I’m not gonna lie—the finale was an odd one, and apparently deeply divisive. Upon first watching I was left feeling very unmoored by a few of their choices—particularly the choice to give their prophecy-cursed dreamer, Helaena (Phia Saban) some fairly direct predictions that reveal some major plot points down the line. Ultimately, I enjoyed the episode quite a bit and its final montage is one of the best sequences either House of the Dragon or Game of Thrones has produced. It’s a quiet, sorrowful end to a season whose greatest strengths lay in taking the time to complicate its characters. There are spoilers below, of course; let’s get started…
The Title
The title of this Season 2 finale is the intriguing, “The Queen Who Ever Was.” Obviously, it plays off of Rhaenys’ sobriquet, “the Queen Who Never Was,” which Corlys reclaimed and honored in renaming his ship after his late wife. This episode seemingly reverses the name: Rhaenyra was always the intended, perhaps even fated Queen on this show. Now that she is fighting for it, the episode asks us to remember that fact. But there’s a cruel irony underlying the title. In invoking the Queen Who Never Was, the show reminds us that Rhaenys Targaryen was likely the best potential monarch of this time period—stoic, brave, kind, prudent, and deeply aware of precisely how much she would be overlooked and underestimated. Her death halfway through the season is meant to be a gut punch—the ultimate indignity in a life filled with them, and the silencing of the last real voice of reason who might have been able to stop the war and broker a lasting peace. It is a cruel little trick, then, that she is remembered as the Queen Who Never Was. The name acknowledges what she should have been while simultaneously failing to imagine that it was truly possible. It makes her Queen and strips her of the title in the same breath. It’s a kind of tokenism.
Here at the end of season 2, the show asks us to remember that Rhaenys is not the only Queen Who Never Was—exalted only in her absence. Rhaenyra and Alicent are also queens who never were. The latter ruled ably as regent during her husband’s illness only to be stripped of all real power and responsibilities as soon as a younger man was installed as king. Rhaenyra, whatever might befall her, is also a Queen who never was; all the promise of her reign, whatever it will be, has already been maimed and stained by the fire and blood she needed to use to claim her throne.
Unraveling the Opening Titles
We get our (presumably) final look at the tapestry-themed opening credits this episode. There is one new panel now, representing the Sowing of the Seeds with all seven of Rhaenyra’s dragons—Vermithor, Silverwing, Syrax, Caraxes, Moondancer, Seasmoke, and Vermax—rising up from Dragonstone to confront Vhagar. It’s been a delight to watch this set of credits unfold each week and I’m excited to see what motif they go with for the next season.
The Triarchy
We finally get a look at the state of the Triarchy of 130 AC—or, at least, we get a look at its military. In Fire & Blood, the Triarchy is an alliance also called the Kingdom of the Three Daughters made up of three of the so-called Free Cities—the nine city states that were former colonies of (or, in the case of Braavos, a refuge from) the Freehold of Valyria. The Triarchy is made up of what The World of Ice and Fire’s in-world writer, Maester Yandel, refers to as “the Quarrelsome Daughters”—Myr, Lys, and Tyrosh.
Myr — Myr is located on the fertile headlands of the bay known as the Sea of Myrth. It is characterized as a city of artisans and inventors with many technologically advanced materials originating there—Myrish lenses, Myrish lace, and Myrish crossbows are all considered to be the finest specimens available. Myrish characters include the Red Priest, Thoros (played by Paul Kaye in GoT), and the Crabfeeder, Prince Craghas Drahar (Daniel Scott-Smith).
Lys — An island city-state off the Southern coast of Essos, Lys was considered a paradise by the Valyrians—the rough equivalent of Capri in our world. Post-Doom, Lys is one of major centers of the Essosi slave trade and specializes in sex slavery, with especially famous brothels. Characters from Lys include Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) and Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorn) as well as original show alums Varys (Conleth Hill) and the pirate, Salladhor Saan (Lucien Msamati).
Tyrosh — The only one of the Quarrelsome Daughters to actually be located next to the Stepstones, Tyrosh is an old Valyrian fortress city built to guard the passage between the Narrow Sea and Summer Sea. It’s known for its flamboyant, piratical navy with most Tyroshi dyeing their hair bright, unnatural colors. The only major character from Tyrosh who has been featured in a GoT show thus far is Daario Naharis, Daenerys’ mercenary paramour (who played first by Ed Skrein and then by Michael Huisman in the original show). The show portrayed Daario as relatively bland in presentation so it’s nice to get a little bit of that Tyroshi costume design and makeup in this episode.
