; Rhae is running out of both tallow and time. Lord Ormund Hightower’s murderous treasons have revealed how fragile her rule truly is, with Prince Daemon’s City Watch exposing their yellow streaks and surrendering their matching cloaks. Maybe Ormund shouldn’t have gone to the trouble; Rhae’s doing a fine job of fumbling the Iron Throne on her own, foisting blame for her myopic failures onto others. More strikingly, she seems to have grown numb to the suffering around her, telling her subjects she’ll light a candle for a kidnapped young septa presumed dead. It’s a character shift that contrasts so harshly with the Rhaenyra Targaryen HOTD has spent seasons establishing that the Iron Throne seems to stir beneath her, drawing blood in protest. If the gods are good, that should rouse her from this apathy.
Everyone is up against the wall this week. Outside Tumbleton, Sers Ulf and Hugh chafe under their assignment patrolling the perimeter while their assumed rewards remain maddeningly out of reach. “I can’t say my life has been improved,” Ulf says. “Can you?” Indeed, Hugh can’t, and soon he’s in disguise, infiltrating the market town to retrieve his wife, Kat. It isn’t the first time he’s pummeled his way through the smallfolk for his family, though it might be the last: Kat’s loud rejection of Hugh and his dragonrider glory heightens this week’s atmosphere of mounting desperation, leaving the Hammer stranded in enemy territory, having risked his life and the queen’s strategic advantage just to grasp how he’s squandered everything that matters to him. As messy as Hugh’s situation is, it pales to the luncheon in Ormund’s chambers further into the city, where assassins in Baratheon garb arrive to slay him and Daeron. Gwayne spots the deception first—the Baratheon envoy was supposedly more “comely” than was presented—and inserts himself between the men, with Bold Jon Roxton following suit. Blood is spilled, and Ormund, objecting to the sudden presence of human innards, promptly decorates the room with his elegant lunch.
Though the noose tightens around the Seven Kingdoms, not all the threads are pulling taut. In the Vale, Rhaena spots Moondancer on the horizon, and in her yearning for family, she breaks her agreement with Lady Jeyne by making her presence known. “[I have a dragon], but I have lost everything else.” It’s a poignant sentiment with curious timing: just two episodes ago, Rhaena seemed content with her exile. This mercurial shift underscores House Of The Dragon’s Rhaena problem: by merging and then pruning the arcs of Rhaena and the girl Nettles from Fire & Blood, HOTD has produced the weakest plot thread in the series. Her longing for home is resonant and sad, and it dovetails neatly with this week’s broader theme of abandonment. But her chaotic life choices come off as plot necessities, which lead her into narrative cul-de-sacs like the one she now finds herself. “The next time you try me will be your last,” Lady Jeyne warns her. Fair enough. But are dragonriders afraid of flying from the Moon Door? A question for the philosophers, perhaps.
Meanwhile, in the Red Keep, Alyn of Hull continues to wrestle with his own yearning: to be seen by his father. He pleads Rhaenyra’s case to Corlys amid the Sea Snake’s successful campaign against the remnants of the Triarchy. While Corlys retreats to his familiar refuge of duty, he does not leave his son entirely empty-handed: reports from captured pirates suggest that Tyland Lannister still lives and has fled to Rook’s Rest. It’s a meaningful gesture, evidence that Corlys is finally emerging from his calcified shell of resentment—but this gradual pivot from spite to duty comes too late, and Lord Ormund makes good on his sneak attack. There’s a lesson to be gleaned from that, Lord Velaryon, should you live to learn it.
Abandonment, in one form or another, plagues everyone this week. Alyn and Baela’s abrupt collapse into each other’s arms is as much a product of it as of their mutual desire. Corlys’s distance leaves Alyn adrift, while Baela has spent weeks scouring the skies for Vhagar just to appease a father who is psychologically incapable of ever showing her love. We watched Criston lose most of his men last week, including Gwayne, which only steeled his resolve to march to a fool’s death. Even Ormund comes into more harrowing focus through this lens. Removed from his overbearing presence, Gwayne and Daeron speak freely, with Daeron’s fear of losing his uncle yet again to duty prompting hints of long-buried family secrets that remain vague but no less unsettling for their ambiguity. Gwayne represents the possibility of Daeron becoming something else beyond Ormund’s creature: “I hate what I am when I’m with him,” he says, begging Gwayne to remain in Tumbleton. What will Daeron the Daring do should his mentor drag him into combat? “You’re his little treasure now; you’ll be fine,” his uncle says. I’m not convinced.
