The Spoiler-Filled Book Reader Debriefing About ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2
Two of The Ringer’s ‘Fire & Blood’ scholars review what went right and wrong in Season 2, and what’s in store for the rest of the series
Zach Kram: Lord Riley, we meet again! I’m delighted by our choice of location today, as we relax in the Dragonstone library, surrounded by scrolls and the weight of Westerosi history. To our fellow visitors, be warned: This is a no-spoilers-barred discussion of all things House of the Dragon and Fire & Blood. Read on only if you, like Helaena Targaryen, already know what will happen in this story’s future.
Now that HotD Season 2 has (prematurely?) concluded, it’s time to reconvene, take stock of our preseason conversation and predictions, and examine what the last eight episodes mean for the remaining trajectory of this prequel show. Let’s start with some general observations before zooming in on specifics: Despite an underwhelming and anticlimactic finale, I still enjoyed Season 2 and thought it was superior to Season 1, with more consistency, more action, and more thorough world-building.
But what was your opinion of the season, Riley—do you agree with my overview or think it’s too optimistic? And when looking back on our preseason chat, which prediction are you proudest to have nailed, and which did you whiff on the most?
Riley McAtee: I’ve been turning the season over in my mind ever since I watched the finale, trying to figure out what it reminded me of, and I finally have it. Season 2 of House of the Dragon would be like a season of Game of Thrones built virtually entirely around Daenerys’s arc in Meereen. It felt like a lot of excuses to not use dragons. A lot of stalling. A lot of “Just get on with it already.”
Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot I liked about this season—Rook’s Rest, Daemon’s Harrenhal arc (controversial, but it won me over), Gwayne Hightower, Jacaerys’s diplomacy skills, Alys Rivers—but as I wrote shortly after watching the finale, the season felt like less than the sum of its parts. Obviously, the last-minute decision to cut the season down to eight episodes had a huge amount to do with that. But even if we had gotten the conclusion we wanted (more on that in a minute), it wouldn’t have fixed some real pacing issues with this season.
In his books, George R.R. Martin is very good at creating things for his characters to do that are somewhat outside the main conflict of the story—he has character arcs within the main arc of the series. I don’t think House of the Dragon does that very well, which is why you get so many characters putzing around in the same locations, having the same conversations, leading to little happening. (This is all a long way of saying I wanted to see Jace kick it in the North with Sara Snow.)
And as for predictions, not to toot my own (dragon) horn, but I was so correct about the showrunners’ desire to find any way to get Alicent and Rhaenyra in a room together that I was correct about it twice. Why are two of the most important figures on each side of the war able to get within spitting distance of each other so easily (especially after multiple assassination attempts)? Who cares?! TV logic prevails!
But, wow, were we ever wrong about the Starks’ place in the story. I was shocked that Cregan was in only the first scene of the season—I really thought we’d get some extended time up north. Heck, we barely even saw Winterfell at all.
What about you? How are you feeling about the predictions you made?
Kram: Well, to be fair to House of the Dragon’s writers, they need to create things for many characters to do because Fire & Blood’s narrative structure means it just drops key people for long stretches of time. Thus we get Alicent’s putzing around King’s Landing, Jace’s putzing around Dragonstone, and Daemon’s putzing around Harrenhal. (Speaking of: You wrote in our preseason chat, “I’d bet a gold dragon that [Daemon] returns to Dragonstone after taking Harrenhal this season.” Pay up!)
My best prediction was that Rhaenyra would be much more involved than she is in this stage of the book—and thank goodness for that change, because Emma D’Arcy is an absolute star. Rhaenyra doesn’t merely putz around, and I think Rhaenyra’s portrayal shows that (as with Game of Thrones at its best) this fictional world is at its most dynamic when characters are moving around the wide map and crossing paths.
But while I’m disappointed to have missed on my prediction about the Starks, I’m even more annoyed to have misfired with my forecast on where the season would conclude. I thought the obvious end point would be Rhaenyra’s ascension to the Iron Throne after taking King’s Landing—though, in my defense, I wrote that I expected that moment to come in the finale “because I’m not sure what else works as a season climax.” Apparently the show didn’t know either, and it just dispensed with the notion of including a climax at all.
So that’s the first question on my mind as we look ahead to Season 3, likely slated for 2026: How does this pacing affect your view of what’s coming next? In my mailbag this week, a reader asked what Season 2’s lack of battles after Rook’s Rest meant going forward, and I admitted some confusion. We know from post-finale comments by showrunner Ryan Condal that the Battle of the Gullet will occur “very shortly in terms of storytelling,” so let’s mark that down for early in Season 3.
But is there enough remaining space, with potentially only 16 episodes left (two more seasons at maybe eight hours apiece), to include all the other battles and set pieces left in the source text’s plot? How can this story map cohere?
