Why did Season 2 of House of the Dragon puff up in smoke?
About that finale…
The Short Take:
A confounding stopping point considering where I thought this season was going. But the couple of big, very satisfying character moments will keep me on the hook for Season 3.
[SPOILER WARNING: If you have not finished Season 2 of House of The Dragon, read no further.]
Image Credit: Screen Rant
The Long Take:
For a time, I was enthralled.
Rhaenyra goes to Harrenhal. Daemon, after an entire season’s worth of witch counseling, is finally in a place where he willingly bends the knee to her. Alicent, after a similar stint of introspection, sneaks to Dragonstone in the middle of the night to confess that she wants out of the rat race, and is willing to forfeit Aegon’s life to bring peace and end it all. She even goes so far as to ask Rhaenyra to run away with her, just as they had joked when they were naive teenagers. Of course, it’s too late for that. And while not as showy or needle-moving as the other two scenes, we finally hear more than a grunt out of Allyn of Hull, as he rips into his fair-weather father, Corlys. What drama! What narrative catharsis! Great stuff!
Was I confused by how much time we were spending with the Triarchy and Tyland Lannister, neither of whom has had much if any screen time this season? Of course, but I was also amused. My befuddled panic and his merged into one meta fish-out-of-water-just-roll-with-it experience. So most of the HotD Season Finale had me. I was entertained. I was happy. I was satisfied.
But I was also revving up for a big battle that I never got.
To recount my exact reaction: as the episode was actually winding down, in its montage hopping from place to place and character to character, leaving us with a cliffhanger for each storyline from the season, I thought, “surely this isn’t the end?” I then hovered my laptop cursor over my progress bar and said, “ah, see? There’s 18 minutes left. That’s plenty of time for a big dragon battle. Nothing to worry about.” What I had tragically forgotten, in that moment, was that HBO often places a behind-the-scenes featurette and a teaser for what’s to come at the end of each episode. And so, the episode ended, yet again perched on the precipice of war. I threw my hands up in the air and yelled, “WHAT?!?”
Minutes after this stark (haha) realization, I remembered that it is in fact in Game of Thrones tradition to have the season finale be a ramp down epilogue of sorts, with the penultimate episode presenting the eruption of conflict and ensuing action spectacle. I know, dear reader, that I frequently overly defend things that I love. I think it’s that my teacher brain has been wired far too long to find the potential in a paper I’m grading, and to be encouraging and supportive to its writer. This rationalization of historical precedence from an entirely different television series, however, did not hold up even for me.
Image Credit: IndieWire
And that’s because of the nature of this specific penultimate episode, “The Red Sowing.” Yes, you could certainly argue that we got our action packed episode with Vermithor essentially reenacting scenes from Jurassic Park at the bastard buffet. I can’t forget or discount that seeing Ulf and Hugh claim dragons was thrilling and triumphant in the way that a “big” (not table-setting, not conversations in small rooms heavy) episode of Game of Thrones would be. Even the title seems to be a reference to The Red Wedding, which took place during “The Rains of Castemere,” one of the most legendary episodes of Game of Thrones. That episode was also a penultimate one: Episode 9 of Season 3, which had 10 episodes. All the signs that this was the big peak of the season were there. And yet, this does not offset or undo the fact that Ulf and Hugh claiming dragons, that Rhaenyra’s grand experiment working in violent and draw-dropping fashion was, in terms of the plot, preamble to Team Black bringing the dragon heat to Team Green in a big climactic battle. One that, due to the show’s premise as a war of succession, we’ve been careening towards but never quite getting to, at what some critics would two slow a pace for not one but two season now.
In many ways, Rhaena’s slow chase of the wild dragon Sheepsteeler is a microcosm of this season’s pacing problems. You cannot continually show the promise and potential of a major moment over and over again without tangible payoff. You cannot keep showing Rhaena thinking about getting a dragon and then wandering around looking for a dragon if you are not actually going to show her getting said dragon. You cannot keep telling us that Rhaenyra’s going to have an answer to Vhagar and then do nothing once she does. You cannot keep telling us that Rhaenyra has no choice but to go to war, and not actually go to war. Or, to be clear, you can, but you can’t expect everyone to be happy about it.
