House Of The Dragon

Credit: HBO

By all rights, we should be getting a new episode of House of the Dragon . Alas, Season 2 was cut short by two episodes thanks to Warner Bros. cost-saving measures following the Discovery merger—a merger many questioned at the time, and one that has sent shockwaves through HBO’s programming slate, including the cancellation of beloved series like Raised By Wolves and Westworld.

If we had gotten a full 10-episode season, we would almost certainly be in for a treat tonight: The Battle of the Gullet. Instead, we ended last week with a season finale that felt more like a build-up to a big season-ending showstopper. The aforementioned battle will have to wait until Season 3. As showrunner Ryan Condal explained in a press conference:

“We were trying to give the Gullet, which is arguably the most anticipated—well, I would say maybe the second most anticipated action event of Fire & Blood—trying to give it the time and the space that it deserved.

I know everybody wants this to come out every summer. It’s just that the show is so complex that we’re really making multiple feature films every season. So I apologize for the wait, but I will just say if Rooks Rest and the Red Sowing were good then the team that we have together … we’re gonna pull off a hell of a win The Battle of the Gullet.”

While it’s unfortunate that we have to wait two years to get that battle, I do think it’s going to be one that pretty much blows everybody’s collective mind and well worth the wait. There’s been a great deal of fan dissatisfaction with Season 2, but if nothing else the upcoming battle—battles, really—will be worth the wait.

And that’s the thing: Condal isn’t just talking about the Battle of the Gullet. In the post-finale featurette, the showrunner said that Season 3 will be the war we’ve all been waiting for.

“While this season was very much about the fits and starts of an early medieval war, season three is clearly going to be about total war,” Condal said. This is good news, to be sure. The first season was excellent, fleshing out the characters and power dynamics, setting up the various players and circumstances that would lead to a war of succession. The second season, while it had some very good moments, felt like too much wheel-spinning. Rhaenyra and Alicent, in particular, seemed to just sort of take up space. The former was too indecisive and failed to really develop beyond where she was t the end of Season 1; the latter was pushed aside and it seemed like the writers didn’t know what to do with her.

If Season 3 really is about total war, that’s exactly what this show really desperately needs at this point. The second half of Season 2 would have been much better if we’d sped things up a bit and gotten to some battles. I say this as someone who enjoys slow, character-driven shows. The problem with Season 2 is that it began to feel aimless, as though it was slowed down to fill up space rather than for any real narrative reason. And I can sympathize with all the obstacles the show’s creators faced: COVID issues remained, the writers’ and actors’ strikes caused problems, and it’s a major production even during the best of times.

Still, it’s good news to hear that ‘total war’ is coming (I’d play a Total War: Westeros game!) but there’s bad news, too. You kind of have to read between the lines to find it, but it’s really rather ominous. I discuss this in the below video, but I’ll also go over it briefly in this post.

Basically, it appears that certain members of the House of the Dragon team have decided to really center the story around Alicent and Rhaenyra, even now that war is upon us. This is why we got the very awkward scene with Alicent somehow managing to visit Rhaenyra at Dragonstone and effectively offering her son’s life in exchange for a relatively bloodless surrender of King’s Landing—something I don’t believe for a second Alicent would do.

Ryan Condal has made it clear that from the get-go the idea was to frame the show around the experiences of these two women, and while I think that was a very savvy idea for Season 1, I’m having a hard time grasping how they can continue to do this as we go forward and remain even slightly faithful to the books—which often present a much different version of these characters. Indeed, even Season 1 portrayed Alicent as a much more ruthless character: Wanting to take Luke’s eye, forcing Rhaenyra—after just giving birth—to walk all the way through the Red Keep to show her the new baby, conspiring to seduce Viserys and begin this entire Green faction in the first place, etc.

It’s very strange to hear how this is actually a “love story” between these two women, who should by now hate one another quite passionately, or at the very least not keep attempting to make peace. It seems Rhaenyra has forgotten that Aemond killed her son, and Alicent has forgotten that Team Black had her grandson assassinated. They just want to be besties again! Decades after they were last friends. More time has passed as bitter rivals than as girlhood friends, and I’m sorry but I have a teenage daughter and I know how girls can feud.

So when I read director Geeta Patel say that this is a love story, I’m very confused. “Alicent is feeling very alone,” Patel said of the final episode of Season 2. “She feels she doesn’t have a real partner in her life, even her father. She feels her father has pushed her to the place she’s in. And she can’t hear her own voice. She can’t feel her own heart beating. So when Rhaenyra enters, that’s what she wants. She wants the love in her life, and it’s a bit of a love story in a way, of these two women.”

