House of the Dragon: Season 3

The civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons is in full force, with Rhaenyra Targaryen and Aegon II Targaryen pitted against one another with their armies and dragons. Aegon II is reportedly dead, though his body has not been found, and his brother and heir Aemond has gone to ground with his dragon Vhagar, the sole survivor of the three dragons that conquered the Seven Kingdoms. But Rhaenyra faces new challenges as a massive naval battle erupts and a substantial Hightower army advances from the south-west. With more claimants to the throne waiting and new dragon riders emerging, the war is about to get a lot messier.

House of the Dragons, Game of Thrones's spin-off prequel about how the Targaryens lost their dragons, has been a bit of a mixed bag so far. The first season was excellent, with impressive fidelity to the source material and Paddy Considine's phenomenal performance as King Viserys Targaryen anchoring a well-considered project, possibly the finest season in the franchise since Game of Thrones's mid-point. The second season was, in sharp contrast, an odd, dispirited convulsion of television that didn't seem to know what it wanted to do or how to execute it. The phenomenal Battle of Rook's Rest aside, it was a bizarre slide into mediocrity.

Season 3 comfortably splits the difference. More dynamic character arcs and two massive battle sequences (one at sea) give the season more verve and pace than the second season. Season 3 is also enhanced by the presence of James Norton as Ormund Hightower, a deliciously scheming performance that adds a lot of character to a minor role from the books. Freddie Fox was already a bit of a breath of fresh air as Ser Gwayne Hightower in Season 2, but here he is presented as the only sane man in the room as he has to traipse around half the continent with Criston Cole (a satisfyingly, increasingly unhinged performance by Fabien Frankel) proving that some people just succeed in life by failing upwards. These two actors do a lot to keep the story afloat during its more questionable moments, helped by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth giving a game performance as the young but wise-beyond-his-years Daeron Targaryen. Phia Saban, who has always been great as Helaena Targaryen, is particularly outstanding, elevated from a few lines in the source material to the damaged heart and soul of the green faction.

Elsewhere the cast is replete with fine actors given iffy scripts or not much to do. Olivia Cooke and Emma D'Arcy remain superb actors but here the writers seem at pains not to have them actually hate one another, and instead constantly come up with ways of getting them to hang out. At least that makes more sense this year than the previous season's "let's sneak into the enemy stronghold" mechanic. Matt Smith is also excellent as the rogue prince Daemon, an at-heart honourable man desperately trying to be bad but not quite pulling it off. Early Season 3 has him not doing much but later on he is finally given quality scripts to cut loose with, and as usual nails it. Fortunately, he doesn't spend half the season in a bizarre horror side-story in Harrenhal.

Unfortunately, Ewan Mitchell's Aemond does spend half the season in a bizarre horror side-story in Harrenhal that will cause screams of frustration from viewers. Stop benching your best characters in Harrenhal doing nothing! It also massively detracts from Harrenhal's reputation as a bleak and foreboding place. By the end of Season 3 it feels about as scary as the Addams Family mansion. Deep untold horrors from the pit in the kitchen again? Must be Tuesday.

Other storylines are a mixed bag. The newly-promoted "dragonseeds" have a lot of good plot material, but Sonoya Mizuno's Mysaria has nothing to do except give bad advice but inexplicably still be trusted. Replacing Nettles from the books with Rhaena Targaryen is one of those ideas that isn't completely bad (at least in terms of keeping the cast manageable) but in execution is half-hearted, though it does at least remind us that dragons are very dangerous creatures that can't always be controlled. The northern greybeards led by Roderick Dustin (Tommy Flanagan) are entertaining and fortunately are not overused, but characters like Alysanne Blackwood (Annie Shapero) feel like they've had 80% of their scenes cut as the camera dwells on them and you're trying to remember what they've done that warrants the attention.

Still, at least this time around the season storylines build satisfyingly to their climax at the Battle of Tumbleton, rather than being cut short and left to flap in the wind by a last-minute episode count cut as with Season 2. The shorter, eight-episode count for Season 3 helps provide it focus and cuts short some storylines that I suspect would have been interminable at ten episodes (particularly anything to do with Harrenhal, or more Criston Cole stomping around the woods looking vaguely constipated).

