Image Credit: HBO
In Rhaenyra Triumphant (season 3, episode 3), the creators of House of the Dragon have produced what I consider the least essential episode of television in the medium's history.
This week’s episode focused on financial mismanagement and rats, and felt so forgettable that I believe if every copy and stream of it were burned in dragon fire, not a single person would notice it was missing.
What happens in Rhaenyra Triumphant?
The simple answer is not a whole lot.
While the first two episodes of season three gave us some excitement, the Battle of the Gullet is an incredible action sequence, and Larys Strong and King Aegon's road trip adventure is at least a fun diversion, episode three is primarily focused on pest control.
To be fair, the episode does open with a bit of flair. Lord Ormond Hightower, nephew of the recently decapitated Otto Hightower, surrenders to Daemon and turns over Daeron Targaryen, the son of Alicent and Viserys and a legitimate heir to the throne.
Then we return to King’s Landing, where most of the problems require a spreadsheet to solve, not a dragon.
Queen Rhaenyra learns that the kingdom has no money, no food and no rat catchers, and her reign is on the verge of collapse only days after it started.
What follows is a series of meetings about finances and grain storage between Rhaenyra and various lords who spend their time blaming other lords for the problems. If Westeros had CSPAN, this is what would be on it.
Rhaenyra can’t do much about money or rats in the short term, so she turns her attention to food.
The Queen learns that while the small folk are starving, the highborn are hoarding food. She invites the various lords and ladies to a sumptuous banquet and serves them grilled rat. As her guests express shock and disgust, Rhaenyra makes it clear that they must return the food they’ve taken so she can feed her people.
This sequence might have been interesting if Rhaenyra had needed to stretch herself or grow as a character in any way to secure the food. Instead, she employs her signature grimace-and-pout routine and gets the food because she’s the Queen, and what she says goes.
Neither the story nor the character moves forward in any meaningful way, which has been House of the Dragon’s most consistent problem over 22 episodes.
What about the episode's big twist?
Ah yes, here is where the writers really smash the gas pedal and get things moving to driveway speed.
As it turns out, the Daeron Targaryen that Lord Hightower surrendered to Daemon is an impostor, and the real Daeron is still roaming free, creating a moment so shocking I could barely shrug at it.
A great twist only works if we’re emotionally invested in the characters involved. Here, the writers reveal that one unseen character is secretly a different unseen character, as part of a master plan orchestrated by another character we’ve barely met.
Also, consider that both Aemon and his dragon and Aegon are still roaming free, and they both represent a far greater threat to Rhaenyra’s reign than a third-in-line claimant to the throne with minimal ambition. The existence of one more teen heir, even with a dragon, hardly seems to have elevated the stakes.
Additionally, we’re clearly meant to see Lord Hightower as a dangerous character; we just don’t know why. In the show’s 22 episodes, he’s only appeared in two scenes.
Why this episode doesn’t matter
In a well-written episode, the point wouldn’t have been that Rhaenyra eventually found a way to feed her subjects, but rather how she had to grow or change to do so.
The mistake that House of the Dragon makes again and again is confusing political complexity with dramatic complexity. Creating problems for your characters to solve isn’t the same thing as creating dramatic tension that draws in audiences and makes them care about a character or outcome.
Rhaenyra begins the episode determined to feed King's Landing and ends the episode...having fed King's Landing. She never has to compromise her values, outwit a rival or confront one of her own flaws in order to succeed.
The moment's weakness stands out even more because nothing exciting happens throughout the episode to distract us. What happens with Aemon and the Harrenhall witch? No idea. What about Aegon and Larys Strong, who were in serious peril in episode two? Not one second of screen time.
Do things happen in this episode? Sure. Does any of it really matter to the plot or characters? Not a bit.
The episode's biggest reveal is that we are building toward a confrontation between Rhaenyra and Lord Ormond Hightower. Its biggest weakness is that it doesn’t give us a reason to care about it.
It's not to say that endless meetings over problems with food and rats couldn’t be interesting. The West Wing created an entire hit series about characters solving problems in meetings.
But it's not the problems themselves that are inherently engaging; it's the ways in which characters must stretch, change or break to solve them that make them compelling.
House of the Dragon might eventually find ways to grow its characters, but given that we're now more than halfway through the series, it’s running out of time to do so.
The season’s problems were already taking shape when House of the Dragon opened Season 3 with a devastating loss.