No, it’s really not. But wait, here’s writer Sara Hess who says the fake history of Fire & Blood

was written by these unreliable narrators and nobody really knows what happened in those rooms. They know the big events that happened historically, but they don’t know what anyone’s intention was. And history is often written by men who write off women as crazy or hysterical or evil and conniving or gold-digging or sexpots. Like in the [book], it says Rhaenyra had kids and got fat. Well, who wrote that? We were able to step back and go: The history tellers want to believe Alicent is an evil conniving b!&$h. But is that true? Who exactly is saying that? That’s part of the thing we’re playing with in this and in season two.

I’m sorry, but is there something wrong with a woman who has children gaining weight? Is that just something the patriarchy would say, or is that a normal experience for countless women (and many men!) after childbirth. You aren’t fighting the patriarchy or putting notches in the belt of feminism by making your female characters “strong” rather than human and complex. And the show’s writers made Alicent a “conniving evil bleep” themselves in Season 1. It doesn’t pass muster that she’d be somehow, miraculously, all nice and good now.

The more I think about her character in Season 2, the less she makes sense. She wants to sue for peace now that she’s out of power, but even in the latest season she treats her own son horribly. She’s still just as awful, but the show’s creators want us to empathize with her and see this as some love story between two women just trying to figure it out together? I’m sorry, but that is ludicrous. It stretches the boundaries of plausibility.

If you want to tell a story about the dangers of patriarchy and the atrocities of war and about how this can all bleed over into the powerful women of the realm, look no further than the source material. Fire & Blood needs to be fleshed out to be a satisfying TV series but it doesn’t need to be radically changed. The path that Rhaenyra goes down is—without spoiling it—very dark, and serves as a great critique of power and patriarchy and all the rest. There’s a real danger in building up these characters into people they were not—making them “heroes” or softening their sharper edges to make them more sympathetic. You risk turning a complicated, authentic character into someone flat and uninteresting in the process. I hope that the writing team realizes this as they work on Season 3.

Suffice to say, now that I’ve seen the entire second Season, George R.R. Martin’s somewhat perplexing blog posts now make a great deal more sense to me.

Update 8/12/24

I’ve heard some interesting feedback from readers who think that I am some being a “purist” or don’t want any added depth to characters like Rhaenyra or Alicent, or that instead of the internal conflict these women experience I just want them to be bloodthirsty warmongers.

This is deeply silly and frankly more than a little dishonest. As I’ve stated, I think fleshing out the relationship between these women was a great decision and worked extremely well in Season 1, where that relationship took lots of interesting twists and turns, going from a girlhood friendship to a deeply strained adult life with a very mixed and dysfunctional family, and at last to utter division, with Rhaenyra fleeing King’s Landing and Alicent aiding the Green coup.

The problem isn’t that all of this was added and expanded in Season 1. The problem is that Season 2 takes all of this momentum and squanders it entirely. The thing about a great dynamic relationship like Rhaenyra and Alicent’s is that it has changed and evolved so much. In Season 2, the writers made both women wishy-washy rather than decisive, and rather than continue to develop this relationship and how it might grow in a time of war, it stagnated—seemingly because the show’s writers have no clear idea of where it ought to go.

Mostly, I’m worried that the show will continue to try to paint Rhaenyra is a heroic figure, when her story—and vague book spoilers follow—is much more complex. If the writers truly believe that the only reason Rhaenyra is portrayed as losing her grip and becoming bitter and tyrannical and making lots and lots of mistakes is because “history is written by men” then I’m afraid they will make a far less complex and compelling version of her character for the adaptation. It’s also rather condescending to women to suggest that unlike men, power and the lust for power can’t corrupt someone like Rhaenyra.

What George R.R. Martin does so well in his stories is craft flawed characters who we can both root for and find appalling in equal measure. This show has done a reasonable job sticking to that with characters like Daemon, Viserys, Aemond and even Criston Cole in Season 2; it is my great hope that they have the stomach to do as much with Rhaenyra.

The problem—or the concern, rather—is stated best by Martin himself who wrote:

Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and “make them their own.” It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and “improve” on it. “The book is the book, the film is the film,” they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own.

They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.

I am not a purist. I believe that changes must be made to the original source material simply because the screen is so very different from the page. But I also believe that the best adaptations only make those changes with the greatest of care, and with very good reasons—not just the desire to reshape characters the way you wish they were, but in order to better tell the story in this new medium.