The Triarchy is not quite a polity on its own—Myr, Lys, and Tyrosh all remain independently ruled—but the “eternal alliance” does offer a council of thirty-three magisters, eleven from each city, who make military and foreign policy decisions. This means that the Admiral of the Fleet is a sort of de facto ruler by virtue of being a singular voice among a famously fractious and often deadlocked ruling body. The previous Admiral, the Crabfeeder, was a Myrish Prince, Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorn) is Lysene so there are no obvious biases when it comes to which citizens of which cities are placed in power.
In F&B, it’s Otto Hightower rather than Tyland Lannister who courts the Triarchy to lend naval assistance to the Greens, and there is no mud-wrestling, singing at swordpoint, or offers to father children in the book. In the show’s version of events, the whole sequence is pretty fun and Jefferson Hall as Tyland is a consistently great source of humor on a series that can be pretty grim. We will definitely see more of the Triarchy next season.
Daemon the Dreamer
We obviously have to spend some time delving into the finale’s absolutely insane sequence of prophetic visions. No such moment exists in the book and I feel like I should reiterate that Daemon’s entire plot this season is almost entirely cut from whole cloth, not based in the source material. That said, the end result of it might be in the service of squaring Daemon’s portrayal in Fire & Blood—that of a fundamentally selfish man who has a couple of bewildering changes of heart—with Archmaester Gyldayn’s assertion that he was “light and dark in equal measure.”
So let’s get to the vision. The images come pretty fast and a few are potentially more symbolic than factual but we see:
- The image of a man (Joshua Ben-Tovim) with a port-wine stain birthmark, entombed in the branches of a Weirwood tree. A three-eyed raven flies past the birthmark. This is clearly Brynden Rivers, aka Bloodraven, the Targaryen bastard, spymaster, and eventual Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch about a hundred years after Daemon’s era who eventually becomes a greenseer and makes himself known to Bran Stark as the “three-eyed raven,” played by Struan Rodger and Max von Sydow in the original show.
- A white walker (what the books call “the Others”) leading a horde of wights through the forests beyond the wall.
- Daemon marching through a field of the dead, including the corpse of a dead dragon. Try as I might I couldn’t be completely sure of the dragon’s identity or even if it was a specific dragon but the form, coloration, and general context of the dream imply that it might be Viserion—Daenerys’ dragon who is killed and raised by the Night King.
- A shot of Daemon sinking into dark water.
- The red comet from the end of A Game of Thrones and present in most of A Clash of Kings which is said to be an omen about the return of fire magic to the world. The original show placed the comet in the premiere of season 2 but the books stick with it for much longer. Martin has always been cagey about confirming magical portents in his book but the comet likely heralded the birth of Dany’s dragons.
- Clearly that is what it’s intended to do here, with a shot of Daenerys’ fossilized eggs in the flames. The behind-the-scenes featurettes for this episode heavily implied that these eggs are the ones that Daemon harvested from the Dragonmont in the season 1 finale and which have been sent along with Aegon the Younger and Viserys the Younger towards Pentos.
- We get a shot of Daenerys herself, on the edge of the Great Dothraki Sea, cradling her hatchling dragons—Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion
- Daemon approaches the Iron Throne to find Rhaenyra (now an adult) crowned and seated on it. Because it’s her as an adult, we can assume this is a vision of the future, or at least a possible future, and Daemon is facing the fact that she is actually the one destined to rule.
- Finally, Helaena appears to tell Daemon that it’s all a story and that he knows his part in it.
I’m of two minds about the visions. Obviously, I love that HotD is delving deeper into Martin’s creepy magical mythology. When Benioff and Weiss made a rule for themselves (later broken) that they would have no visions or flashbacks in the original series, they cut themselves off from a lot of what makes ASoIaF a fantasy series rather than historical fiction set in a fictional world. Condal and his writers’ room are not only setting that omission right, they are doing so in a way that captures the uncanny horror of how Martin views magic.
