The House of the Dragon is at War With Its Own Premise

A sad day in Westeros

(The following contains full spoilers for both seasons of House of the Dragon.)

The second season of House of the Dragon has wrapped, and the fans are outraged. Reddit buzzes with pleas to replace the showrunners. The show’s IMDB ratings have tanked, with half of the Season 2 rated below the worst Season 1 episode. Reviewers call the Season 2 finale “anticlimatic”, “a letdown”, and “hugely underwhelming”.

The show’s defenders, including the showrunners themselves, have argued that fans are simply angry about the lack of a big finale battle. And yes, given that one of the main complaints against the season was “nothing happened,” a big finale battle would’ve helped.

But the problems in Season 2 run much, much deeper.

Consider the showrunners’ commentary about the goals and characters in Season 2:

One of the things we do — and it was very clear to me when I read this season — is have protagonists. With [Rhaenyra, Alicent] and Daemon, we’ve set up these three characters in Season 1 and were obliged to continue with them in Season 2.
— Season finale director Geeta Vasent Patel in an interview with The Wrap

Rhaenyra sees what’s coming she’s trying to put an end to it, and beseech Alicent to help her see that through. She sees it as her job as sovereign to risk herself before she risks the lives of possibly millions of the realm. … For Rhaenyra, it’s a really outlandish risk to try and go to Alicent and say, ‘We are the only two people at either of these councils with the power, influence, and desire to see about a peaceful end to this thing.’
— Showrunner Ryan Condal, Season 2 Episode 3 commentary

There’s so much in play, there are armies, there are dragons, there's castle strongholds and political maneuvering, but at the end of the day, it comes down to these two women trying to figure it out.
— Showrunner Sara Hess, Season 2 Episode 8 commentary

Based on their commentary and the narrative choices made in the show, the showrunners have two goals:

1. Rhaenyra and Alicent (along with Daemon) are the primary protagonists and drivers of the story.

2. Rhaenyra and, eventually, Alicent want to achieve peace for the good of the realm.

The problem is, these two goals are in conflict with a third, unavoidable fact:

3. The story is about a bloody, ruthless civil war.

To satisfy any two of these statements, and the third must suffer. If Rhaenyra and Alicent drive the story and want peace, the war must wait. When Rhaenyra acts like the protagonist of a ruthless civil war, as she does when she roasts dozens of innocent potential dragonriders alive, it undermines her alleged pacificism. And in the one episode that truly centers the war — episode 4 in the Battle of the Rook’s Rest — Rhaenyra and Alicent are sidelined, with neither playing a role beyond Rhaenyra begrudgingly allowing Rhaenys to fight on her behalf.

This dissonance is rot at the root, and it causes the show to wilt in three ways:

1. It Forces Everyone Into Holding Patterns

The pacing. My god, the pacing. I have never seen a show so content to repeat the same motions in the same settings over, and over, and over again. Daemon trips balls in Harrenhall. Alyn moves the same planks at the only pier and only ship in all of Spicetown. Rhaenyra’s council of nameless senile men insists that they must act! and Rhaenyra inevitably, exasperatedly replies, “What would you have me do?” Everyone is trapped in their own personal Groundhog Day, doomed to forever repeat the same boring scenes.

The showrunners need these scenes to repeat to buy time for Alicent to come around to Rhaenyra’s side. But because the season starts off with them furious at each other, it takes a lot of episodes (and some very implausible plot points, but more on that later) to get there.

Unfortunately, the further the war progresses, the harder it will be for them to reconcile. It already strains credulity to believe that after a murdered son and grandson — not to mention an assassination attempt — Rhaenyra and Alicent would bury the hatchet. Wars devolve into downward spirals of violence, with each side using the other side’s misdeeds to justify its own. Each battle and each death makes it less plausible that Rhaenyra and Alicent’s friendship would win out, so the screenwriters need the war to move in slow motion.

And, boy, does it ever.

To slow-walk the war, main characters are placed in endless holding patterns. After ending the prior season out for blood, Rhaenyra spends the first half of the season rehashing arguments about avoiding violence at all costs. Alicent is sidelined in every Green Council meeting. Daemon is stuck in a timeloop of Blackwoods-vs-Brackens feuds, blackout fever dreams, and regaining consciousness in the midst of dinner with poor Simon Strong, who just wants a nice meal. Let the man eat!

Daemon and Rhaenyra are not only in holding patterns, but worse, replays of their Season 1 arcs. Just as she was before Vhagar devoured Luke, Rhaenyra is deciding whether war is justified for the sake of preserving her rule. Daemond is back to wondering why he should accept Rhaenyra’s rule, when she’s a woman and he’s a power-hungry incest lord. The ending beat of Season 2 — the war is about to begin — is identical to the ending of Season 1!

There is, of course, one main character whose season two arc brings them to a new place: Alicent. But that brings to us to the second problem with the showrunner’s conflicting aims…

2. It Breaks the Consistency of the World

Unlike Daemon and Rhaenyra, Alicent gets a new arc: she will eventually defect to Rhaenyra’s side for the sake of peace.

