Walking away from House of the Dragon Season 3, one thing is clear: no one can be happy. Unlike the seasons before, there isn’t a single character who moves past their own incompetence or mistakes to emerge as someone endearing. In fact, the whole season is a prolonged tragedy, slowed by narrative speed bumps that leave the audience just waiting for the car to hit the wall.
House of the Dragon Season 3 sees Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) take the Iron Throne. She has “won.” But she has also lost just about everything. Her son has been killed because of Sheepstealer, The Vale’s wild dragon ridden by Rhaena. There is no gold in King’s Landing, leading her to staff her Small Council with scapegoats. Her reign is consistently tarnished and questioned by talk of bastards, leading her to isolate and hurt her most trusted advisor and uncle, Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint).
Even love can not offer her a safe port. Rhaenyra’s husband, Prince Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith), has finally decided to be a father to his daughter, Rhaena, leaving his wife doubtful about his loyalty and honesty. Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) is far from the confidant and friend she once was.
Despite delivering on her promise to allow Rhaenyra into King’s Landing, Alicent’s capture in the Red Keep and Heleana’s fragility have driven a deep wedge between the two, leaving Alicent to be the only one who seems to understand what ruling Westeros entails.
Finally, her sometimes-lover and always-right-hand, Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno), has resorted to planning an escape plan in case she needs it, as Rhaenyra’s neck began to break under the weight of the crown. The once sure hand of the White Worm is now thinking of herself first, withholding information, and sweetly keeping Rhaenyra calm, not informed.
House of the Dragon Season 3 has some of the series’ best moments and many of its weaknesses.
Add in the utter mental collapse that Rhaenyra is facing as she comes face to face with the reality that her father was, in fact, a bad king and a man in his own fantasy world. Taking the throne was supposed to be a moment of triumph. But instead, there is nothing but death around the Queen, and the mounting pressure to give in to the monstrosity that is ruling effectively.
Rhaenyra giving in to the cruelty of ruling was bound to happen, but what House of the Dragon Season 3 showed us was that it had to happen. The undercurrent driving the season’s narrative is a deep commitment to understanding how morality and heart are often squashed by power.
To be an effective ruler, Rhaenyra has to make decisions that don’t always align with her hopes or aspirations. More importantly, every question that comes to the Queen pushes her further and further toward accepting that the mess she has stepped into has spiraled far beyond her control.
To secure her reign, she has to imprison the last remaining heirs. She has to question if she will kill a child to keep Aegon’s heirs (and the rest of Alicent Hightower’s children) from coming for the crown. And throughout the season, our Targaryen Queen repeatedly makes wrong choices that compound, leading her to question whether she should have chosen violence over other options.
Still, it’s not just Rhaenyra this season who can’t seem to feel like everything will be okay. And I think that is the strength of the season: “everything will be okay” is not a phrase that any character in House of the Dragon Season 3 would utter. Whether they backed the Blacks or the Greens, no one is having a good time. And those who are, like Ormund Hightower, are delusional.
Alicent’s last acts of motherhood end up empty in the end. Her children are essentially gone to her, her father is executed, and she is utterly alone. Alicent is at a level of isolation we have not seen before, and while she still moves as a mother would, too much has been corrupted by her son’s choices and actions for her to remain so.
She is a mother, but the entirety of House of the Dragon Season 3 is watching her lose her children to their decisions, or hers. As Rhaenyra grieves Jace’s death, Alicent finds herself coming to terms with the death of her motherhood. And realizing just how much she gave up by letting her father guide her hand.
Even with a large ensemble cast, there is no space for any of them to grow.
As for Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell), he is on a weird Dreaming journey with Alys Rivers, hallucinating that he is sleeping with his mother, and choosing a vision in which he is a King of dragons. He’s wounded, nursed back to health, and now is spending his days hallucinating with the witch of Harrenhall. Ultimately, despite the many talks and small amount of action we see him, Aemond could have been omitted from the season entirely, and the impact would not have been felt.