On the other hand, as a friend pointed out, the original series, in ignoring all of that prophecy and treating Martin’s ultimate conflict between ice and fire as secondary to its political struggle, makes for an unsatisfying end to what HotD is proposing. Daemon’s vision implies that Daenerys is the Prince That Was Promised and while ASoIaF certainly makes that out to be a strong possibility, GoT completely dropped the importance of this aspect of the books, in the end: Dany and Jon are the show’s two best candidates but the one who fulfills the prophecy of ending the long night is Arya…who has nothing to do with Daemon, Valyria, or the Targaryens in general.
Where I am more hopeful and interested in HotD’s focus on prophecy is the way in which it is using it to provide an emotional infrastructure for its characters. Daemon’s vision is an existential horror—proof positive that he only matters insofar as his line will give birth to a real savior, centuries from now. It’s not just the confirmation that he will never be king, it’s the confirmation that, king or no, he fundamentally will not have mattered. He’s not Caraxes’ only rider. He’s not Dark Sister’s only wielder. He’s just one more body on the road to greatness and madness.
That vision is placed back to back with a similar prophecy in which Helaena tells Aemond that he will not outlive his brother and will similarly be gone before Aegon sees any rise to power. A humbled Daemon, resigned to his fate, is one thing but an Aemond raging against the death that has been foretold for him is quite another. I think it’s a great decision to have the show open up a little window on Aemond’s endpoint in order to give its audience a front row seat to his doomed fury.
Moreover, in having Helaena’s prophecy be so stark and legible—this is not a cryptic, “beast beneath the boards” situation—it does open up the possibility that HotD will change things. After all, Martin uses prophecies like Athenian tragedians used them, as puzzle-boxes to torment and surprise both characters and the audience. If Helaena tells Aemond that he’ll be swallowed up in the God’s Eye and never seen again, is the show signaling its intent to both make good on those words while fundamentally altering the events of Fire & Blood? It’s both a worrying and thrilling possibility.
DragonWatch
Two new dragons were shown this episode, though we were only given a brief glimpse of each.
Tessarion — Prince Daeron’s dragon, Tessarion, makes the briefest of appearances in the show’s final montage. Called the “Blue Queen” for her color and potentially in reference to Meleys, the Red Queen, Tessarion is described in the books as beautiful with dark cobalt scales and membranes, and horns the color of beaten copper. The show has lightened the membranes to a sort of peach, but otherwise kept the coloration. She has a blockier, more obviously muscular body than either Moondancer or Vermax, with tiny legs that make her look a little like she hasn’t fully grown into her adult body. She is younger than Vermax, potentially between ten and sixteen years old, making her the youngest dragon currently being fielded in the war. She is, of course, not battle-tested and has only been ridden for a few weeks (the show mentioned that Daeron first rode Tessarion in episode 6 of this season). I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of her along with her rider, Daeron Targaryen, in season 3.
Sheepstealer — The final montage also shows us the wild dragon known as Sheepstealer for the first time. Described in the books as large but skinny and an ugly mud-brown color, Sheepstealer is characterized as a sort of lovable (but dangerous) stray. The show has kept the mud-brown coloring but also given the dragon what appears to be vitiligo with patches of paler skin where melanin is being insufficiently produced. In addition to the coloration, the show has given him massively untrimmed wingtips that look like hoary, overgrown cat’s claws, and a short, porcine muzzle. It’s a charmingly off-kilter design. We may not have gotten any more CheeseDog this season, but if it’s possible for a dragon to have CheeseDog vibes, it’s this guy. Being a feral resident of Dragonstone in the book, Sheepstealer’s age is unrecorded, but Gyldayn has a source that estimates it to be about fifty by the time of the Dance. Again, we only have two shots of him, but it’s going to be a delight to see him in action next season.
Rhaenyra the Cruel
Fire & Blood’s characterization of Rhaenyra, especially during the Dance, is of an increasingly paranoid and spiteful person—one whose grief has curdled into a drive for vengeance. The second episode of this season went out of its way to say that her nickname (“Rhaenyra the Cruel” in the show, “Maegor with teats” in the book) is undeserved, part of a campaign of calculated character assassination on the part of Otto Hightower. But we are circling back to a Rhaenyra that might have the same capacity for monstrousness. Her season arc has taken her, not from grief to paranoia like the book, but from a pacifist desire to make the realm better to a kind of dragoncentric fanaticism where smallfolk can be sacrificed and the gods seemingly ordain her actions.