McAtee: All bangers, all the time, I guess. Theoretically, the show is slated to include these major events:
- The Battle of the Gullet
- The Battle of the Honeywine
- The Fishfeed
- The fall of King’s Landing
- The Butcher’s Ball
- The First Battle of Tumbleton
- The fall of Dragonstone
- The Battle Above the Gods Eye
- The Storming of the Dragonpit
- The Second Battle of Tumbleton
- The death of Rhaenyra
- The Battle of the Kingsroad
- The death of Aegon II
- The coronation of Aegon III
- The Hour of the Wolf
Some of these events can be combined and/or cut, but this is a lot to get through. I am skeptical that 16 episodes are enough to do it. This entire season had just one big dragon battle; how will they pull off one every couple of episodes, or thereabouts, the rest of the way?
There are a few ideas I have to condense things. One would be to move the Battle of the Honeywine off-screen, or make it short and sweet—much as the show approached the Battle of the Burning Mill this season.
I also think the Fishfeed and the Butcher’s Ball could be combined into one big Riverlands battle. We’ve been introduced to so few of the main combatants involved in the Fishfeed that it makes sense to throw Criston Cole in there, and at that point, you may as well accelerate through to his death.
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The fall of Dragonstone could also be changed. Sunfyre may be dead, and Aegon’s legs are already broken, so a quieter conquest of the castle seems in order. I’m not sure exactly what the show will do with Baela and Moondancer, though.
The Battle of the Kingsroad seems ripe to be cut—or to happen off-screen. Or, at the very least, to be moved in the timeline. It’s hard for me to see any big battles happening in the show after Rhaenyra’s death.
And then finally, I think the Hour of the Wolf will happen—we simply must see Cregan again—but it’ll happen before or concurrent with Aegon III’s ascension to the throne.
So let’s see, that leaves us with these “big” events:
- The Battle of the Gullet
- The Fishfeed/Butcher’s Ball
- The fall of King’s Landing
- The First Battle of Tumbleton
- The fall of Dragonstone
- The Battle Above the Gods Eye
- The Storming of the Dragonpit
- The Second Battle of Tumbleton
- The death of Rhaenyra
- The death of Aegon II
- The coronation of Aegon III/the Hour of the Wolf
Still a lot to get through! But I guess I’m actually talking myself into it here. Does this seem doable to you?
Kram: Wait, you think Sunfyre might actually be dead? I know all the characters think he is and that we haven’t seen him since his fall at Rook’s Rest, but that would be a massive canon change. He needs to be alive to kill Rhaenyra! Joffrey told us as much when he spoiled the prequel show in Thrones.
As I tried to sketch out a potential timeline for all those bullet-pointed events, I found it easiest to work backward. Let’s say that in the series finale, Aegon II dies, and a young, miserable, dragonless Aegon III is crowned; that would be an apt way to wrap up the themes of the story. Then Rhaenyra probably needs to die in the penultimate or antepenultimate (yes, it’s a word!) episode, which means she has to flee the capital no later than Season 4, Episode 5 (assuming eight-episode seasons). Ideally, she’d spend at least a season’s worth of episodes in power in King’s Landing before that, to drive home the slow demise of her position that leads to the Storming of the Dragonpit.
So at a minimum, to tell the best story possible, Rhaenyra needs to take King’s Landing within the first few episodes of Season 3. (That suggestion also matches the “three days” timeline Alicent provides in the Season 2 finale.) That requires the Gullet (which Condal said would be “the biggest thing to date we have pulled off”), a giant Riverlands battle, and the fall of King’s Landing all in a row. That pacing would be wildly out of proportion to anything Dragon has depicted thus far, without much room to breathe between set pieces.
Given that potential outline, I feel fairly confident that First Tumbleton will be Season 3’s last big battle—thus bookending an otherwise triumphant Rhaenyra season with Jace’s death in the Gullet at the start and the great dragonseed betrayal at Tumbleton at the end. Then in Season 4, we’d see the Gods Eye (because there’s no way they’re killing off Matt Smith and Ewan Mitchell before the last season), Dragonpit, Second Tumbleton, and the rest.
That’s doable but would represent a break from the show’s first two seasons. Does HotD have the budget for all that dragon action, and does it have the appetite for such breakneck speed?
Thinking about Dragon’s difficult position reminds me of a similar problem with the ASOIAF book series. George R.R. Martin’s novels—especially the most recent pair, A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons—tend to be slower, introspective, fairly meandering narratives, but he’ll have to speed things up if he wants to (a) fit his next manuscript into one book given the limits of printing presses and (b) wrap up his sprawling story in two more entries.
It’s the same deal here. Dragon even had to push the Gullet into Season 3, much as Martin had to push the battles of fire and ice into The Winds of Winter. And those decisions potentially create cascading pacing issues down the line—as we all know, this hasn’t been an easy problem for Martin to solve, or else we’d all have Winds on our shelves by now.
McAtee: Ah, you’re right about Sunfyre—he must be alive for Rhaenyra’s death. I just don’t understand why all the characters think he’s dead. Has no one checked on the dragon in the weeks since Rook’s Rest? It’s a head-scratching change.
Speaking of changes, let’s talk about some of them. The biggest change the series has made—by far in my opinion—is its use of prophecies and dreams. Daemon’s acid trips are not in Fire & Blood. Nor are Helaena’s. Nor is Aegon the Conqueror’s dream. And in the Season 2 finale, Daemon even sees the White Walkers and Daenerys Targaryen—another direct connection to the main series that is completely absent from the book.
