{"id":783081,"date":"2026-07-06T03:52:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T03:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/783081\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T03:52:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T03:52:08","slug":"house-of-the-dragon-season-3-episode-3-review-recap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/783081\/","title":{"rendered":"House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 3 Review & Recap"},"content":{"rendered":"

Full spoilers follow for House of the Dragon<\/a> Season 3, Episode 3.<\/p>\n

They say that in the Game Of Thrones, you either win or you die. But there\u2019s another stage: sometimes you win the throne but are then beset by a thousand petty decisions that only you can make, and each one could either secure your position or leave you fatally vulnerable. Oh, and there are rats everywhere: literal ones, for once, and not just the traitorous kind. That\u2019s the dilemma for Emma D\u2019Arcy\u2019s Rhaenyra in this episode, and it\u2019s surprisingly compelling.<\/p>\n

We open, however, with one of the more striking images in Westeros\u2019 TV history. Ormund Hightower (James Norton) rides out from his thousands-strong army to surrender to Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith), who stands alone, his sword still sheathed. It\u2019s only when the camera pans around and you see that Daemon is backed up by not just his own Caraxes but two other dragons that the scale of the threat becomes clear. Ormund\u2019s shiny armour would only help him to cook evenly; all his neat rows of soldiers are just dragonfeed if he doesn\u2019t make the deal. So Ormund swears fealty to Rhaenyra and, after a Columbo-style \u201cone more thing\u201d from Daemon, very reluctantly throws in his nephew Daeron as a hostage. Daeron is the youngest son of the late Viserys and Alicent (Olivia Cooke), raised by the Hightowers, and specifically Ormund, for years. You\u2019d be forgiven for having forgotten he exists.<\/p>\n

But, psych! The big twist of this episode is that the child Ormund hands over, the one that Daemon is going to spend the episode recommending that Rhaenyra assassinate, the one that she wrings her hands over repeatedly, is just some kid. The real Daeron has been safe with Ormund the whole time. Rhaenyra learns this in an interesting way: she brings Alicent in to see \u201cDaeron\u201d before \u2013 compromise! \u2013 sending him to the Wall for life, and Alicent is visibly disconcerted for a moment. Her mind goes into overdrive, trying to figure out if this is Rhaenyra playing a trick or something else. Then she just admits it. <\/p>\n

House of the Dragon: Season 3 Official Images\"James<\/p>\n

It was almost a smart play by Ormund, who\u2019s soon revealed to have immediately broken his oath of fealty and taken control of the small city of Tumbleton; we\u2019d never heard of it before except as the place dragonrider Hugh the Hammer\u2019s (Kieran Bew) wife has gone to live with her brother, which may become relevant later. After the Hightowers\u2019 very brief intro in the season opener, and what looked to be a \u201cso long, and thanks for nearly fighting\u201d at the start of this episode, it\u2019s now clear that Ormund will be a major player, and Norton is going to have something to do. All this, and he has fancy armour. Fun!<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, Rhaenyra is experiencing death by a thousand cuts: not literally (worth specifying on this show) but in the sense that everyone wants a piece of her or her treasury and she doesn\u2019t have nearly enough to go around. There are rats everywhere in the palace because all the ratcatchers were executed last season. She tries to cope with the problem by inviting some minor nobles to dinner, wooing them for a few moments and then hitting them with a) a rat-based main course and b) the news that she\u2019s raiding their houses for hoarded food that she can share with the hungry smallfolk. Communism is alive and well in King\u2019s Landing! I\u2019m sure none of these rich people will be deeply offended.<\/p>\n

Rhaenyra wants to be good, and to rule effectively, but as Alicent sadly points out, you can\u2019t do both \u2013 especially with the contents of the treasury missing, the city starving, the palace filled with Hightower loyalists, the dragonseeds asking for their promised rewards, and Corlys deeply pissed off when Rhaenyra refuses to legitimize his sons, worried that that will highlight how clearly illegitimate her own are. She\u2019s been on the throne for a matter of days, and trouble seems to be brewing. <\/p>\n

While she has, for now, taken Mysaria\u2019s (Sonoya Mizuno) advice to look out for her people, she\u2019s worryingly obsessed with her coronation, and her confrontation with the High Septon, leader of the faith, is also concerning. He not only refuses to formally crown her because there\u2019s no sign of Aegon II\u2019s (Tom Glynn-Carney) body \u2013 because hey, he\u2019s not actually dead \u2013 but also because he considers dragons an abomination and the workings of dark magic. This is unfair because they\u2019re all good lizards, Septon, 15 out of 10. It\u2019s the owners you can\u2019t always rely on.<\/p>\n

Speaking of which, Rhaenyra is also very anxious to find the person who rode Sheepstealer and introduce them to a new definition of pain and suffering, so Daemon is dispatched to the Vale to look for the miscreant (unbeknownst to him, the rider\u2019s actually his daughter Rhaena) and also to collect some gold from the Lady of the Vale, who promised troops but who has notably failed to send any. Before he goes, Daemon correctly points out that they could just say buggeration to the whole thing, conquer a different kingdom \u2013 Dorne, perhaps, for the weather \u2013 or fly off into the sunset on their giant scaly pets. \u201cYou will have an empire, unassailable\u2026I style us gods, Rhaenyra, as we were always meant to be.\u201d No one ever accused him of having a small ego. She resists, pointing out that her father valued restraint more than power, but he dismisses that as weakness and a lack of force. There\u2019s an element of truth to both sides.<\/p>\n

It’s the next day when Rhaenyra learns from a dragonkeeper who barely escaped the town that Ormund has taken Tumbleton and she has to figure out how to respond. If she flies over and torches the place, she\u2019ll be flamb\u00e9ing her loyal subjects. If she ignores the provocation, she leaves a place to potentially rally the Greens to continue fighting. And Aemond is still MIA, which would be good news if he didn\u2019t have a gigantic flamethrower with him of unpredictable behaviour. Rhaenyra may think she\u2019s won the war, but she\u2019s finding that holding the throne is going to be a whole other struggle. The drama already feels unbearably tense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Full spoilers follow for House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 3. They say that in the Game…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":783082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75],"class_list":["post-783081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}