Rhaenyra is not the Queen Who Ever Was. She’s not on the Iron Throne and her kingdom is in the midst of civil war. But she believes she must be Queen and that she never had a choice to relinquish her claim. The issue is not that she should do so, but that she sees her claim as unavoidable destiny and not a conscious choice. It’s the seed of something unpleasant and far more interesting than Gyldayn’s vision of a queen made monstrous by hysterical grief over her children.
The final scene before the ending montage lays that journey bare. She knows she has to kill Aegon but she still makes Alicent choose it. She becomes, in that moment, the monster Alicent has been terrified of for twenty years, who was at the start only a fiction created by Otto Hightower as a means of controlling his daughter. That scene is incredible for so many reasons, but perhaps it’s made most poignant by hiding the birth of Rhaenyra the Cruel, ushering this fictional horror into reality.
Odds & Ends
- Sharako Lohar asks if Tyland is a philosopher early on in the episode. It might be a reference to Lohar’s actor, Abigail Thorn, who is the founder of Philosophy Tube, a YouTube channel that offers free lessons in philosophy, sociology, and gender studies.
- Condal clarified on the post-show podcast that the show’s version of Lohar is a queer cisgender woman who uses male pronouns in a professional capacity as a way of co-opting masculine power. Martin himself only ever gestures vaguely to trans and non-binary people in his books and the show’s version of Lohar is borrowing a lot of his personality from Racallio Ryndoon, an eccentric, bisexual Tyroshi captain who wears dresses, has a dozen wives, and speaks numerous dialects of Valyrian.
- Aemond and Vhagar burn the town of Sharp Point, the seat of Black loyalist House Bar Emmon. It’s located on a peninsula that forms the Southern boundary of the Gullet in which both Dragonstone and Driftmark sit. Sharp Point doesn’t really matter throughout ASoIaF so having it destroyed doesn’t really change the strategy or overall arc of the war. That’s said, it’s a bit odd to have the event occur entirely offscreen. It’s decent characterization for Aemond, maybe not the best storytelling practice. Still, the show’s design includes the large stone lighthouse which is the only notable feature Martin gives it—so good on the art team for continuing to bring even the most minor parts of Westeros to life.
- When Aegon reverently whispers “Aegon the Realm’s Delight” as his desired sobriquet, it’s a callback to Rhaenyra’s childhood appellation. The show never much used it but it’s an important name in the book as it serves as a distinction between Rhaenyra’s promise as a child and her disappointment as an adult. So when Aegon imagines himself having the same name, it’s an expression of his desire to have what he’s always wanted: the love of his father and the adoration of a kingdom that thinks of him as a beloved child.
- Speaking of tragic turns from increasingly pitiable villains, the season’s final beat for the the man the internet loves to hate, Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), is one of despondent misery. The show does a good job of reminding us that, for all the incel misogyny that corrupts the chivalric code (and Cole himself), it’s still based in motivations that are potentially valuable and honorable. Cole loves Alicent because she saved his life, plucking him from the depths of despair where he was ready to end it, but he also is facing down a world where knights are irrelevant. He’s Westeros’ own Robert Oppenheimer, having unleashed a nuclear option and now despondent that the genie cannot be put back in the bottle
- We see a Green Man out by Harrenhal’s heart tree. The Green Men were the order of Druidic humans who learned greenseeing magic from the Children of the Forest. They supposedly have antlers and green skin though this is often thought to be a misinterpretation of their wearing green clothes and wearing antlered headdresses. The show makes it clear that, though this Green Man is likely a weirwood hallucination, they do indeed have bestial features.
- Brynden Rivers famously has only one eye in the books—leading to the riddle referring to his spy network, “how many eyes does Bloodraven have? A thousand eyes and one.” He definitely has a single eye by the time he’s entombed in the tree beyond the wall and his GoT actors both reflected that aspect of the characters’ appearance. I assume they did not add this detail, here, just to make absolutely sure that he did not read as Aemond for the brief moment he was on screen.
- Simon Strong’s bewildered clapping at Daemon choosing to serve Rhaenyra, is one last delightful little affectation from the show’s most delightful character.
- Where is Otto Hightower? In the book he is never taken prisoner before his return to King’s Landing. My guess is that he is a prisoner of the Beesburys who are now in open Rebellion against the Hightowers and Tyrells. But the show may also have something more devious and interesting to show us, perhaps something wildly off-book. At this point, I trust Condal to deviate far more from the source material than I ever trusted Benioff and Weiss.
