In embracing all-out nihilism, the Game of Thrones prequel reaches its potential in season three.
Photo: Theo Whiteman/HBO

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Sound the horns: House of the Dragon has fixed its momentum problem. In season three, vows are made and broken, citizens are violated and slaughtered, and heroes we’ve known from the beginning are unceremoniously offed. It’s bleak as hell, and it’s also the best House of the Dragon has ever been, clear-eyed about the story it’s telling and no longer so enamored with the people grasping for power or the dragons they use for their bidding.

To be fair, stretching a few chapters from Fire & Blood, George R.R. Martin’s in-universe history of the Targaryens, into a multi-season bonanza of familial infighting for the Iron Throne was always going to come with pacing issues. HOTD’s first season comprised a lot of setup, time jumps, and a questionable prophetic tie to Game of Thrones proper in order to establish the intimacy between Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and Alicent (Olivia Cooke), best friends turned step-relations turned opposing matriarchs battling over the Iron Throne. Following the death of Rhaenyra’s father and Alicent’s husband, King Viserys (Paddy Considine), the women split over Rhaenyra’s right to the crown versus Alicent’s son, Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney). Season two had bouts of devastating dragon action saddled with narrative wheel-spinning; there are only so many times one can nod along to the thematic parallels of Queen Rhaenyra pacing in frustration around Dragonstone while Queen Dowager Alicent paces in frustration around King’s Landing to understand, hey, there are some similarities between Team Black and Team Green! HOTD spent much of its run time so far assuring viewers that this will all connect back to Game of Thrones, really, and there are people you’ll want to root for in this whole mêlée, promise. In its third season, the prequel series holds onto the former tactic but abandons the latter — to its betterment. This is an ignoble war making monsters and fools out of its participants, and against the uncontrollable weapons that are dragons, everyone’s resolve is crumbling.

The premiere, which airs on June 21 on HBO, picks up immediately where season-two finale “The Queen Who Ever Was” left off in August 2024, when Alicent came to Rhaenyra with a secret proposition. If she were to sacrifice her two shitty sons, Aegon and Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), to Team Black and surrender King’s Landing to Rhaenyra, could Rhaenyra rule justly and save Alicent and her daughter Helaena (Phia Saban)? Rhaenyra is seriously considering the proposition when HOTD starts up again, to the surprise of the men in her Small Council. Can she really trust Alicent, a woman who has conspired against Rhaenyra for so long? But all this bloodshed in her name is getting to the Black Queen, who has already lost one son to the war and sent away her three youngest children to keep them safe. In a season where practically all the Targaryens feel the destabilizing consequences of their actions, Rhaenyra struggles to gain the respect she’s convinced she deserves, especially from men who sneer that she’s never been to battle, the only way Westeros knows to solve its problems. The action sequences are as exorbitant as ever, especially when the dragon Sheepstealer and his underbite show up. But what you’ll remember long after the Battle of the Gullet or the Battles of Tumbleton are over, instead of the sick tricks the dragonriders get up to, are the oceans and fields of dead, the blood in the water and the mud, the bodies picked clean by animal scavengers and human looters alike.

Shook free of Martin’s influence, co-creator and showrunner Ryan Condal still sticks to most of Fire & Blood’s pivotal plot points, but Condal also corrects a recurring HOTD error: He fills in the internal blanks of these characters by sowing discontent within the teams, disrupting their assumed homogeny and hammering home just how devastating this war for loyalty and land has been. Aegon, dragged out of King’s Landing by spymaster Lord Larys Strong (Matthew Needham) in an effort to save him from the fratricidal Aemond, gets an up-close look at the petty tyrants who have sprouted up in the countryside thanks to his impetuous rule. Aemond, horny always for bloodshed, pushes his luck with Alicent, who has to play the role of supportive mommy while secretly yearning for Rhaenyra to accept her offer and free her from her mad sons. Daemon was stuck at Harrenhal last season; now, Matt Smith is unleashing every smirk and eye roll in his arsenal as he serves as his wife-niece Rhaenyra’s best warrior and worst diplomatic envoy. He’s either dropping sarcastic, unbothered one-liners about the war to opponents like the rigid Ormund Hightower (James Norton), who leads the land army pledged to Aegon and has been warding Alicent’s youngest son, Daeron, or cooing in Rhaenyra’s ear about world domination like they’re Pinky and the Brain. Either way, he’s a menace.

In between the expected violence are dialogue-heavy scenes where characters discuss their ideologies and worldviews and grapple with what it means to rule and seem genuinely changed by the rigor of those conversations. At long last, the interiorities so many of these characters lack — especially the adult versions of Rhaenyra and Alicent, who usually are limited to reactivity — are able to expand. This season’s third episode should be recognized as the best hour of the series so far, a thorough, process-centric portrait of what’s required to lead the commonfolk and sit on the maybe-sentient Iron Throne, which is famed for its ability to accept or reject a ruler. D’Arcy and Cooke have remarkable moments of despair and paranoia all throughout the first half of this season, but they shine particularly in this episode as each queen grapples with the limitations of her role and the myriad responsibilities they’ve been saddled with thanks to their fathers, husbands, and sons. HOTD’s version of feminism is still a simplistic “boys drool, girls rule” dichotomy, but it’s easy to accept when D’Arcy and Cooke maneuver their characters so well into joined puzzle pieces, each woman’s frustrations and resentments against the Man becoming easier to understand when the other is presented as her mirror. And, most importantly, all this progression is occurring at a rapid clip, with full arcs tidily wrapped up in the four (of eight) episodes provided for review and characters’ hidden motivations revealed deliberately and steadily. We’re closer to the end of HOTD now than the beginning, and the series, noticeably and refreshingly, churns along toward that conclusion.

Midway through the premiere, the season’s seeming thesis statement is delivered by Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), perhaps the series’ most malleably moral character. He swore himself to Rhaenyra, then to Alicent; he slept with each woman; he’s a fuckboy and a backstabber in equal measure. Now, he’s a philosopher, a man who sees what the Targaryens and their dragons have wrought and understands that there’s no hope for anyone who isn’t in that family tree (and probably not very much hope for those in it, either). “Look to the sky, to the horizon. Doom and ruin surround us. We’ll all become beasts before our end,” Cole says in a bland, resigned deadpan. The nihilism of that statement is exactly what invigorates this season of HOTD. The questions raised about whether any of these characters really earned the power that’s been handed to them, and the realization that all of them, one way or another, will likely meet their end without the honor they thought they were due, propels HOTD into somber storytelling heights that haven’t been seen in this franchise since midway through GOT’s original run. All men must die. All women, too.

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