A Hugely Underwhelming Season Finale

Sunday night’s season finale of House of the Dragon would have made a really amazing penultimate entry to Season 2. Imagine that ending, knowing that one week from now there will be blood. Think about all the things that were set up, all the little pieces poised and ready, all the matchsticks drawn, hovering over the tinder:

• Alicent visits Rhaenyra in a reversal of roles from earlier this season, not to sue for peace, but to open the gates of King’s Landing to Team Black. She even agrees, bitterly, to her maimed son Aegon losing his head. All of this is to take place in just three days time, right after Aemond flies for Harrenhal to meet up with Ser Criston Cole and wage war against Daemon and his armies. (Side-note: Aemond probably should have attacked Harrenhal before Daemon gathered armies; the whole ruse at Rook’s Rest and loss of Aegon and Sunfyre has proven a disastrous tactical error).
• Aegon, meanwhile, has fled King’s Landing with Larys Strong, making their way secretly for Braavos and all that money Larys has hidden there. It took some convincing, but the King was swayed when he realized every other path meant death.
• Daemon—after some visions of White Walkers, the Three-Eyed Raven, Daenerys and her baby dragons and Rhaenyra on the throne (and a fascinating conversation with Helaena) decides to give up his ambitions and side with Rhaenyra. He kneels before her when she comes to visit him, and then rouses his men to war, crying “No mercy!” His armies are ready to meet Criston Cole and Gwayne Hightower, and Caraxes is ready to go to battle with Vhagar. I’m on the edge of my seat!
• We get a montage of the three new dragonriders—Ulf, Hugh and Addam—as they’re armored up and prepared to fly. Gorgeous, dramatic music plays over this scene as we see also Alicent leaving Dragonstone, Aegon leaving King’s Landing, Otto Hightower apparently locked up somewhere, armies of Starks, Lannisters and Hightowers all on the march, and Rhaena finally coming face to face with the wild dragon, Sheepstealer. Again, this is edge-of-your-seat, I can’t wait to see next week kind of stuff.
• On sea, the massive fleet of Triarchy pirates, led by the Sharako Lohar—recast as a woman played hilariously by Abigail Thorn—is making for the Gullet, ready to break the Sea Snake’s blockade. Corlys and Alyn of Hull are aboard ships as well. Armies march! Fleets sail! Dragons fly! Next week’s season finale is going to be some incredible!

Alas, we likely have two or even three full years before we get payoff on all these cliffhangers, and for all we know the next season could be just 6 episodes. And the thing about waiting and Game Of Thrones is that we’re far, far too accustomed to it. I’ve waited 13 years for The Winds Of Winter and I’m afraid I’ll be waiting 13 more (and that’s just half the characters; the other half were in A Feast For Crows, published 19 years ago. 19 years! There hasn’t been a Sansa POV chapter since 2005!)

It’s been two years since Season 1 of House of the Dragon and 8 years since a good season of Game of Thrones aired. We have waited, Your Grace, long enough. We do not want to wait two more years to see what happens next.

The thing about Season 2 is that it has been, for the most part, quite brilliant. Phenomenal character and world building, enormous attention to detail, lots of great dialogue and even some funny bits thanks to Ser Simon Strong, Ulf the White and now Lohar the pirate queen (originally a man in the books, but I prefer this bawdy woman and her many wives—and Tywin, er Tyrond, er Tyland Lannister deserved a nice treat at the end of all that suffering). We even had one great battle and some cool dragon-bonding stuff, all of which is fantastic.

The problem is that we have now had two seasons of table-setting with very, very little action. Season 1 was largely devoted to setting up the conflict, fleshing out the cast, giving us an understanding of what leads up to this brutal and terrible war. That makes sense for a first season! But Season 2 was generally more of the same: Lots of pieces moving about the board but only a moment or two of real action.

Clearly, this season needed to be 10 episodes (or at least 9) and HBO cut that short and that’s a huge shame, because as great as this episode was, it was not a great season finale. It sets up a huge cliffhanger and then leaves us to wait. And wait.

