‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 Finale Review: Anticlimax of your choice

SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers for the season 2 finale of HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” titled “The Queen Who Ever Was,” now streaming on Max.

“The Queen Who Ever Was,” the season 2 finale of HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” is a television episode largely defined by what not happen in a running time of almost 70 minutes. There are no major battles between the Greens and the Blacks, the two factions of the Targaryen family currently vying for the Iron Throne. There are no major deaths either – a far cry from last season’s conclusion, which saw aspiring queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) lose her infant son Lucerys (Elliot Grihault) to the vengeful impulse of her half-brother Aemond (Ewan Mitchell).

“House of the Dragon” differs from “Game of Thrones,” the generation-defining hit of which it is a spinoff, in the nature of its source material. Unlike George R.R. Martin’s major novel series, which remain unfinished to this day, the fictional history “Fire & Blood” is both a complete work and deliberately ambiguous. Rather than a real-time telling of events from the characters’ perspectives, “Fire & Blood” is a composite of multiple retrospective accounts, none of which are canonical — even if certain milestones are set in stone. This quality gave ‘House of the Dragon’ showrunner Ryan Condal the freedom to choose which version of the truth the show would choose, as well as the opportunity for fans to frantically speculate about the impending arrival of major developments they knew were coming . if not when or in what context.

That “The Queen Who Ever Was” – written by producer Sara Hess and directed by Geeta Vasant Patel, who also helmed Episode 3 – stops short of these looming cataclysms can be attributed to its compressed schedule, which cuts the season to eight ended episodes instead of 10. There was no confrontation at Harrenhal, where Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) has spent months raising an army and confronting his demons. There was also no reward for the rising tensions in the capital King’s Landing, where Rhaenyra’s lowborn advisor Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) has sown the seeds of rebellion among the common people.

Instead, the episode’s crescendos were mostly interpersonal: Daemon finally accepting Rhaenyra as his superior after a lifetime of desire for the crown; bastard sailor Alyn (Abubakar Salim) finally confronted his father Corlys (Steven Toussaint) after decades of neglect; Rhaenyra’s childhood friend Alicent (Olivia Cooke) finally gave up the self-righteousness she had been clinging to like a security blanket, and admitted that she had been wrong to help start a war. The bloodshed paled in comparison to last week, when dozens of Targaryen villains went up in flames as part of the so-called Red Seeding.

Many fans will undoubtedly view “The Queen Who Ever Was” as anticlimactic, especially as a final glimpse of Westeros before potentially having to wait years for Season 3. (Season 1 premiered in August 2022, though there will be at least a second spin-off, ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ is already in production.) But in a different light, the finale reads like a statement of intent. “House of the Dragon” may have a premise that requires high-octane dragon fighting, but the show doesn’t want to be defined by it. Instead, the finale reiterates that the real focus of the series is on the lives and relationships that will become the collateral damage of these fights. The more “House of the Dragon” can delay gratification via glorious bloodshed, the more it forces the viewer to remain stuck in the grim fatalism that is increasingly its preferred mode.

Surprisingly, the Cassandra of this conflict is Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), Rhaenyra and Alicent’s shared ex, and thus far, a dick of the highest order. But witnessing season 2’s only dragon-on-dragon match – the fire at Rook’s Rest in episode 4, which claimed the lives of Princess Rhaenys (Eve Best) and Rhaenyra’s usurper brother King Aegon (Tom Glynn Carney) permanently paralyzed – is humiliated at close range the bitter, vengeful knight. “The dragons dance and the people are like dust under their feet,” he growls. “All our beautiful thoughts and all our efforts are as nothing.” But for ‘House of the Dragon’ they are something. In effect, the show inverts Cole’s hierarchy, placing human thoughts, feelings, and efforts above the spectacle of fire-powered carnage.

“History will portray you as a villain,” Rhaenyra tells Alicent in the final scene, after her former friend offers to surrender King’s Landing to an invading army. “House of the Dragon” as a whole is deeply concerned with history, partly as a nod to “Fire & Blood.” In “The Queen Who Ever Was” alone, the final shot of Rhaenyra places her among a wall of scrolls containing thousands of years of past knowledge, as Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin) convinces Daemon to commit by offering him a to show a vision of the coming existential struggle. in ‘Game of Thrones’, more than a century in the future. The events of ‘House of the Dragon’ are presented as mere fragments in (to use the visual metaphor of the opening credits) a much broader tapestry, with the characters’ motivations unknowable and inevitably misinterpreted by future generations. Everything we look at will eventually be lost to time. Paradoxically, this perspective only raises the stakes of the emotions at play. Before these Targaryens became proper names in a history book, they were the center of their own story.

This focus is far from universally rewarding. While the conclusion was relatively satisfying – Oscar Tully (Archie Barnes), I’d promise you my sword any day – Daemon’s stint with Harrenhal felt interminable, leaving the character stranded in navel-gazing hallucinations that stretched on for the better part of a season. Candid conversations between Rhaenyra’s heir Jacaerys (Harry Collett) and his relatives were a long-awaited reckoning with his adulterous origins, retroactively attempting to make up for Season 1’s warp speed.

But while it’s fair to fault “House of the Dragon” for mismanaging the pace of these internal journeys, it’s less of a mistake that the season ends with armies on the march rather than in the field. When action does come, “House of the Dragon” cuts around it, like the outbreak of hostilities between old rivals the Blackwoods and Brackens of Aemonds setting fire to a small castle in this episode, or makes it actively unpleasant to watch to look. If you were looking forward to seeing the dragons face off, Rook’s Rest probably nipped that enthusiasm in the bud. Season 1 necessarily felt like an elaborate setup, with the chess pieces being arranged before the game could begin in earnest. By the end, Season 2 feels like an extended setup as a conscious thematic choice.

After all, the feeling that disaster is always lurking illustrates the slippery slope of armed conflict. The Dance of the Dragons has already seen war crimes, infanticide and the demise of majestic creatures once worshiped as gods. It is difficult to determine the exact moment when the combatants passed the point of no return, but a war has come, although it can certainly always get worse and more destructive. We know that more deaths are on the way, a certainty that colors every interaction and scene with stomach-churning effect. What’s the rush to see it coming?