Review: House of the Dragon, "Tumbleton" | Season 3, Episode 4

“Even great dynasties fall”

Game of Thrones began its run with a massive ensemble spread across multiple continents, creating a clear challenge for its showrunners to figure out how to keep the audience engaged with so many different characters. In the back of their minds, though, Benioff and Weiss also knew that they had a bigger problem: they were going to keep adding entirely new sets of characters throughout the entire series, and even a Red Wedding or two couldn’t offset the burden this creates on your storytelling.

By comparison, House of the Dragon has been relatively contained to a singular conflict, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a problem with introducing new characters. Last season they struggled to make the arrival of the Targaryen bastards feel organic to the story; it would eventually make sense why we were spending time with Ulf and Hugh, but in the moment it seemed like a distraction from the core story we were invested in. Despite being mostly limited to two families and those loyal to them, there’s still plenty of sprawl in House of the Dragon’s narrative, and adding new perspectives comes with a burden in its own right.

“Tumbleton” is an episode built around this burden, even if the character in question was formally introduced in earlier episodes this season. Ormund Hightower was mentioned back in season two, but his prominence in this season was foretold by James Norton’s prominence in the opening credits, and so his brief appearances in previous episodes felt like a teaser for something more significant. And while Ormund’s importance to the plot became apparent last week when we learned that he had tricked Daemon into accepting a fake Daeron and made plans to occupy Tumbleton, the claustrophobic focus on Rhaenyra’s perspective meant we didn’t get an understanding of him as a leader or as a man. We need that if we’re to accept him as the season’s primary antagonist, if this is in fact what he is.