And wait.

I spotted this review of the finale over at Variety. In it, writer Alison Herman speculates that viewers may find the finale anticlimactic since it didn’t end with any sort of big battle or deaths or anything of that nature. She writes:

Yet, in another light, the finale reads as a statement of intent. “House of the Dragon” may have a premise that demands high-octane dragon battles, but the show doesn’t want to be defined by them. Instead, the finale reiterates that the true focus of the series is on the lives and relationships set to become those battles’ collateral damage. The more “House of the Dragon” can delay gratification via glorious gore, the more it forces the viewer to sit in the grim fatalism that’s increasingly its preferred mode.

If this is the case—if this is the intent of the show’s creators—I have to protest in earnest, Your Grace. I am all for exploring and relishing these characters and the heaps and mounds of collateral damage this war will invariably bring but I still want the war story. I want the battles and the gore, and you can’t delay gratification this often and expect people to be happy about it.

Game Of Thrones was about characters. That was the focus of that series as well, but we still got lots of big battles throughout, and lots of smaller fights and skirmishes as well. None of that detracted in any way whatsoever from the character bits. In a lot of ways, those battles were about characters. How did The Hound react during the Battle of Blackwater Bay? How did Joffrey? Tyrion? Stannis? Each of these men made choices that deepened their characters in ways that not being in a battle wouldn’t have. So did Sansa and Cersei. My goodness, the amount of character development in that battle alone was astonishing.

In any case, that’s my position on this episode. It was fantastic. Tremendous. Brilliant. And a genuinely lousy season finale that requires us all now to wait a very long time and perhaps even longer, since for all we know—and based on the evidence before us—whatever battle is brewing won’t even happen until Season 3, Episode 5 or something. I’ve been heaping praise on this season and somewhat baffled by its detractors, but on this point I am unbending. I shall not bend the knee!

This is a bad call, and either the show’s creators’ hands were forced by HBO, or this was the plan all along and we just missed out on two episodes worth of content in the middle with Layrs and Alicent talking about power or something, and another scene with Rhaena at the Vale.

I’ll go over a few of the other important bits before Rhaelyx and I fly away to Pentos or Dorne or somewhere warm where we can sit on the beach and make friends with beautiful women and fascinating sellswords and magicians and the like. She’s almost as annoyed as I am, and dragons are never any fun when they’re annoyed (unless you have a battle to fight, that is).

Team Green

Over in the Red Keep, Aemond tries to convince Helaena to fly her dragon Dreamfyre—an ancient and mighty beast—but she refuses, saying she won’t burn anybody. She refuses twice actually. Once, with her mother present and then again after she joins Daemon in his Godswood vision.

Helaena is one of the few genuinely good characters on this show. Too good, one might say. When he threatens her she asks if he’ll burn her like he did Aegon. Then she gives him prophecy: Aegon will be king again and sit a wooden throne. Aemond, however, will die. He will fly through the God’s Eye and never be seen again. (The God’s Eye is vast lake just south of Harrenhal). Furious, Aemond leaves.

I think Aemond is a really compelling character but I think they have sold him a little short this season. He’s the one character that I really want them to keep making complex and more sympathetic, but they keep going the other way. His cool, icy response to Aegon in the brothel is so much more interesting than his pathetic “I could have you arrested!” threats to his sister.

Ser Criston Cole, of all people, has become one of the most circumspect and even sympathetic characters in the series. He’s been so vile, even in the earlier episodes this season, that this changed man—sobered up and shaken by the dragon battle at Rook’s Rest—is almost unrecognizable. When Gwayne confronts him about sleeping with Alicent, his response is so honest and so remorseful—”To die would be a kind of relief,” he says, morosely—that Gwayne is left speechless. He sits down next to him on the log, his sword forgotten across his lap.

