Image credit: HBO
Queen’s Landing (season 3, episode 2) was like the day after a massive rager. Everyone had a blast the night before, but now it's time to clean up the mess and the bodies.
We finally see Rhaenyra take the throne she’s lusted after for decades, a pinnacle moment that also reveals the show’s biggest flaw.
I don’t care who wins.
Let’s do a quick check-in on the various surviving characters.
Rhaenyra Targaryen
She did it! She finally did it! After 19 episodes of plotting, intrigues and indiscriminate slaughter, Rhaenyra seized King's Landing and ascended to the Iron Throne that was promised to her by her father.
Thousands have died to give her a moment she’s spent years fighting for, so why does she give us the same tight-lipped, narrow-eyed reaction she has to almost everything that happens?
Rhaenyra’s ascension helped me understand why I’ve never really enjoyed House of the Dragon. What made the original Game of Thrones compelling wasn’t the battle for the throne; it was watching the characters grow as they fought for it.
Daenerys went from a powerless sex-slave to one of the most feared warlords in all of the seven kingdoms, and we watched her struggle as she was forced to grow into a power that eventually destroyed her.
Jon Snow was the cast-off bastard son who was banished to the Westeros equivalent of Siberia, only to emerge as the liberator of the North and a great hero.
Throughout the series, his character is tested, and he must repeatedly sacrifice what he wants for what he believes is right.
Hell, even Ser Dunk manages to go from bumbling squire to confident knight in just eight episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
Now let's take it back to Rhaenyra or Alicent or Daemon or anyone you’d like to pick from the HotD cast. We’ve watched them for years, but which of them has meaningfully changed? Whose arc are we emotionally invested in beyond the curiosity of seeing who wins?
Rhaenyra’s circumstances change, but she doesn’t. In season one, she was entitled, stubborn and didn’t trust Alicent. In season 3, it’s pretty much the same.
Maybe she’s grown more confident as a leader or restrained in her emotions, but while the best characters in GoT have walked miles from the character they were to the character they become, she’s barely moved more than a few inches from her starting point.
This lack of growth reduces the entire show from an emotional journey to a math problem. Subtract enough Targaryen heirs, and whoever remains gets to be Queen.
Proximity isn’t the same thing as intimacy, and after 20 hours of television I don’t feel any closer to these characters than when I started.
The HotD writers have shown us Raenrya’s journey to take the throne; they just haven’t given us a reason to care.
King (?) Aegon
Why am I skipping over all of the other lords and knights to get to a secondary character who barely seems relevant to the main action?
Because Aegon Targaryen is the one character in this entire show I’ve actually come to care about. He remains repugnant, cruel and arrogant, but in many ways it feels like he’s undergone the greatest journey and has the best capacity for growth.
Aegon went from cruel playboy to reluctant king to dragon-flying warrior to scarred fugitive, and he is now on the run with no protection other than the company of what might be the show’s most treacherous character.
I want to see how that journey ends.
Again, we get only one scene with the former King, but in a moment of desperation, we see him choose to fight. He showed more character and tenacity in that one scene than I think we’ve seen from Raenrya in the entire show.
A character who’s spent most of the series as an overindulged brat is now battling to survive, and I want to know what that turns him into, even if it's worse than the person he is now.
Against all odds, Aegon has become the character I'm most invested in.
As for the rest…
Alicent Hightower is still desperately smashing the undo button on the plot she unleashed after realizing that both of her sons are unfit to be king and probably shouldn’t be trusted alone with a sandwich, much less an entire kingdom.
At the end of the episode, she’s standing in a pool of blood emanating from her own father’s severed head as she awaits Raenrya’s judgment.
Daemon loves two things: killing and partying. Now he’s back on top, and I suspect that he’ll do plenty of both in the coming days. Nothing bad has ever happened to a GoT character who finally achieves the thing they’ve desperately wanted.
Aemond Targaryen, the Cobra commander of Team Green, tries to single-handedly seize Harrenhall, which rivals the Iron Throne for how cursed it is for anyone who captures it and gets a knife in the back for his trouble.
However, this does appear to be a setup for the evil Prince X Harrenhall witch crossover we’ve all been desperately waiting for.
The Dragonseed remains useless through two episodes.
The Sea Snake. Not dead! We told you so!
That weakness became especially clear in our review of “Rhaenyra Triumphant,” the season’s most forgettable episode yet.