Season 2 in Review
Every prequel is, in some ways, a tragedy. If you’re watching or reading something written with Melpomene as its muse, you engage with the understanding that you will not get what you want. Any connection made with a character, any desire for a happy ending is done with anticipated sorrow right around the corner. And when you know the ending, as you must in a prequel, every interesting moment is predicated on the dramatic irony of knowing that it cannot turn out any differently. House of the Dragon is not just a prequel to Game of Thrones, the end of the story is literally spoiled by Joffrey in Season 3, episode 4 of the original series. Even non-book readers with sufficiently good memories know one of the most important and potentially spoilable things about the show. So all you really have is how you get to the end, and whether or not you can find enough catharsis in the difference between what was and what could have been.
I think HotD is a spectacular success in that regard. I’ve seen complaints that this season was slow. And, certainly, it did not get to either of the two events that seemed like shoo-ins for a big season finale (though both have been clearly set up to take place early next season—I won’t spoil them here but you can probably guess even if you haven’t read the book). But I would characterize the pace of the show as deliberate. It is taking its time to say what it needs to say and make sure that we fully buy in to the humanity of its major players…all the better to twist the knife when it delivers their inevitable fates.
And, speaking of those fates, HotD manages to be eminently watchable and affecting without somehow being fatiguing. Let’s not forget that Martin’s world has always been a cruel one. It’s a place where people only get what they want if they pay unreasonable prices. Daemon can be a great leader of men, but only if he gives up his lifelong ambition for the throne and accepts that he will only ever be a pawn in a larger game. Aemond can make himself into the perfect vessel to dispense revenge for his childhood slights but he can’t change the fate that Helaena dreamed. Alicent can be freed of the humiliation of the patriarchy but only if she agrees to let her son die. Rhaena can finally have her dragon but only if she wanders, filthy, half-mad, and dying of thirst, across the Vale. Perhaps Rhaenyra can even be the Queen Who Ever Was, but only if she gives up her last chance to walk away and be happy and unremarkable with the woman a part of her still clearly still loves.
This season is better than the first. I think it might be better than any season of Game of Thrones. Condal and his team have proven that they both care deeply about the tone and intricacies of Martin’s source material while taking every opportunity to elevate it, sanding away the rough edges and imbuing the story with a power and significance that makes it feel like so much more than the cynical prequel to a bankable hit show (which it easily could have been).
The season ends with Alicent, the saddest woman in Westeros, having let go of almost everything she holds dear and having agreed to sacrifice her son in the name of peace, staring out at the impossibly vast horizon. It may be an image that evokes freedom but, for a woman who has spent her life following the narrow path set out for her, it is a vision of overwhelming sublimity, unwieldy in its terrible multitude of possibilities. Alicent is dwarfed by what life might hold in store for her. In some ways, it’s the same moment that Daemon has—realizing just how insignificant you are up against the vastness of a story in which you are not the protagonist.
The Black Queen has never been more powerful. She has the literal firepower to take on Vhagar, and has the armies of the North and Riverlands at her disposal. She has a backdoor to King’s Landing and the hard-won blessing of the Queen Dowager to kill her rival for the throne. Alicent tells Rhaenyra that she has always envied her ability to know what she wants and flaunt convention in taking it. But in her final shot of the season, Rhaenyra is framed by the scroll cases of Targaryen history, staring at the shattered skull of Meraxes. She’s now bound to that history, to the prophecy of the Prince That Was Promised, to the responsibilities and compromises of winning and keeping the throne. The Queen Who Ever Was has never been more trapped.
The show has always been Alicent and Rhaenyra’s story, first and foremost—Martin got it right when he titled his first pass at writing about the Dance of the Dragons “The Princess and The Queen.” At the end of last season, I characterized the show as a tragedy about the dissolution of their friendship. But I think I was wrong. It’s a show about how their love for one another endures. It endures without the possibility of fulfillment. It endures to the detriment of their children. But it is the inescapable heart of the Dance and this second season has made it clearer than ever that, even if you know the end, that tragic friendship is more than worth watching.
What did you think of the finale—and of Daemon’s visions, Helaena’s prophecies, and that final conversation? What are you looking forward to seeing in the next two seasons (given the news that the series will end with Season 4)? Please share your thoughts, and thanks for reading and chiming in!
