Here’s the thing about war: It never goes as planned.
Literally everybody who ever started a war of conquest thought they would achieve victory quickly and cleanly. They were all wrong. As the saying goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Or, as Mike Tyson put it, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.” War has its own twisted logic, and that logic tends to take you to places you never contemplated before. Even when a war seems to go your way, as it did in the early days of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, that doesn’t mean that you’ve really won. Because then you have to pick up the pieces of all the things you broke along the road to “victory.”
That’s roughly where Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) lands in episode 3 of the third season of House of the Dragon, ironically titled “Rhaenyra Triumphant.” The spinoff, set a couple of centuries before the events of Game of Thrones, has taken a creaky two seasons to set up Rhaenyra’s ascension to the Iron Throne. Season three is where all of the courtly intrigue starts to pay off.
Of course, if you were one of the common folk just trying to live their lives in King’s Landing or Tumbleton, you wouldn’t think things had “paid off” so much as they had “degenerated into bloody chaos.” That’s the thing about interesting historical eras — they’re a lot less fun to live through than they are to read about. In the season’s first episode, “Salt and Sea, Fire and Blood” the various factions have all decided to pursue politics by other means, such as enormous fire-breathing dragons. Control over these flying weapons of mass destruction has been a major preoccupation for the Targaryens, as it is the source of their political power. But the biggest lesson Rhaenyra will learn this season is that you never really control a dragon, or a war. Quite the opposite, in fact. When her enemies in the Triarchy ambush the Valyrian fleet in a strait known as The Gullet, Rhaenyra tries to hop on her dragon Syrax to help her cousins. But her advisers and relatives can’t have their meal ticket risk her life in an actual pitched battle, so they lock her in her royal chambers while her son Jace (Harry Collett) takes the lead on his dragon Vermax. Meanwhile, Rhaenyra’s niece/stepdaughter Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell), embarrassed by her failure to bond with a dragon from the family pit, tries to tame the wild dragon Sheepstealer. But when she tries to ride it into the battle of The Gullet, Sheepstealer goes rogue and starts sinking friendlies. In the chaos, Vermax is brought down and Jace dies.
Rhaenyra’s family is in tatters, but her childhood bestie Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) has convinced her himbo son Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) to flee King’s Landing, so she’s easily able to declare the horribly burned King Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) dead and install herself as de facto queen. But she soon discovers that actually ruling is a lot more complicated than conquering. The blockade she has been enforcing on King’s Landing has made the smallfolk desperate for food. But because the fleeing Hightowers absconded with the treasury, there’s no money to help them, and the local nobles are in no mood to assist.
Even worse, there are a lot of other claimants to the throne loose in Westeros. Unbeknownst to Rhaenyra, Aegon is not dead, but rather on the lam with his long-suffering adviser Larys (Matthew Needham). The remains of the Hightower army is holed up in Tumbleton, and Lord Ormund Hightower (James Norton) is minting coins with cousin Daeron Targaryen’s (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) face on them. Aemond, meanwhile, is shacked up at the ruined castle of Harrenhal with the possibly immortal Alys (Gayle Rankin), although he doesn’t seem to have a plan beyond lots of hot witch sex.
If all this sounds pretty convoluted, it is, and I’m still leaving a lot out. The labyrinthine plotting has always been author George R. R. Martin’s specialty. This season of House of the Dragon hits hard because we’re getting to the part of the story where events are spiraling out of control. After “Rhaenyra Triumphant,” everything the young queen tries to do to fix her problems, both large and small, only serves to make things worse. She puts the squeeze on King’s Landing’s rich families to help the starving poor, then lets her uncle/husband Daemon (Matt Smith) hunt traitors in the streets with his brutal Gold Cloaks, leaving all the classes mad at her. It’s a testament to D’Arcy’s performance that we find ourselves rooting for Rhaenyra to pull it together, right up until the point where she starts massacring priests. Former Doctor Who Matt Smith is masterful as the arrogant Daemon, who believes every problem can be solved with the point of a sword.
The season finale, “The Treasons at Tumbleton”, is among the best episodes this franchise has ever produced. Surrounded by enemies, and spooked by Aegon’s reappearance, Rhaenyra chooses violence. But Daemon’s attempts to force a final confrontation with the Hightowers at Tumbleton are once again thwarted by a rogue dragon. What would happen if we threw a war and everybody lost? I think we’re about to find out.
House of the Dragon is now streaming on HBO Max.
