Review: House of the Dragon, "The Dragon in Winter" | Season 3, Episode 7
Look, you can't just keep saying it's winter when we don't even know what season it is right now
Let’s start at the end of this week’s House of the Dragon. Throughout the episode, Daeron and Gwayne are trying to understand why Ormund is unconcerned with the Winter Wolves about to show up on his doorstep. How is he not panicked? Why is there no urgency? Gwayne—as is his pattern—intends to run, but Daeron is right that he has no future as a craven would-be King who abandoned his own men. And so we as the audience are left alongside them to wonder how he intends to use the pieces at his disposal—basically just the newly finger-less Corlys—to survive the coming onslaught.
The episode ends with our answer: Ulf, won over by the promise of a lordship and a castle, has agreed to turn against Rhaenyra. It’s technically a twist, given we had no clue they had been parlaying, but I didn’t receive it as one. The show laid on Ulf’s disgruntlement so thick that there was no other potential path for the character. Ulf is not a complex portrait of humanity—he is a barely two-dimensional plot device, and has been since he was introduced. The straightforwardness of his story means that when the plot needs to make its move with the character, it offers no real excitement. I appreciate the creepy ass smile Tom Bennett delivers in the episode’s final shot, but “Duh” is not the response I want to end a penultimate episode with.
Admittedly, the Tumbleton battle suffers from several other problems, chief among them that our central characters have absolutely nothing to do with it. We see the Winter Wolves on the march, but we’ve spent very little time embedded with them, and thus the prospect of them fighting their way into Tumbleton doesn’t have much resonance in it. Rhaenyra spends this episode distracted once again with her trauma from Jace’s death, and while that delivers some dragon-on-dragon action, the disconnect between the stories makes it a bit hard to call it climactic. The characters we’ve followed for three seasons all have their stories here, but they’re at arm’s length from the major battle we’re conditioned to read as a climax.
