House of the Dragon’s Underwhelming Season 2 Finale Exposes the Show's Greatest Flaw
A good story needs a good villain.
House of the Dragon Season 2 ended not with a bang but a whimper. After drawing out numerous storylines for seven episodes and offering only a few truly game-changing moments along the way, HBO's Game of Thrones prequel wrapped up its sophomore season with a finale that felt more like a trailer for Season 3 rather than a fitting conclusion to Season 2. Fans are a bit frustrated, especially considering the assumption that Season 2 would be the explosive payoff to a slow-burn Season 1.
A lack of any substantial resolutions isn't the only issue with House of the Dragon's latest season, though. In an attempt to add further ambiguity and shades of gray to its story, the series has also sanded down the sharpest edges of its characters, rendering many of them duller and less vibrant than the versions described in the pages of Fire & Blood, the fictional Targaryen history book that serves as House of the Dragon's source material.
In the House of the Dragon’s Season 2 finale, Alicent Hightower makes her most desperate and uncharacteristic move yet.
Sanding Down the Edges
House of the Dragon's second season turned out to be a bit strange for several of its characters, especially Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), and Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith). These characters, who’d previously emerged as some of House of the Dragon's most striking and well-defined figures, were left to drift in the wind this year.
Daemon was kept within the haunted halls of Harrenhal for much of the season to go on a moral journey that ends with him seeing a literal preview of Game of Thrones, swearing his unwavering fealty to his wife, Rhaenyra (Emma D'Arcy), and losing the magnetic unpredictability that makes him such a dynamic figure to read about in Fire & Blood.
To be fair to House of the Dragon, the book version of Daemon is (mostly) as devoted to Rhaenyra as his live-action counterpart seems to be now. There’s a much greater disparity between House of the Dragon's and Fire & Blood’s iterations of Alicent and Criston Cole. Both characters spend the second half of Season 1 transforming into the kind of bitter, selfish, and scheming characters that Game of Thrones fans are accustomed to seeing. They seemed, at first, to be fairly faithful takes on the characters presented in Fire & Blood.
Ser Criston Cole, one of House of the Dragon’s fiercest villains, seems to have lost his fighting spirit.
In the back half of Season 2, however, both Alicent and Criston become overwhelmed by the brutality of the conflict they started. Criston becomes so nihilistic and introspective that he no longer resembles either the character fans were introduced to in Season 1 or the brash, arrogant warrior described in Fire & Blood. Alicent, meanwhile, becomes so fearful for the lives of her children that she seeks out Rhaenyra and agrees to give up King's Landing and the life of her eldest son, Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney), in exchange for immunity and freedom for her and her only daughter, Helaena (Phia Saban).
Alicent's actions in the Season 2 finale, especially her willingness to let her son be executed, are difficult to accept. This is, after all, the same woman who wanted to cut out a young boy's eye in Season 1 because he partly blinded her son, Aemond (Ewan Mitchell). She also spent most of her life resenting Rhaenyra and spent years telling Aegon that he needed to prepare to fight for his life if Rhaenyra ever took the throne. It’s hard to believe that Alicent would go on to behave how she does at the end of Season 2. Her recent actions don’t align with her established character, making it difficult to imagine her again becoming the cutting, Cersei-esque figure who’s such a striking villain in Fire & Blood.
Who Should We Root For?
That's a noteworthy shift, and not a particularly good one. While the two shows are different in many ways, both Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon are fundamentally about a struggle for ultimate power. Across its first six seasons, Game of Thrones went out of its way to give all its characters as much depth as possible, but it wasn’t afraid to let its villains be villains and its heroes be heroes. Viewers always understood why characters like Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister, and Walder Frey behaved as they did, but that didn't stop them from rooting against them and supporting straightforward heroic figures like Jon Snow and Brienne of Tarth, and complex anti-heroes like Arya Stark and Jaime Lannister. Growing to hate certain characters and love others made it much easier for viewers to become invested in Game of Thrones' prolonged royal conflicts.
House of the Dragon has made a critical mistake by giving one of Otto Hightower’s smartest strategic decisions to two different characters.
By refusing to let characters like Alicent and Criston be their vibrant yet archetypal selves, House of the Dragon has actively discouraged the level of emotional participation that Game of Thrones invited. The show has even robbed Otto Hightower of his position as one of its most formidable political schemers by trapping him in a cage and giving one of his smartest plays in Fire & Blood, the formation of an alliance with the Triarchy, to Aemond and Tyland Lannister.
No matter how disappointing Game of Thrones’ finale may have been, watching characters like Ramsay Bolton and Joffrey Baratheon finally lose onscreen are moments fans will never forget. Will viewers be able to similarly enjoy it when and if Alicent and Criston eventually lose, too? It seems unlikely, given that both characters have all but admitted defeat already. That's a problem no matter how you look at it, especially when you consider that House of the Dragon has been sold as a drama about two sides fighting to beat the other.
House of the Dragon is streaming on Max.
