‘House Of The Dragon’ Season 2 Finale recap: All have chosen (2024)

The tapestry’s getting longer, and playing out into the dark unknown. Since the beginning, the illuminated histories of the Targaryens – full-blooded or not – their dragons, and the wild and weirwoody events of Westeros were consistently getting stitched into that House of the Dragon opener. Now, with its season 2 finale, what the series illuminates is its own future. Into HOTD season 3, of course. But also dramatically beyond, as the years pile up and the events of these peoples’ futures – you know, Game of Thrones – reflect backward and forward in their time. In Westeros, whether it’s 130 AC or two hundred years later, winter is always coming.

At Harrenhal, Daemon’s army has been built, its swords sharpened. There are sufficient quantities of swine in Harrenhal’s storehouses to keep Caraxes fed. They could march at any moment. But tripping on bloody weirwood sap has finally changed Daemon’s whole perspective. “All your life,” Alys Rivers tells him in the godswood, “you sought to control your own fate. Today, you are ready.” And Daemon’s latest vision shows him a future he never expected, but that we already know. Daenerys Targaryen, and the miraculous birth of her dragon babes. A grim glimpse of the feared White Walkers. (Yikes! A glimpse is all it takes!) A man with a facial birthmark – this a younger version of Brynden Rivers, the “Three-Eyed Raven” seer of the GOT era – and comets streaking across the sky. Dead dragons, fallen armies. And most startling for Daemon? Rhaenyra, sitting on the Iron Throne as Queen.

Daemon now sees the future understood by his late brother the king. And when Rhaenyra flies on dragonback to Harrenhal to confront his season-long waffling – “To whom are you sworn?” – he instead bends the knee, as do his men. There is also a tiny bit of quiet humor as they touch hands. With her warning to not leave her again, Matt Smith gives Daemon an impish smile and funny little shrug. “I could not. I have tried.”

But what of that other character in Daemon’s vision? It was Helaena Targaryen who told her uncle that it’s all a story, that he knows his part. And when House of the Dragon cut to Helaena in the Red Keep, it was as if she communicated with Daemon in real vision time. Wait, like Rey and Kylo Ren in their Force Dyad? Maybe, but going forward, what else Helaena reveals might be even more important. Interrupted from her reverie by Aemond, who’s just finished burning the innocent city of Sharp Point after his episode 7 humiliation at the hands of Team Black’s dragons, Helaena not only refuses to ride her beast Dreamfyre into battle. She also reveals how she knows all about his treachery at Rook’s Rest. “Will you burn me as you did Aegon? I saw it. You burned him. And you let him fall.” Helaena isn’t done with Aemond. “Aegon will be king again. And you – you’ll be dead.”

Will Aemond, the rash, violent, one-eyed prince regent, really die in dragon battle over the mysterious lake waters of the God’s Eye, as foretold by George RR Martin’s Fire & Blood? That is a matter for HOTD season 3 to resolve. But the series is veering away from its source material in another way that feels very significant. With six dragons in her corner, Rhaenyra is under pressure from Lord Corlys and others to seize her tactical advantage. But just as she gives orders to her dragonseed riders – “The strongholds of the usurper, Oldtown and Lannisport, and their armies, all must be subdued” – Alicent arrives alone, under blue cloak, in the hall at Dragonstone. And she has a proposition for the woman who was once her dear childhood friend.

“I have been…mistaken,” Alicent begins, and a frowning, silent Rhaenyra is the arms-folded picture of “Uh-huh, I’m listening.” Time outside its walls proved to Alicent that she has no wish to rule King’s Landing, or anything else, not to mention her season 2 experience inside the Red Keep, where she was constantly overlooked and diminished by men and their plans. “I wish to live,” she tells Rhaenyra. “To be free of this endless plotting and striving. I would take my daughter and her child and leave it all behind.” What Alicent offers is a theoretical end to the current Targaryen conflict. In three days’ time, when Aemond rides Vhagar to meet Ser Criston Cole and Ser Gwayne Hightower in the coming battleground of the Riverlands, Alicent, with Heleana’s blessing, will make King’s Landing an open city. If she agrees, Rhaenyra can have the Iron Throne. Bloodlessly.

“Did you come here thinking you’d be absolved?” It’s an incredible scene, a bookend to their secret meeting in Season 2 Episode 4, when it was Rhaenyra who snuck behind the defenses of Team Green. But Rhaenyra does not immediately cave to her counterpart’s notions, even if privately she has urged this very path of deterrence. She does remind Alicent of her words in the sept. (“It’s too late…”) And besides, just as the stakes of their current conflict prove, any royal taking the throne would require that action to be definitive. “I must take Aegon’s head,” Rhaenyra says.

“You know this.” And she forces Alicent to choose. “Make your sacrifice. A son for a son.”

Season 2 of House of the Dragon concludes with the two queens’ agreement struck. A shot of Rhaenyra, framed through the myriad scrolls of Westerosi history, and a matching shot of Alicent, set against open lands and sky. And they could each get what they want. But a lot can happen “in three days’ time.” And it is bound to not be bloodless. The giant battle we thought would end this season is instead one that everyone is now irrevocably moving toward. Newly-minted dragonriders have suited up with their orders. Lord Corlys and Alyn of Hull, his first mate/estranged bastard son, are set to bring war on the water. Columns pledged to Team Black and Team Green are on the march. And in the Riverlands, Criston Cole is having a crisis of conscience not dissimilar to that of Alicent, his onetime lover. “The dragons dance, and men are like dust under their feet. All our endeavors are as nothing. We march now toward annihilation.”

HOT D’s:

• One missing detail to Alicent and Rhaenyra’s bargain: “A son for a son” requires that son’s neck to be present and cuttable, which Aegon’s isn’t. Frail but now coherent, Aegon listened as Larys Strong made a case for them to flee King’s Landing. Let the factional warfare burn itself out, and Aegon could return as a welcome conqueror. (“Aegon, the realm’s delight,” the burned usurper imagined with glee.) When we last see them, Larys has bundled Aegon into a prison cart for an unannounced trip out of town.

• “Let the Sea Snake rue the day we meet again!” We can’t wait to see what kind of mayhem Abigail Thorne unleashes as Triarchy admiral Sharako Lohor in HOTD season 3. Introduced in episode 8 as she challenges Tyland Lannister to fight her in a mud pit – and to f*ck her wives – Admiral Lohor eventually agrees to devote herself and her captains to Team Green’s cause. She has unfinished business with Lord Corlys. Is that thin slice of ocean known as the Gullet ready for the raging sea battle to come?

• With all of the big dragon reveals this season, HOTD might have saved its most intriguing one for last. After wandering alone through the Vale, searching for drinking water and more evidence of the region’s untamed dragon, Lady Rhaena Targaryen finally encounters the beast in another patch of dragonfire. Rhaena was denied a dragon bond before, and it almost killed her. But when she runs toward this one, the beast does not immediately burn her to a crisp.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.