Review: House of the Dragon, "The Queen Who Ever Was" | Season 2, Episode 8
A climactic montage ends a surprisingly low key finale we probably should have seen coming
“It’s all a story, and you’re but one part in it.”
Our conception of what qualifies as a satisfying season of television is of course contextual: depending on the show, there are different expectations audiences will bring to bear as a season concludes. With The Bear, for example, the first and second seasons had clear arc structures built around first the collapse of the original restaurant and then the creation of a new one; as a result, when season three left the fate of The Bear and the relationships between its characters unresolved, some viewers logically felt the season was unfinished.
House of the Dragon is an interesting case study in this reality of television narrative. On the one hand, the time jumps in the first season made it clear that the show will not have an explicit pattern: no season of the show will be like the first. However, on the other hand, this is a spinoff of a series that did have explicit patterns, to the point where we knew each season would end with a thrilling penultimate episode. My interpretation of the first season was that its breakneck pace was at its core designed to allow the show to settle into a more familiar rhythm for the franchise come season two, and any subsequent seasons that followed.
As you can tell from this preamble, I’m not convinced that the second season of House of the Dragon is a satisfying whole. To be clear, I knew that the second season wouldn’t be telling the story of the entire war between Team Black and Team Green, but it retrospect it was filled with false starts that gave an incorrect impression of how close we were to the precipice of the conflict. The dogfight between Aemond and Rhaenys felt like a turning point, but it mostly just maintained the status quo, and the same can be said for the clandestine meeting between Rhaenyra and Alicent. In fact, that latter scene gets repeated at the end of this finale, resetting the clock on what we now know is the actual eve of the war that even three new dragon riders couldn’t avert in the end.
