The House of the Dragon Finale Was Anticlimactic and Thats the Point: TV Review

SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers for HBO’s “House of the Dragon” Season 2 finale, titled “The Queen Who Ever Was,” now streaming on Max.

“The Queen Who Ever Was,” the Season 2 finale of HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” is an episode of television largely defined by what doesn’t happen in its nearly 70-minute runtime. There are no major battles between the Greens and the Blacks, the two Targaryen family factions currently vying for the Iron Throne. Nor are there any major deaths — unlike last season’s conclusion, in which aspiring queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) lost her young son Lucerys (Elliot Grihault) to the vengeful impulse of her half-brother Aemond (Ewan Mitchell).

“House of the Dragon” differs from “Game of Thrones,” the generation-defining hit of which it’s a spinoff, in the nature of its source material. Unlike George R.R. Martin’s primary series of novels, which remain unfinished to this day, the fictional history “Fire & Blood” is both a complete work and deliberately ambiguous. Rather than a real-time narration of events from the point of view of its characters, “Fire & Blood” is a composite of multiple retrospective accounts, none of which is canonical — even as certain milestones are set in stone. This quality gave “House of the Dragon” showrunner Ryan Condal the freedom to pick and choose what version of the truth the show would settle on, as well as fans the ability to frantically speculate about the impending arrival of major developments they knew were coming, if not when or in what context.

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That “The Queen Who Ever Was” — written by producer Sara Hess and directed by Geeta Vasant Patel, who also helmed Episode 3 — stops short of these looming cataclysms could be attributed to its compressed schedule, which wrapped the season at eight episodes instead of 10. There was no faceoff at Harrenhal, where Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) has spent months raising an army and facing his demons. Nor was there a payoff to the mounting tensions in capital city King’s Landing, where Rhaenyra’s lowborn advisor Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) has been sowing the seeds of rebellion among the common people.

Instead, the episode’s crescendos were mostly interpersonal: Daemon finally accepted Rhaenyra as his superior after a lifetime of lusting after the crown; bastard sailor Alyn (Abubakar Salim) finally confronted his father Corlys (Steven Toussaint) over decades of neglect; Rhaenyra’s childhood friend Alicent (Olivia Cooke) finally gave up the self-righteousness she’d clung to like a security blanket, admitting she was in the wrong to help start a war. Any bloodshed paled in comparison to just last week, when scores of Targaryen bastards went up in flames as part of the so-called Red Sowing.

Many fans will doubtless consider “The Queen Who Ever Was” anticlimactic, especially as a final glimpse of Westeros before a potentially yearslong wait for Season 3. (Season 1 premiered in August 2022, though at least a second spinoff, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” is already in production.) Yet, in another light, the finale reads as a statement of intent. “House of the Dragon” may have a premise that demands high-octane dragon battles, but the show doesn’t want to be defined by them. Instead, the finale reiterates that the true focus of the series is on the lives and relationships set to become those battles’ collateral damage. The more “House of the Dragon” can delay gratification via glorious gore, the more it forces the viewer to sit in the grim fatalism that’s increasingly its preferred mode.

Surprisingly, the Cassandra of this conflict is Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), Rhaenyra and Alicent’s shared ex and heretofore a prick of the highest order. But witnessing Season 2’s sole dragon-on-dragon matchup — the conflagration at Rook’s Rest in Episode 4, which took the life of Princess Rhaenys (Eve Best) and permanently crippled Rhaenyra’s usurper brother King Aegon (Tom Glynn Carney) — up close has humbled the bitter, revenge-minded knight. “The dragons dance and men are like dust under their feet,” he grouses. “All our fine thoughts and all our endeavors are as nothing.” But to “House of the Dragon,” they’re something. In fact, the show reverses Cole’s hierarchy, putting human thoughts, feelings and efforts over the spectacle of fire-powered carnage.

“History will paint you a villain,” Rhaenyra tells Alicent in the final scene, after her former friend offers to surrender King’s Landing to an invading army. “House of the Dragon” is, as a whole, deeply concerned with history, partly as a nod to “Fire & Blood.” In “The Queen Who Ever Was” alone, the final shot of Rhaenyra frames her among a wall of scrolls containing millennia of past lore, while Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin) convinces Daemon to commit by showing him a vision of the existential struggle to come in “Game of Thrones,” more than a century in the future. The events of “House of the Dragon” are framed as mere blips in (to borrow the opening credits’ visual metaphor) a much broader tapestry, its characters’ motivations unknowable and inevitably misconstrued by future generations. All of what we’re watching will eventually be lost to time. Paradoxically, this perspective only heightens the stakes of the emotions in play. Before these Targaryens became proper nouns in a history book, they were the center of their own narrative.

This focus is far from universally rewarding. While its conclusion was relatively satisfying — Oscar Tully (Archie Barnes), I’d pledge my sword to you any day — Daemon’s stint at Harrenhal felt interminable, marooning the character in navel-gazing hallucinations stretched to the better part of a season. Candid conversations between Rhaenyra’s heir Jacaerys (Harry Collett) and his family members were a long-overdue reckoning with his adulterous heritage, retroactively trying to make up for the warp speed of Season 1.

But while it’s fair to fault “House of the Dragon” for mismanaging the pace of these internal journeys, it’s less of a flaw that the season ends with armies on the march rather than in the field. When action does arrive, “House of the Dragon” either cuts around it, like the breakout of hostilities between longtime rivals the Blackwoods and Brackens or Aemond’s torching of a small castle in this very episode, or makes it actively unpleasant to watch. If you were looking forward to dragons squaring off, Rook’s Rest likely nipped that enthusiasm in the bud. Season 1 felt like an extended set-up by necessity, arranging the chess pieces before the game could start in earnest. Upon its conclusion, Season 2 feels like an extended set-up as a deliberate thematic choice.

After all, the sense that disaster is always just around the bend helps illustrate the slippery slope of armed conflict. The Dance of the Dragons has already seen war crimes, child murder and the demise of majestic creatures once revered as gods. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment the combatants went past the point of no return, but war has very much arrived, though it could certainly always get worse and more destructive. We know more death is coming, a certainty that colors every interaction and scene to stomach-twisting effect. What’s the rush to see it arrive?

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Jenniffer Sheldon

Update: 2024-07-08

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