But the cycle of violence has already begun. Rhaenyra’s son has been killed, as has Alicent’s grandson. At this point in both the real world and the source material (George R.R. Martin’s “Fire and Blood”), it would be close to impossible to derail the war. Alicent and Rhaenyra already hate each other — with good reason! — and are surrounded by people who share their hate. The opposing sides have incompatible goals, no lines of communication, and slowly increasing bodycounts. It’s hard to imagine either Rhaenyra and Alicent reaching out for peace because there’s no will or path for anything but war.

So the screenwriters must intervene. They give Rhaenyra a desire to “sue for peace”, incongruously following an assassination attempt on her life. To provide a path to peace, they lay out the most implausible sequence in a show about dragonriders: Rhaenyra waltzes into Kings Landing disguised as a septa, holds Alicent at knifepoint in the High Sept, conducts a heated interview without anyone noticing, and escapes undetected after Alicent simply lets her go.

To call this plan ‘risky’ is to falsely imply it has a chance of succeeding. Were it not a TV show, and Rhaenyra did not have Valyrian-steel plot armor, this plan would be guaranteed to fail. At least, it’s so likely to fail that no sane leader would entertain it. Even showrunner Ryan Condal unironically describes Rhaenyra’s plan as “outlandish.” A quick rundown of the plan’s ridiculousness:

• Rhaenyra, arguably the most famous face in Kings Landing, especially among the old Kingsguard who used to serve her, could easily be detected even before reaching Alicent.

• Alicent could easily call for help upon spotting Rhaenyra, or arrest her immediately upon leaving.

• A random guard, septa or Alicent stan might notice that the queen was doing a lot of talking with someone who looked like suspiciously like her mortal enemy.

• The entire plot contrivance also rests on the idea that literally anyone can slide up next to (and stab!) Alicent in the High Sept, which, come on.

In the source material, this meeting does not happen. Nor does the underlying arc wherein Alicent and Rhaenyra team up for friendship and peace. The writers are left contorting the characters, story, and world to fit this plot line.

All the logical leaps and confusing character motivations stem from these contortions. Rhaenyra must pivot from bloodlust to benevolence, Rhaenyra and Alicent must meet in person, and Alicent must let Rhaenyra escape to serve screenwriter’s contradictory aims. The circumstances of their meeting are nonsensical because the story was not set up for them to meet in any circumstance.

In the season finale, the showrunners repeat the same mistake, this time having Alicent sneak into Dragonstone to plea for peace. Again, this scene does not happen in the book; again, they need more contortions to accommodate it.

While logistically more plausible than the Septa Rhaerya Rendezvous, there’s still a sort of ridiculous breeziness with which each side pops over through blockades. (One of the other recurring plot points in Season 2 is people casually wandering into enemy strongholds.) Or as the Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh nicely puts it: “the ease with which the main characters in this conflict cross enemy lines undercuts the gravity of the standoff between the two factions.”

The biggest contortion, though, is Alicent joining Team Rhaenyra. Yes, Alicent was wrong about Viserys’s dying wish. But in Season 1, Alicent is portrayed as a fiercely defensive mother, one who tries to stab Rhaenyra to get a literal eye-for-an-eye for her son. Even when Aegon did terrible things, she defended him. Now, she agrees to have him beheaded for wrongfully claiming the throne, which he did only because Alicent told him to. Alicent misinterpreted Viserys’s final words, pressured her son to claim the throne, and now that he followed her bad instructions… he pays the price.

In the showrunner’s eyes, Alicent’s flip-flop shows that she chooses the side of peace and righteousness. Sure, she did a lot of messed up things before, they’re saying, but now she’s good. Which brings us to the final problem caused by the showrunners’ conflicting goals…

3. It Flattens the Moral Landscape

Worse than making Rhaenyra and Alicent inconsistent, Season 2 made them boring.

The most interesting characters in Game of Thrones were morally complex. They did good, bad, and bad in the name of good. Varys schemed in defense of the realm. Jaime Lannister was torn between his love of Cersei and his increasing sense of duty to others. Daenerys wanted to break the wheel but also was a tad eager to burn her enemies alive in the process. Tyrion, clearly a good guy, murdered his own father mid-dump. They were interesting to watch because they contained multitudes, and you didn’t know what side would show up.

The first season of House of the Dragon laid the groundwork for a host of new morally complex characters. At the center were Rhaenyra and Alicent, who each had a mix of selfish and selfless impulses. And while the first season went out of its way to portray Rhaenyra as ‘good’ — after all, she had the rightful claim to the throne — she wasn’t all good. Especially as child, she had a swagger that verged on haughtiness. She had an affair with a kingsguard, had bastard children, demanded the head of anyone who whispered the truth about her children, and made her original husband fake his death so that she could <checks notes> marry her uncle. And like anyone who insists they deserve the crown, it’s not purely for the good of the realm.

