Review: House of the Dragon, "Queen’s Landing" | Season 3, Episode 2

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“If this be victory, I hope I never see another.”

In the comments on last week’s review, it was pointed out that The Battle of the Gullet sure felt like the kind of massive military moment that would be the penultimate episode in a season of Game of Thrones. It’s a logical observation, one aided by the context that the show went from 10 to 8 episodes between the first and second seasons. All told, it supports the argument that when Ryan Condal originally mapped out the events from Fire & Blood onto seasons of television, that battle was intended as the climax of the second season as opposed to the opening of its third.

Ultimately, I would argue that the end result still worked. Jumping back into the show with spectacle was a nice way to overcome the burden of exposition, insofar as it didn’t really matter if you didn’t fully follow the characters arcs when sound and fury were front and center. There’s a sacrifice there: I have no doubt that the impact of Jace’s death would have been greater if we had been more connected with his relationship with Rhaenyra instead of two years removed. However, in a context where House of the Dragon lives in Game of Thrones’ shadow (for better or worse), starting out with something so recognizably related to the latter creates some runway for whatever story they want to tell next.

But if we extend this logic, and presume that this second episode of the season was originally imagined as the finale of the last one, the situation becomes more complicated. On the one hand, this does seem like the natural finale to the events of last season, finally paying off the risky alliance that Rhaenyra and Alicent formed throughout. If there was a single image the show would have liked to have left us with for two years, it would have been Rhaenyra tentatively taking her place on the Iron Throne, Emma D’Arcy capturing the mixed feelings of grief and relief that come from the long road to this moment…all for Alicent to be pushed in front of her, realizing that her father’s head was the unintended price of righting her wrong from years earlier.