“We ride to our annhialiation,” Cole says. (My dragon, Rhaelyx, of the black and red scales, always gives me side-eye when I try to spell annhialiation, because it’s one of those words I never can get right on the first try).

Team Black

We had a great scene between Alyn of Hull and his father, Corlys. Abubakar Salim hasn’t had a huge role this season, but when he angrily confronts his father and lets him really know how horrible it was to grow up fatherless, scorned as a bastard, and how insulting it is now to be offered the “scraps” of his affection, it’s one of the finest moments in the season. “If I survive this war,” he says, Corlys staring down at his feet, properly ashamed, “I will go on as I started: Alone.”

The comic relief this episode comes from both the pirate queen Lohar who—along with the Tyland—stole every scene they were in together, like a comic duo, and from Ulf the White. Jace immediately dislikes him (because Jace is pouting, as Baela puts it, over his being a bastard). At dinner, Rhaenyra says she’ll make all three new riders knights of the realm if they fight for her and are loyal. When Ulf continues to shout at servants for more “little birds” and crack wise she tells him that her knights are to comport themselves at the dinner table. “Well ya better make me a knight then!” he jokes. Jace is upset, and Ulf says: “A sense of humor would do you lot some good” or something to that effect.

This is now officially my favorite line of the entire season, and the truest. As I’ve noted in the past, the one thing lacking most from this show is a sense of humor. At least we’ve gotten it here and there in Season 2 with Ser Simon Strong and his gentle fathering of mad Daemon (shush, shush) and with Ulf and Lohar.

Of course, Strong may have done more than just amuse us. When he spies on Daemon and the faithless Ser Alfred Broome, he hears Broome telling Daemon that the realm needs a king, not a queen. Strong sends a raven to Dragonstone, prompting Rhaenyra and Addam to fly on Syrax and Seasmoke (I won’t remember any of these damn dragon names in two years) and her presence there, methinks, tips the scales for Daemon.

Of course, it was Alys Rivers, the witch, and the vision she helped him see in the Godswood that made him realize that he is but one part in all of this, one small part in a much larger story. This is the vastly important arc for Daemon this season, all his growth and self-realization about his brother and his ambition. I wonder where the show takes his and Rhaenyra’s relationship in the future. “Leave me again at your peril,” she tells him.

All told, a brilliant episode but I’m still annoyed that we have to wait until Season 3 to see any sort of battle on land, sea or in the sky. I am underwhelmed. This felt like almost the exact same ending as Season 1, with everyone preparing for war. Still. Again? Still again? Again still? Oy vey.

Scattered Thoughts:

• Where is Otto Hightower? I had no idea he was imprisoned. I’m so confused by this, did I miss something?
• Poor Ageon’s sizzling sausage. I really do feel bad for him. Clearly Larys is just out for his own gain. What is the “wooden throne” Helaena speaks of?
• I like how they’re setting up Ulf and Hugh. Ulf is clearly faithless. But Hugh is worried about killing the smallfolk, while Rhaenyra and Jace are just like “That’s war, buddy.”
• Baela and Helaena are my favorite female characters in this (and Lohar). Rhaenyra is too much all the time second-guessing herself. Alicent is basically “Oh things didn’t all turn out great for me, boohoo I just want to be free and live in the forest in a nice cottage with my daughter.” Zero sympathy, Alicent.
• Sunfyre isn’t dead, but he’s not doing so hot. Well, that’s my theory. Show us the body, HBO.
• I’m going to give Ser Simon Strong the MVP of the Season award. He was the highlight, and is probably one of the best human beings in this show. I would like him to become surrogate grandfather of Helaena, and the two of them can go take care of chickens in Alicent’s forest cottage—without Alicent.
• Rhaelyx agrees with me. But only because I feed her chickens. Caraxes may prefer pigs, Rhaelyx is a fried-chicken sort of dragon.

I’ll add more scattered thoughts as they come to me. For now, I’m off to ponder all of this some more. What are your thoughts on the season 2 finale? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.