These attributes made her complicated. They made her compelling.

The same is true for Season 1 Alicent, whose flaws were even more evident. She was hypocritical, occasionally cruel, an apologist for her rapist son, and ultimately in the wrong about the rightful heir. But she also felt very human, often trying her best to weather the hierarchy and partiarchy buffeting around her. Season 1 beautifully made the viewer understand how these two former friends would fall out and how they would each feel aggrieved by the other. You could understand both of them, even root for both of them, despite the conflict between them. The tension between them was real, earned, and riveting.

Season 2, in contrast, flattens Rhaenyra and Alicent. I get the sense that the showrunners want to convey that Rhaenyra and Alicent are the good ones: they’re interested in peace, unlike everyone else on their councils. They are protagonists not just in the sense that they’re central actors, but also in that they are the (possibly tragic) heroines of the story.

Maybe this could be done in a way that preserved their full, flawed, compelling personalities. But instead, it boxes them into cautious, timid roles. Where Rhaenyra once had swagger, she now spends every episode doubting whether the path she chose last episode was the right one. On the brink of civil war, she continually stalls to commit to any action, peaceful or otherwise.

The show, I think, confuses indecision from wisdom. It wants Rhaenyra to be the good queen; it wants to contrast her wisdom against her council’s warmongering. But because peace can’t actually win out — again, Fire and Blood is about a civil war — she can’t decisively commit to it. She instead has to waffle to stall for time, before taking the extremely unwise step of rendezvousing with Alicent. If you want peace, send a message that says “Let’s make a truce for the good of the realm,” and hunker down defensively. You don’t need a septa costume.

And thanks to all her talk of peace, Rhaenyra’s few acts of ruthlessness feel abrupt and out-of-character. When she locks dozens of civilians in the dragon pit, knowing full well that they’ll be flambéd alive, it feels inexplicable. (Also, avoidable. Why not do it one at a time, or spread outside where the dragon can choose a rider?) With so much time spent handwringing about harming the laypeople, why does she suddenly not care? The answer is, in part, that book-Rhaenyra is much less pacifist than show-Rhaenyra, forcing show-Rhaenyra to do out-of-character things simply because book-Rhaenyra did them.

Alicent fairs even worse. In season one, the bad blood between her and Rhaenyra was truly bad. Remember: she forced Rhaenyra to walk up multiple flights of stairs immediately after giving birth. She grabbed a dagger to gouge Rhaenyra’s eye as retribution for Aemond’s. And now that her grandson was brutally beheaded on Rhaenyra’s behalf… Alicent agrees to let Rhaenyra behead her son, too. As with Rhaenyra, the showrunners want to convey that Alicent cares about the realm over her own interests. And as with Rhaenyra, this is a cartoonish reduction of the character we’ve seen before.

To reinforce the good-vs-evil divide, the show also reduces supporting characters based on their allegiances.

Corlys, originally an ambitious leader in his own right, has devolved into a pro-Rhaenyra stick figure. Admittedly, this flattening was already happening at the end of Season 1. Despite believing that Rhaenyra and Daemon had murdered his son, and knowing that Daemon murdered his brother, Corlys vowed his allegiance and his fleet to Rhaenyra. The justification is a single sentence from his wife, Rhaenys, saying, “but Rhaenyra is the only one looking out for the realm!” In Season 2, after Rhaenys dies on Rhaenyra’s behalf, Corlys humbly supports Rhaenyra. Despite everything she has cost him, Corlys never challenges or doubts her. In an attempt to draw clean borders between good and evil — and keep Corlys on the side of good — the showrunners rob him of his agency.

Elsewhere, villains become more cartoonish. Aemond, who already looked like an anime villain at the end of Season 1, becomes one by the end of Season 2. His Season 1 behavior was cruel but retained flashes of humanity. When he (or Vhagar) killed Luke, Aemond’s face conveyed horror and sadness: he wanted to torment Luke, but he didn’t want this. In Season 2, as he becomes more unhinged, the glimpses of humanity vanish. He unambiguously tries to kill his brother; he razes towns without clear motivation. This progression toward savagery on its own wouldn’t be too hard to swallow — power corrupts, etc. — but as part of a general trend toward casting major players as Good™ or Evil™, it’s worrying.

The showrunners, I think, botched a great opportunity to tell a morality tale about the cycle of violence. These cycles are hard to break even when people want to break them. It’s a coordination problem where each actor’s motives force them to ratchet up the conflict, despite the harm it causes everyone. There’s a rich moral lesson about how even well-intentioned leaders can fall into downward spirals of violence, simply because they are human.

House of the Dragon, in contrast, says that a good person can just snap out of a cycle of violence. To do so, though, it slices off its protagonists’ rough edges and gives them impossible opportunities to reconcile. The show wants to emphasize the value of reaching for peace, but it only cheapens it by making it look so easy.

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