Season 3 of House of the Dragon (***½) improves on the second but doesn't rise to the heights of the first. It is certainly an entertaining season of television with lots of vfx eye candy, great performances and several satisfying storylines, but the show seems to still be rolling around with its safety wheels on, not letting things cut loose with how vicious and vengeance-driven the story in the books could be, and tying itself into pretzel-like knots to explain why it's holding back. Hopefully the show can deliver a stronger run of episodes for its fourth and final run.

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House of the Dragon: Season 2

King Viserys Targaryen has died. He left instructions for his oldest child, Princess Rhaenyra, to inherit the Iron Throne. But Ser Criston Cole, the Kingmaker, has instead crowned his son as Aegon II. The realm is divided with almost half declaring for the Queen on Dragonstone and almost half for Aegon. Banners have been summoned and armies are forming. But this war will be bloody, for both sides are armed with dragons. Some are trying to halt the bloodshed with a negotiation, but others are seeking to profit from the chaos as much as possible. The Dance of the Dragons has begun.

Game of Thrones was the biggest TV show of the 2010s and also, easily, the biggest live-action fantasy television series of all time. The show stumbled hard at the end, though, and left behind a bitter taste for viewers. When HBO announced a prequel spin-off, they knew they would have to work hard to win back the fans disappointed by how Game of Thrones ended.

Against the odds, they succeeded. The first season of House of the Dragon was well-characterised with some great dialogue, brief but impressive action sequences, and some outstanding performances, particularly Paddy Considine's epic turn as King Viserys and Matt Smith as his brother, Prince Daeron, as well as Milly Alcock and Emma D'Arcy as Rhaenyra and Emily Carey and Olivia Cooke as her rival, Alicent. This was all great stuff, and established House of the Dragon as the clear fantasy successor to Game of Thrones, succeeding where Wheel of Time, Rings of Power and The Witcher had, to one extent or another, failed.

The reason for the success appears reasonable: whilst Game of Thrones struggled when it outpaced the books and did not have access to George R.R. Martin's source material any more, House of the Dragon had its entire storyline mapped out in Martin's 2018 tome Fire & Blood, with character motivations and arcs clearly established, and major action setpieces established. With a great cast, some strong writers who'd already established themselves in the first season, and some superb vfx designers (the dragons remain unmatched on the small screen), there was no reason to expect Season 2 to be anything other than a smash hit success.

Which is why it's a bit of a mystery why the second season is such a bizarre mess. Season 2 certainly has some great character moments to match anything in Season 1, some superb action scenes, some phenomenal vfx etc, but the pacing of the season has been hugely thrown off. Much of the season feels sluggish, with too many scenes of characters sitting around talking about the plot (again) rather than getting on with business. There's also a bizarre reluctance to embrace the fact that the war has started and cannot be stopped: Season 1 ended in such a way that should have left nobody in doubt that a full-scale conflict could not be avoided. Season 2, however, spends almost its entire length re-litigating about whether the war is inevitable and maybe there's a way to avoid it etc, which beggars all belief. The writers also seem to have realised that, following the book, they'd never have a scene with Emma D'Arcy and Olivia Cooke verbally sparring ever again, so they introduce a surreal device where the two find ways to sneak into one another's strongholds for occasional hearts-to-hearts. It's genuinely bizarre and does not wreck a sense of disbelief as drive a four-ton truck right through the middle of it.

The writers also decided it was a great idea to have Matt Smith spend most of the season wandering around the "haunted" castle of Harrenhal having weird visions and strange exchanges with the locals. One episode of this might have been interesting, even fun, but when this extends into a third episode you might be wondering this was a good use of resources, such as one of your best and most expensive actors. There's also a bemusing obsession with trying to tie the events of House of the Dragon into those of Game of Thrones, through visions, dreams, prophecies, etc that just makes the show feel less confident in standing on its own two feet.

The season finally perks up with the fourth episode, where all hell breaks loose. The Battle of Rook's Rest is excellent, with a well-choreographed ground battle and a furious aerial engagement. Any fears that HBO's vfx department would not be able to deliver on the promise of dragon-on-dragon ultraviolence are laid to rest here. The battle and its plot ramifications are a major highlight of the season.

