“If this be victory,” a character on “House of the Dragon” reflects while gazing out at a corpse-strewn battlefield, “I hope I never see another.”
That line is essentially the thesis statement of the “Game of Thrones” prequel series, which returns on June 21 after a now-customary two-year absence. (Franchise fans could get their fix in the meantime with the lovely, much lower-key “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” which aired on HBO earlier this year.) The drama follows a massive civil war that pits the royal family of Westeros against itself to the benefit of absolutely no one. Season 2, however, faced some criticism for its lack of climactic setpieces, potentially due to an episode order shortened from 10 to just eight.
Personally, I was a defender of the sophomore season’s sometimes funereal feel, apart from some true wheel-spinning like an overreliance on dream sequences. Not only did I find the major confrontations we did see, like the death of Princess Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best) and maiming of Iron Throne claimant Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) in the show’s first proper instance of dragon-on-dragon combat, plenty awesome — as in, literally awe-inspiring — in themselves; I’d also internalized the show’s previously well-established stance toward armed conflict. The quote that opens this review is simply one of the more explicit statements of what any casual “House of the Dragon” viewer already knows: war is hell, and there’s no war more hellacious than one with fire-breathing, questionably controllable weapons of mass destruction. It’s not something to look forward to, or relish when it arrives.
As is typical for a show of this scale, the four episodes of Season 3 provided to critics came with a laundry list of spoilers longer than some wedding toasts. But one plot point I can divulge — in fact, one I bet HBO would very much like me to — is that there’s a major showdown in the very first episode. The infamous Battle of the Gullet pits naval forces loyal to Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) and led by decorated commander Corlys “Sea Snake” Velaryon (Stephen Toussaint) against a fleet from a Triarchy of allied city-states who’ve agreed to help break Rhaenyra’s blockade on the Westerosi capital of King’s Landing. It’s also one of several pivotal confrontations that will likely allay concerns about continued treading of water, Narrow Sea or otherwise.
As stewarded by showrunner Ryan Condal and directed by Loni Peristere, the Battle of the Gullet is indeed spectacular. Yet the entire point of “House of the Dragon” has been so well made that there’s little satisfaction to be gained by the Pyrrhic victories achieved within its scope. There’s no moment comparable to Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) raising the chain across the bay in the Battle of the Blackwater, an early highlight in “Game of Thrones” that delivered a (brief) dose of fist-pumping triumph. When the dragons arrive at the Gullet, any relief felt by Rhaenyra’s troops is fleeting at best — especially when not all of them obey their riders’ wishes, which is how this whole mess began in the first place. Though neither history nor the parties affected care that Prince Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) didn’t mean for his supersized pet to vaporize his own nephew, which is another “House of the Dragon” theme: that individual intentions are no match for larger forces, be they historical or animal.
That’s why, to my mind, the more exciting development in Season 3 is much more intimate in scope than hordes of troops descending into chaos. The final episode of Season 2 saw a long-delayed face-off between Rhaenyra and her estranged childhood friend-turned-stepmother (the Targaryens, everybody!) Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), two women now stranded on opposite sides of the yawning chasm that started as a crack in their once-strong bond. The scene was a reminder of the rewarding layers in the relationship as acted by two of the more skilled actors in a deep-benched ensemble. (So skilled, in fact, that we barely blink when reminded the 32-year-old Cooke is meant to be the mother of 29-year-old Mitchell.)
I’m forbidden from disclosing their exact circumstances, but Season 3 features many more scenes between this central pair, a rewarding return by “House of the Dragon” to its roots. Decades have passed within the series’ time frame, not to mention four years of real time; it’s often difficult to recall the complex web of alliances, betrayals and family ties that brought these characters to each other’s throats, a confusion that’s sometimes purposeful and sometimes frustrating. (It took me several minutes of one supposedly emotional midseason scene to remember I was watching a parent speak to their own child.) In their alternating waves of resentment and understanding, anger and sorrow, D’Arcy and Cooke imbue Rhaenyra and Alicent’s dynamic with all the weight of this history and none of its convolutions.
Not all of the show’s connections are so well-realized, even foundational ones that drive vast swathes of the story. Two seasons later, for example, “House of the Dragon” is still paying the price for handwaving such developments as Rhaenyra’s long-term affair with Harwin Strong (Ryan Corr), which produced two children whose widely disputed legitimacy played a major role in starting the war. Seeds planted in Season 1 are supposed to be bearing fruit by now, but Rhaenyra’s continued denial and her hazily sketched blip of a massively consequential romance make the payoff less than cathartic. It’s a good thing, then, that Rhaenyra and Alicent’s multifaceted rapport is a check the show is more than able to cash.
“House of the Dragon” is adapted from author George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” a text that’s more an alternate history encyclopedia than literary narrative. At times, Condal and his collaborators work to shade in the nuance and humanity that gets erased in academic accounts; at others, they accurately channel the feeling of stumbling on a footnote that contains an entire idiosyncratic life story. So it is with Alicent’s cousin Ormund Hightower (James Norton), a Season 3 newcomer who quickly earns his place in a crowded field of combat. Deceptive, capricious, fussy and endowed with quirks like a sensitivity to scents, Ormund enters the fray as a chaos agent, nominally allied with the so-called Greens (the Alicent-Aemond-Aegon side) but with an agenda and strategy of his own. He’s the kind of character who leaps off the page in Martin’s writing, a feeling Condal and others preserve in the adaptation despite Martin’s publicly stated issues with some of their choices.
Condal has said that “House of the Dragon” will end with Season 4, and it’s not quite a criticism to say that the first half of Season 3 left me ready for that conclusion. I don’t need to know the particulars of how the conflict resolves to know it will leave no one truly happy and everyone worse off, precisely because “House of the Dragon” forecasts that so clearly in each character’s terrible, escalatory decisions. That’s what makes both marginal figures like Ormond and fundamental ones like the two antiheroines so important. Whether they provide surprise and distraction or anchoring ballast, it’s the people who make “House of the Dragon” worth enduring the predetermined devastation. The dragons are just the CGI flying lizards on top.
Season 3 of “House of the Dragon” will premiere on HBO and HBO Max on June 21 at 9 p.m. ET.