Daeron’s loneliness and fear echo his sister Helaena’s, whose grief has manifested as self-harm since her daughter was taken from her. She accuses Alicent of selfishness, of abandoning Jaehaera to ease her escape from King’s Landing. She is not wrong—and, worse, Alicent’s insistence on abandoning the girl last week leaves her in an unwinnable position with Rhae. As the walls close in around her, it’s worth circling back to Alicent’s paramour, who most embodies this week’s theme of abandonment. Facing what he knows will be his final battle, Ser Criston wraps her favor around his sword and faces oblivion. The cruelest twist isn’t the arrows flung into his body—there will be no songs of his valor after today—but that he died with Alicent in his heart, while Alicent, consumed by the practical demands of survival, scarcely gives him a passing thought. Stripped of glory and steeped in irony, Ser Criston’s end rightfully amounts to a footnote. For all its structural frustrations and occasional inertia, House Of The Dragon still grasps the bigger picture: history sings for its kingmakers and monsters and snuffs out the candles lit for those who loved them.
Stray observations
- • I realize the staging of Criston’s last stand probably didn’t allow it, but I’m sad nobody got to say Pate of Longleaf’s great kiss-off line, “I’ll have no songs about how brave you died, Kingmaker. There’s tens o’ thousands dead on your account.” It would have been a fine epitaph for Criston’s grim legacy.
- • “I’ll hear no more from those whose greatest battle has been with their own indigestion.”
- • Rhae gently giving Daemon an order is perhaps the second time we’ve seen any affection between them this season. I think the fact that they’re married sometimes gets lost in the shuffle.
- • Also, is it me, or is Rhae wearing a lot more eye makeup than usual this week?
- • Tyland can’t muster pretty words about Aegon when pressed to prove his value in this new, terrible trio of Tyland, Larys, and the boy king-in-exile. “There is, in any one of us, I venture… much to admire and much to be deplored.” Anyway, we’re Essos-bound!
- • “Her needs are endless.” Well, she is a queen, Lord Corlys; that tends to be the case.
- • Fun use of juxtaposition this week: As Alys asks Aemond, “you’ll fall alone… and to what end?” we cut to Lady Jeyne delivering someone to their doom through the Eyrie’s Moon Door.
- • “Never ceases to be fascinating.” Lady Jeyne is a fascination unto herself, I’d say.
- • I get that the show is tasked with giving each of their characters something to do, but making Baela Team Black’s reluctant cheerleader is the drowsiest choice they could make for her. At least it’s bearing fruit in terms of romance with Alyn, as much of a second thought this development is. Maybe a love triangle with Addam is in the offing?
- • Also, I feel that making Alyn the eldest over Addam is the show’s way of telegraphing that Addam’s contributions to this story might end in tragedy—which could end up cheapening the dramatic effect should the time come for Addam to step up in this war.
- • Also also: Baela and Alyn are kissin’ step-sibs. Ewwww.
- • I think Ormund’s misogyny and performative homophobia suggest deep self-hatred, but I’m no headshrinker. At any rate, his aversion to stink might have saved his and Daeron’s lives by putting Gwayne and Bold Jon between him and their assassins.
- • How embarrassing: Alicent and Helaena are now double-prisoners! (“More strictly confined” is how Rhae puts it.)
- • Misery’s ineffectiveness as Mistress of Whisperers is beginning to show. Now she’s having people killed to cover up her own bungled secrets.
- • We come to learn a bit more about Alys Rivers, who presses Aemond to remain in Harrenhal, bribing him with Queen Rhaena Targaryen’s lost dragon eggs. “I am tired of this desolate existence,” she says, “and so, I think, are you.” She wants to be the Lady of the Water, with him as the dragonlord at her side, a new kingdom and a new dynasty. Or something like that.
- • Interesting choice of imagery in Helaena’s tapestry: Aegon in the fetal position, nude and vulnerable, surrounded by the blackness of Harrenhal and a witch looking over him, ensconced in a red, warm bloom.
- • Awesome shot of the Iron Throne and its confluence of swords spilling outwards—can’t remember seeing it from that angle before!
- • There’s a bit of Malcom McDowell in Freddie Fox’s voice, I think.
- • I wonder how Alicent and Alys will get on, and how his mother’s sudden appearance at Harrenhal will affect Aemond. Oh, the dramatic permutations!
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