This article contains spoilers for the House of the Dragon Season 3 finale.<\/p>\n
House of the Dragon is not making a habit out of quiet finales. Viewers who grumbled over the anticlimax of Season 2 must have been pleased with Sunday\u2019s Season 3 finale, which one-upped the previous episode\u2019s Sunfyre resurrection and br\u00fbl\u00e9eing of many soldiers loyal to Rhaenyra with a Battle of Tumbleton that torched the city; left thousands of casualties Black,\u00a0 Green, and civilian; and ended both Ormund Hightower\u2019s (James Norton) kingmaking ambitions and his life. Major character deaths weren\u2019t even limited to the battlefield: RIP Helaena, for one, too good for Westeros and for her family. I\u2019ll miss Phia Saban\u2019s quietly resolute performance.<\/p>\n
You wouldn\u2019t be wrong to place the blame for the battle\u2019s carnage as well as Helaena\u2019s spiky suicide on Rhaenyra (Emma D\u2019Arcy). It\u2019s she who, after some handwringing, orders Daemon (Matt Smith) to lay siege to Tumbleton and \u201croot out every Hightower and kill them to the last man.\u201d She also has a captive, pregnant, hunger-striking Helaena violently force-fed. Anti-Rhaenyra sentiment is festering, even within the Red Keep. Until this season, she has been Dragon\u2019s default hero, bravely defending her right to succeed her father against a Green faction whose loyalty to Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) basically comes down to misogyny, despite wrenching personal losses. But now that she sits the Iron Throne, the show is making us\u2014like the starving peasants she has yet to materially help\u2014question whether she is truly the great leader she\u2019s convinced she can be. I don\u2019t know that she is, or that anyone could be in similar circumstances. She\u2019s still the hero of this story, though, even if she turns out to be a tragic one.<\/p>\n
The finale opens with Rhaenyra waking to the news that Aegon is alive, and that his return\u2014with a still-quite-lethal Sunfyre, no less\u2014after she declared him dead makes him some kind of messiah. Understandably, she panics, cursing the memory of Viserys (Paddy Considine) for putting her in such a terrible situation. \u201cHis prophecy has tested me again and again, and I have met its every challenge!\u201d she complains to Daemon. He takes the opportunity to remind her of her Targaryen supremacy. So, how should she wield it? \u201cThe only quality the realm understands is strength,\u201d Daemon says. It\u2019s enough to get him dispatched to Tumbleton.<\/p>\n
Baela (Bethany Antonia) urges Rhaenyra to have Lord Corlys (Steve Toussaint) rescued from the Hightowers\u2019 clutches while Black forces are in town. He is, after all, the Hand of the Queen, and he\u2019s sacrificed mightily for her cause. Also: \u201cIt was your fault\u201d the Sea Snake was captured in the first place, Baela says. When Rhaenyra seems less than enthusiastic about helping him, Baela really goes off on her. \u201cIf a person is useful to you, you wield them,\u201d she accuses. \u201cBut if not, you abandon them.\u201d This may be true. A few scenes later, Rhaenyra abruptly banishes her paramour Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno)\u2014through a minion, no less. (Mysaria does get a nice severance package.) But doesn\u2019t a responsible sovereign have to be ready to throw her friends and family under the bus in service of what she believes to be the greater good of the kingdom? I mean, wasn\u2019t that the takeaway of six seasons of Matt Smith\u2019s other show, The Crown? Of course, as with Elizabeth\u2019s real-life refusal to let her sister marry a divorced man, the question of whether it\u2019s actually prudent for the monarchy to deprioritize saving Corlys is a different matter.<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t just Baela who rips into Rhaenyra in her own home. Helaena\u2019s force-feeding comes after a heated encounter with the Queen. \u201cYou cannot think I would harm you,\u201d says Rhaenyra, who must still see herself as a merciful person. (That she has thugs shoving gruel down Helaena\u2019s throat seconds later suggests an alarming lack of self-awareness.) Helaena\u2019s retort: \u201cDo you think life is nothing more than not being dead? Our father would hate you for this.\u201d She\u2019s right. But Rhaenyra is also correct when she points out to her half-sister that Viserys\u2019 dithering over succession is what put them in this predicament in the first place. Then again, there\u2019s truth to Helaena\u2019s scathing final blow: \u201cAll the things you care about are ugly. This place is ugly. You, yourself, are ugly.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Helaena is Dragon\u2019s Cassandra; her supernatural prescience and big-picture perspective make her perhaps the wisest character this side of Game of Thrones\u2019 Bran the Broken. (This makes the embroidered portrait of Rhaenyra on a bloody Iron Throne that is, in effect, her suicide note, particularly foreboding.) If you take \u201cthe things you care about\u201d and \u201cthis place\u201d to mean power and King\u2019s Landing\u2014or Westeros at large\u2014she\u2019s reiterating a core theme of A Song of Ice and Fire. Like anyone vying for a throne, Rhaenyra is playing a brutal, yes, game. Would it be a more just or humane game, though, if she forfeited? Would it have a better long-term outcome?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rhaenyra doesn\u2019t think so. And unlike Aegon or Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), whose kingly ambitions don\u2019t seem grounded in anything more than entitlement and will to power, she is actually taking Westeros\u2019 future into consideration when she clings to her birthright. Not only does she ascend the Iron Throne with the intention of helping the small folk, but she also sincerely believes in the Song of Ice and Fire prophecy\u2014a prophecy that Thrones viewers know will, whether self-fulfilling or not, both lead to great destruction and, ultimately, prove instrumental in saving humanity from extinction via White Walker. This is why we see her, in the finale, demand to be anointed by the High Septon (Gary Raymond) and order Alyn (Abubakar Salim) to kill him when he refuses. She isn\u2019t betraying the Seven, exactly, because her fealty is to the prophecy and to her Valyrian ancestors. She believes she\u2019s answering a higher calling.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tragedy lies in the gulf between beliefs or intentions and reality. In the Battle of Tumbleton, it\u2019s Daemon rejecting Gwayne (Freddie Fox) and Daeron\u2019s (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) plea for peace, taking offense at Corlys\u2019 further attempts at diplomacy, exhorting his army to avoid excessive casualties because \u201cthe Queen\u2019s moral standing must remain absolute\u201d\u2014and then presiding over a grisly mass slaughter against an enemy that makes terrified children cannon fodder. Because he is carrying out her order to decimate the Hightowers, in defiance of Corlys\u2019 plan for victory without bloodshed, Rhaenyra is just as responsible for these atrocities as Daemon. A tragic hero has the most noble aims but, due to some intrinsic character flaw or external factor (a sexist society, say, or misplaced faith) ends up doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Rhaenyra seems to be heading in this unfortunate direction, but she\u2019s no villain. We\u2019ll find out in the show\u2019s last act whether her heroism proves to be triumphant or tragic.<\/p>\n