At the same time, his brother, Aegon II, is showing that he’s learned nothing. While the start of his trajectory on the road begins to humble him, most notably so when Lord Larys Strong (Matthew Needham) verbally eviscerates him, now, at the end of the season, he’s back to what he was.
It wasn’t only his cruelty or violence that made King Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney) unbearable. It was also his ineptitude at making decisions, his putting himself first, and his craving for power above all else. There are glints of growth and adaptation, but Aegon is rewarded for his sharp tongue in a way that puts the most incompetent king at the forefront of the race to take back power by season’s end.
Then there is the series’ Dragonseed storyline, which is both underserved and constantly at the center of the story. The heartfelt moments in House of the Dragon Season 3 are one of the reasons to stick with it. Corlys’ acceptance and understanding of Alyn (Abubakar Salim) and Addam of Hull are among the rare moments of comfort in the season. He loves them, and he wants to give them what he has denied them: his name.
This is one of the reasons why Corlys has been a standout for the series. But instead, he and his children are made to be pawns in the story. Similarly, Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), no matter how much I hate him, is a piece put on the battlefield and unceremoniously killed. The last part of this, his death, is actually one of the highs of the series, but everything leading up to it does little to make it a climactic moment despite being one of the series’ longer-running characters.
Add in how terribly House of the Dragon Season 3 continues to treat Baela (Bethany Antonia) and Rhaena Targaryen (Phoebe Campbell), and there is little to hold onto. Baela may get a sliver of a romance; Rhaena may finally be seen by her father, but there is too little done in such a late hour of the season that they fall flat.
House Velaryon deserved so much more in House of the Dragon Season 3.
Then there are Hugh the Hammer and Ulf the White. Two characters who saw their lives change when they became dragonriders, but not for the better. Independently, they’ve each dealt with upsets to their life and hopes, but their experiences are sprinkled in with little care, making it difficult to reach their full emotional impact.
Hugh’s push to provide for his family and save them from poverty has cost him everything. Ulf’s dragon has brought him nothing but isolation from the little pieces of friendship he had, and constant abuse at the hands of the highborn continues to compound until he flips sides.
But beyond small throwaway lines that let us know more about the men’s choices in life or their fears of being in a war, there isn’t much to see that lets us see them as thriving characters. Where Game of Thrones managed to balance its large ensemble cast for the better part of its run, House of the Dragon continues to buckle under its characters.
Then there is the reality that we have gotten some of the series’ best action, and the spectacle is starting to be all we can see. Despite this season featuring far more dragon battles and moments, the riders get little to no storytelling elements that would make the audience latch onto them beyond just “catching a vibe.”
House of the Dragon Season 3’s story is a thorough mess, but that’s a feature, not a bug. There is chaos in the power transfers, but, more importantly, the same question you can’t help but leave with after every episode is: Does anyone know what they’re doing? It’s as if every choice made this season is to bring each character toward a collective rock bottom of patheticness that, by the penultimate episode, it was genuinely hard to stomach.
As a season of television, it’s hard to knock House of the Dragon Season 3 because it is directly channeling the fact that the Targaryen Civil War is just wrong. So much of the continuation of the war can be distilled into moments where selfishness and pride led to choices. Which, yes, is the reality of many wars. But here, narratively, this season does more to showcase the ineptitude of every single one of Viserys’ heirs that the audience winds up with no horse in the race by its end.
So many of the misses this season come from abandoning the more focused elements of storytelling that we see in episodes one through three. Smaller in scale, these episodes aren’t spread out to the point of collapse as we see with the rest of the series’ ensemble.
Too many characters doing too many things is a recipe the series just can’t seem to make work. Still, House of the Dragon Season 3 isn’t without its redeeming elements. Chief among them are the stories being developed in Ormund Hightower’s stronghold of Tumbleton and the general intricacies in King’s Landing.