I’m conflicted about this stuff. In the book, Daemon just kind of hangs around Harrenhal for a long time. It’s very boring. They had to give him something to do, and I enjoyed his conversations with Alys Rivers. But I also think the show has leaned a bit too heavily on prophecies and dreams for character development. Why do visions of the past and future have more of an effect on Daemon than Rhaenyra’s son’s killing has on her? Does Rhaenyra need to sleep in a weirwood bed to realize it’s time for some fire and blood?
I think Season 2 continued to clarify the showrunners’ vision for this story. They are leaning hard into the tragedy of it all—the inevitability of a war that was foreordained decades before—whereas Fire & Blood had more true antagonists with clearly selfish motivations. (Though the show also hits directly on the meta aspect here when Rhaenyra tells Alicent that history will remember her as a villain.)
Which changes stood out to you?
Kram: I wonder how the show’s embrace of prophecy might cause it to alter some elements of the adaptation to avoid outright spoiling itself. Dragon hasn’t shied away from alterations to major events in the canon, like Luke’s death (which it portrayed as solely Vhagar’s doing, against Aemond’s wishes), the Blood and Cheese affair (without little Maelor and a Sophie’s Choice situation for Helaena), and the dragon clash at Rook’s Rest (where Aemond ordered the fire blast that injured Aegon and Sunfyre).
And as you noted this week, Condal has teased the potential for more such tweaks. He said after the season, “I will just say that just because a thing is told to you doesn’t mean it’s going to happen exactly that way. And we’ve seen obviously in history and all that be misinterpreted before, both in the world of Fire & Blood and in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire.”
So might a future climactic event, like the fateful duel above the Gods Eye between Daemon/Caraxes and Aemond/Vhagar, look different on-screen than it does on the page? It’s kind of weird that Alys and Helaena have already told Daemon and Aemond, respectively, that they’ll die in that location! Condal justified that decision by saying some fans have already read Fire & Blood while others have Wikipedia at their fingertips, so secrets are difficult to keep—but that was true for Thrones as well, and Ned’s death, the Red Wedding, and Jon’s (temporary) death still surprised millions.
At any rate, we won’t find out about the Gods Eye until Season 4—see you in 2028!—but I wonder what other future adaptation changes were foreshadowed by Season 2. Will the betrayers’ turn at Tumbleton be different, now that we know more about the seeds’ backgrounds (Hugh and his family in particular)? Will show Rhaenyra be as paranoid about Daemon’s relationship with Rhaena as book Rhaenyra is about Daemon’s relationship with Nettles, assuming Sheepstealer’s rider follows the same plotline? Will Criston Cole still die anticlimactically and defenseless at the hands of men after descending into nihilism about dragon destruction? (I hope so—his sudden, unheroic death is incredible.)
I have to admit, I don’t agree with all of the adaptation changes thus far; I, too, am annoyed by the overreliance on prophecy and links to original Thrones. But as a fan of the material in both mediums, I’m glad we have the changes to interpret and speculate about, because I’d rather watch an interesting story than a mere one-to-one re-creation of something I’ve already read.
McAtee: One thing that’s interesting about the Battle Above the Gods Eye is that, in the book, basically no one witnessed it. Everything we know about it comes from a few fisherfolk who are said to have been present in the lake below—and I’m not really putting much stock in their reliability. So it’d be easy for the showrunners to argue that all the specifics from Fire & Blood—“You have lived too long, Nuncle” and all the rest, save for Dark Sister’s ultimate burial in Aemond’s blind eye—were just made up. They can change whatever they want about that scene.
That said, this is a scene that I think book readers will be more protective of than any other. If Daemon doesn’t jump off Caraxes and plunge his sword through Aemond’s eye socket, I’ll be irate. Condal can add a little fatalism to Daemon and Aemond—reading between the lines, the book already has some of that, at least for Daemon—but I’ll politely request that the specifics remain the same.
As for the other events you bring up, I agree that the betrayers’ turn at Tumbleton will be different. Hugh in particular is a character that Condal and Co. clearly believe was done dirty in the histories; he’s basically a completely different character in the show compared to the ambitious brute Fire & Blood portrays. I can’t wait to see what makes him turn on the blacks, though I’m sure it will have something to do with his wife.
I’m not sure that the show will be able to have its version of Rhaenyra order Rhaena’s assassination. I think that plot point is moving in a different direction. I will miss Nettles, though—I always liked the implication that Targaryens are actually not special and that they keep their exclusive grip on dragonriding through propaganda alone.
And finally, I’m also in agreement with you about Criston Cole. The finale scene he shared with Gwayne Hightower hinted at some redemption for him … but I hope the show stays true to the books and forgoes giving him a hero’s death. He sucks.
One way or another, we have a long wait ahead of us.
Kram: Not that long—you’ll have to start refreshing your memory of Dunk and Egg pretty soon. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is only a year away!