While I am often warning all of us not to get wrapped up in our expectations for what we think should happen at the expense of our enjoyment of what does happen, I would simply like to point to the fact that I wrote an entire article in anticipation of this finale not directly reviewing the penultimate episode, “The Red Sowing,” but instead providing a detailed breakdown of all the dragons on each team so we would have a clear sense of where they stood heading into a final battle. I can’t believe I’m about to quote myself, but it’s so gobsmacking how wrong I was that I must: “Considering that we ended on this “look at us now” shot, the most logical place for tonight’s season finale to go is in an all-out, knockdown, dragon-out fight between Team Black and Team Green. Why else would the penultimate episode have spent so much time gaining new dragons and altering the balance of power?” Why else indeed.
I’m far from alone in this reaction, though I’d like to think I am more gracious than some. Most other critics had some variation of my reaction, nearly unanimously agreeing that this season should have had 10 episodes instead of 8, just as Season 1 did. Imagine if they had built up to this point of anticipation and then ended the season with what book readers are calling, “The Battle of the Gullet.” (I do not know what happens in this battle, since it’s past where I have read in Fire and Blood.)
So why wait? Why cut this season short with no final battle? Reports on this are mostly inconclusive in terms of whose decision it ultimately was to make Season 2 shorter than Season 1, and what the primary motivation for that decision was. From the medium amount of research I did not the matter, it does seem as though budgetary restrictions were to blame. That’s not what HBO/Warner Bros. wants us to think, though.
Image Credit: LA Times
A Deadline article as far back as March 2023 broke the news that Season 2 would have eight episodes instead of 10, and in that article an HBO spokesperson reportedly “stressed that the episode count was story-driven.” I would take that to mean that they thought ending where we ended was good for the story. That ending on a pre-battle cliffhanger rather than with a battle would be a better place for the arc of the season to conclude.
Later, in a preview article that mostly features stars Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke, however, series writer Sarah Hess told Entertainment Weekly that “It wasn’t really our choice.” That pieced together with the fact that the author of the earlier Deadline article said “I hear that the initial plan was for was for a 10-episode arc” and that the switch to eight lead “to some script rewrites.” As Joanna Robinson notes on the House of R Podcast’s Season 2 finale breakdown episode, the creators may have had to pivot from 10 to eight, but it’s not as if they had to do that at the last minute or after they had already started filming. It was a decision they had time to plan around. But, if my experience with student writers is any indication, oftentimes it’s difficult to let go of a draft you already have when deep down you know you have to overhaul and restructure the whole thing. Sometimes the vestiges of the original vision for the piece is impossible to excise, especially when you like what you had already.
Regardless of what happened behind the scenes, it’s clear that the most recent announcement — that we are not only getting a Season 3 of House of the Dragon but that the series would conclude with a Season 4 that has already been greenlit — is designed to distract us or at the very least soften the blow of a battle-less finale. Most recently, in a press conference to announce the upcoming season news, Showrunner Ryan Condal said that they purposefully wanted to save The Battle of the Gullet for Season 3 because they “just wanted to have the time, the space to do that at a level that is going to excite and satisfy the fans and in the way it’s deserved.” I may be reading between the lines a bit too much here, but to me this sounds like they did not want to shortchange the visual effects of a big, climactic battle like this one if they did not have the budget to support it. As in, they could have squeezed in The Battle of the Gullet into the finale, but, they would have had to sacrifice some of the quality to stay within the budget that they may have already spent on Rook’s Rest and The Red Sowing. Animating dragons seems like it would be incredibly expensive, so I don’t blame them or wanting to hold another big battle.
All that is to say that it seems like the decision to end Season 2 where it ends may technically be story driven because they purposefully decided to end here, it’s also budget-driven because they decided to save the big battle, at the end of the day, due to budgetary constraints. Should the creators have known better? Probably. Did they actually have any other choice? Probably not. Either way I would point my finger at HBO/Warner Bros. for not giving the creators carte blanche and financially supporting them so that they could worry more about the story and less about how to ration the story based on budget. With an IP as big as Game of Thrones, no one should have to settle. And while we didn’t have to settle at all with our character arcs this season, as many of those came to a dazzling finish, the plot clearly suffered from the creative team’s own skirmishes with corporate executives.
Image Credit: Variety
This is me at my most cynical, but perhaps Criston Cole is right for a change: “The dragons dance, and men are like dust under their feet.” The Streaming Wars rage on, and creators’ sense of artistic integrity crumble under the bottom line. Am I being too cynical or too idealistic? Either way, like Criston Cole, I’m just along for the perilous ride.