Emma D’Arcy’s performance as Rhaenyra is stellar in every way.
House of the Dragon Season 3 has epic highs in character performances. Emma D’Arcy’s performance as Rhaenyra, for all of the story’s faults, gives us a new side of the fragile queen. She’s grieving, yes, we’ve seen it before. But there is something about her brokenness, and the emptiness that Jace’s (Harry Collett) death leaves, where we begin to see the Queen’s entire sense of self erode.
Episode 3 of the season is also one of the most powerful episodes in the Game of Thrones franchise because it is so centered on Rhaenyra. The use of the score to build anxiety and panic, the way we see Rhaenyra’s vision blur and narrow. So much is done to show that Rhaenyra has been tossed into a hopeless hole and is failing to claw her way out.
And maybe that is the issue with House of the Dragon Season 3. Had the tragedy been Rhaenyra’s alone, had it been allowed to be the shining tragedy of the series, one where the weight of her “triumph” has removed the rose colored glasses her father gave her, and was the focus, this would work. But when the star’s central character’s misery is reduced to just a tiny part of the series, nothing feels like it matters.
Tragedy can be the focus of a story. Why else would Wuthering Heights be a classic, or Hamlet? Why would we clamor to see any number of historical tragedies put on film? But here, in House of the Dragon Season 3, everyone’s suffering is undercut by a level of ineptitude that makes it stop being tragic and start being pathetic. And that there in lies the issue.
It’s also why the season’s second best character moments belong to those in Tumbleton, because Ser Ormund Hightower (James Norton) refuses to admit that he is pathetic. Ser Ormund begins the season outsmarting everyone.
He sends a fake Prince Daeron with Daemon, keeping his army alive and deceiving the man he hates. He captures Corlys to push the Velaryon troops back to Driftmark to protect it, rather than aiding Rhaenyra. He uses Tumbleton as a base, knowing Rhaenyra won’t burn her people. All of this feels like the man that has been built up on honor the last season.
Ormund Hightower is a standout for House of the Dragon Season 3.
Then we realize that these are moments, but they aren’t success, and they have very little to do with what he did. And that is where the audience begins to laugh at him. The audience knows that he is pathetic now, even if he keeps bumbling into success, and so do Ser Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox) and Daeron Targaryen (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth).
They know that Ormund is in a manic push for power. They know that his inferiority is festering his hatred of dragons, Targaryens, and anyone he doesn’t view as a Knight or a scholar, and will make his time run out.
Ormund is one of Westeros’ most pathetic men, and yet, he is the most successful this season up until the end. Everyone else gives in to their circumstances and allows the pity to take them whole. But when they do showcase a hint of purpose or interest in their characters, like Baela, Daemon, Alyn of Hull, Hugh, or even Alys Rivers, they’re not given the time or interest from the camera to thrive on-screen.
The bloat of the season mars some truly stellar performances, and much of that is because every good scene feels like a tease for a character moment that either won’t come or will be limited to a minute at most every 45 minutes. The story is too wide, so even its most important moments fall into a cacophony of subplots.
House of the Dragon Season 3 has too much going for it to tell a story with impact. While each character is individually served or underserved, the season seems to forget the importance of connecting all the points. Needing to move between multiple storylines, the season gets lost in it all, but more specifically, it buries or abandons the parts of this third season that had started to make it great.
It’s not that House of the Dragon is a tragedy; it’s that the tragedy is a slow-moving car crash. We can all see what is about to happen. We know the ending; we know the blood and the fire, and we know just how difficult it will increasingly get for our characters.
The sin the series commits in making everyone do everything wrong is that it leaves us with no one to root for. And when it does, they have no wider impact in the story, so we might as well not fall in love with them anyway. A race to the bottom is never fun, and when every character in House of the Dragon Season 3 is signed up for it, it’s hard to stay fully invested.
House of the Dragon Season 3 is streaming on HBO Max.