Any hope of the season turning the corner and becoming more compelling is quickly dispelled: Daemon continues to mess around at Harrenhal interminably, Rhaenyra and Alicent continue to come up with reasons not to, y'know, get on with the actual the war the story is about, and there's a whole lot of not very much going on . The season is not helped by the late HBO decision to reduce the episode count from ten to eight, with the writers' strike just starting. This meant that the production team couldn't do anything to compact the events into fewer episodes (usually ill-advised, but in this case it would have helped the season tremendously with pacing) and just had to cut off the final two scripts from the run and shunt them into Season 3 instead. This robs Season 2 of any kind of climax, it just stumbles to a halt.

There are other strengths to Season 2. Though he debuted at the end of Season 1 and showed some good promise, The Last Kingdom's Ewan Mitchell really nails the role of Prince Aemond and becomes a great addition to the show. Jefferson Hall's Tyland Lannister is also most entertaining and has more to do this season as a politician and diplomat. The acting throughout remains strong, even if the actors sometimes struggle to sell the more nonsensical plot twists.

Season 2 of House of the Dragon (***) is a deeply odd, dispirited convulsion of television. It retains many of the strengths of the first season, including great acting, vfx and casting, but the pacing and writing are all over the place. There's a lack of firm commitment to the fact this is a war, and despite the source material being complete and eminently filmable, there's a strange tendency to drift away from it at times in favour of contrived, less interesting "TV drama" moments. Game of Thrones and House are both at their very best when they resist being "ordinary TV" and it's odd this season makes such strides to try to become that. The battle sequence in the fourth episode is a huge highlight, though, and hopefully now all this additional scene-setting has been done, Season 3 can just cut loose with business and get the story going at last.

The season is available to watch on HBO and Max (and local equivalents) in much of the world, and Sky Atlantic and Now TV in the UK, alongside physical media releases. A third season of House of the Dragon is currently in production for release in late 2026.

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House of the Dragon: Season 1

The Old King, Jaehaerys Targaryen, dies with no clear line of succession. At a Great Council, the realm chooses Prince Viserys as his successor, despite the superior blood-claim of Princess Rhaenys, establishing a precedent that a man's claim to the Iron Throne will always outclass that of a woman. Many years later, Viserys' wife dies in childbirth and he names his daughter and only child, Rhaenyra as his own heir. But when Viserys marries again and sires several sons, the precedent that he benefited from sets Westeros on a course for a deadly clash.

HBO's Game of Thrones, based on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire epic fantasy series, was the most successful, most talked-about television show of the 2010s. The disappointing finale aside, the show reset expectations for the scale of stories that could be told on the small screen and single-handedly turned adult, live-action fantasy into a viable television genre. Many fantasy shows have come along since seeking to pick up where it left off, such as The Witcher, The Wheel of Time and, most recently, Amazon's Rings of Power. But HBO itself has now rejoined the fray with a direct spin-off, a prequel set almost 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones and charting the division of the Targaryen dynasty.

Perhaps frustratingly for all those other claimants to the fantasy crown, House of the Dragon emerges as the clear successor to Game of Thrones in overall quality. Despite the near-total absence of any of the same creative team from Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon arrives on screen with formidable verve and gravitas. It has the confidence to deal out its storytelling in measured doses, long scenes devoted to characterisation and relationships punctuated by swift bursts of action, dragonfire and violence. The show channels some of the same energy HBO's other great political drama, Succession, as a story of familial drama with vast-ranging consequences, a huge scope examined through a small lens. This gives Dragon some benefits even over its mothership series, with much less rapid transitioning between events separated by thousands of miles, allowing the show to delve deeper into the characters and their motivations.

Dragon still doesn't make things too easy for itself. The first season spans almost three decades, with several shifts in the cast. There's a lot of similar-looking characters with similar-sounding names, many coming complete with their own dragon (some of whom change owners as the story continues). If Game of Thrones had a sin of sometimes shying away from complexity and streamlining A Song of Ice and Fire's scope into something less ambitious, combining characters and (often pointlessly) renaming those with even vaguely similar names, House of the Dragon goes in the other direction, trusting the viewers will follow it along. This stands in especially harsh contrast to The Rings of Power, where at almost every turn the writers instead chose to simplify and streamline things, constantly underestimating the both the intelligence of the viewer and the richness of Tolkien's source material. 

Where Dragon overcomes potential hurdles is its constant reframing of the story on the relationship between Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower. Childhood friends and contemporaries (in a shift from the source material, where Alicent is older and more ambitious from the off), the two enjoy a strong camaraderie that is upset by politics, especially the yearning ambition of Alicent's father, Otto, Hand of the King. From the perspective of each, both Rhaenyra and Alicent have excellent reasons and sympathetic motivations for much of their actions. Rhaenyra is foolish in having children with something other than her husband, but she is also put in a difficult position by his inability to have children with her. Viserys often makes weak decisions to appease those around him, but he both has an aversion to bloodshed (not necessarily a bad thing) and a deep-seated belief that House Targaryen must marshal its strength against other, greater threats. Even the central argument over whether a woman should sit the Iron Throne delves into the idea of idealism versus pragmatism, what should be conflicting with what actually is.

The casting is exemplary. Paddy Considine plays King Viserys as a peacemaker and a family man who is never happier when sharing good news with his closest friends and family. Realpolitik and discussions of war anger him. Considine is already one of Britain's finest actors and House of the Dragon has finally given him the international awareness of that; his final scenes in the season should ensure him an Emmy nomination, at the very least, next year.

Similarly, Matt Smith shakes off the last vestiges of being Doctor Who to give a performance mixing anger, edgy violence and a yearning for acceptance as Prince Daemon, Viserys' younger, more reckless brother whom everyone fears will plunge the realm into war, but grows over the season into something of a more responsible figure. Smith had already made a great career pulling away from his early signature role and House of the Dragon solidifies his reputation.

Other seasoned hands get some great moments in the sun: Rhys Ifans is excellent as Otto Hightower, giving a human edge to his character's grasping ambition. Steve Toussaint brings a mixture of pride, dignity and passion as Lord Corlys Velaryon, the Sea Snake. Eve Best is outrageously good as Rhaenys, the Queen Who Never Was, whose historical anger at her own usurping brings an interesting perspective to the current crisis.

The focus of the season is definitely on the two central characters of Rhaenyra and Alicent. Milly Alcock and Emily Carey play the young Rhaenyra and Alicent (in the first five episodes) with a mixture of energy and responsibility. Emma D'Arcy and Olivia Cooke play their adult incarnations (in the latter five episodes) with more nuance and cynicism, but channelling their younger counterparts' mannerisms and expressions in an impressive way.

Production-wise the show is also outstanding. Impressive sets and excellent costumes abound, and the CG is superb, especially anything involving the dragons. The show does make liberal use of video walls (similar to those used on The Mandalorian) and, like a lot of other modern fantasy shows, it sometimes feels a bit unnecessarily fake when real locations are substituted for CGI backdrops that can't help but feel sterile and unconvincing. Dragon goes a step further by faking some of the exact same places that were shot on location in Thrones (most notably the Dragonstone causeway), which makes the fakery even more obvious. However, Dragon does, for the most part, avoid the awful, plastic-looking CGI that blights a lot of modern genre productions, usually with much better use of lighting. Unfortunately Dragon does have a lot of murky night-time scenes and these are almost as badly-lit as the final season of Game of Thrones, with important scenes vanishing in a murky grey soup.

House of the Dragon is not flawless and does make some odd choices, and some outright (but certainly not fatal) stumbles. Several times the show unleashes "rule of cool" nonsense, things that look really spectacular but don't make any sense if you spend five seconds thinking about them: a Kingsguard brutally murdering a guy in front of a room full of witnesses and suffers no consequences; a dragon smashes through a building and kills dozens of civilians and nobody gives a toss; a character throws away a moment where they could end a conflict before it even starts with a minimum of bloodshed (although they later give some semi-reasonable justifications for it); Daemon runs through a storm of arrows and single-handedly fights off dozens of men in a highly improbable manner. In these moments the show teeters on the edge of Game of Thrones Season 7 and 8 silliness, but it always manages to pull itself back from the abyss with its character-focused and character-based dramatic scenes, which is where the meat of the story is.

Season 1 of House of the Dragon (****) is the finest slice of the Thrones franchise since at least the fourth season of the original series, and certainly the finest slice of live-action, epic fantasy TV to air since then as well (despite some other showings bringing much more money to the table). It's character-focused story mixes family and political drama to great effect, with outstanding vfx set pieces and uniformly excellent performances. Occasional jarring jumps in the timeline and events that visually impress but don't make sense logically threaten to undo the good work being done elsewhere, but ultimately the season is a great piece of television fantasy and drama.

The season is available to watch on HBO and HBO Max (and local equivalents) in much of the world, and Sky Atlantic and Now TV in the UK.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.