‘House of the Dragon’ Season 3 Review: A Fiery, Patchy, Whiplash-Inducing Waiting Game

It’s fitting that the third season of House of the Dragon begins with a shot of the wild dragon Sheepstealer. In a way, the moment in which a character nervously mounts the erratic beast is reflective of co-creator and showrunner Ryan Condal’s ongoing struggle to bring a sense of balance to his adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood. The text and dragon alike are full of explosive energy, and both are frustratingly unrestrained.

That, in part, is due to a change in narrative direction, with the first four episodes provided to critics pushing the tensions between Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) and Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), which were mined for depth in the previous season, to the background. The focus now is on the new opposition led by Alicent’s cousin, Ormund Hightower (James Norton). Given how hastily and superficially Ormund is introduced as a misogynistic zealot, it’s doubtful that our understanding of him will evolve, but it says a lot about the show’s problems that he still comes across as the most clearly defined new character.

In an almost comically fast first 15 minutes, we see Alicent scheming to get her reckless children removed from power, followed by those children playing musical thrones: A crippled King Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) flees King’s Landing, fearing that his brother Aemon (Ewan Mitchell) will seek to finish him off, and Aemon claims the abdicated throne only to be convinced one scene later to leave it behind to seize and take shelter in Harrenhall.

The speed at which those narrative events are delivered are liable to induce whiplash in the viewer, but at least those scenes carry dramatic weight. Others, like the ones depicting Cristan Cole (Fabien Frankel), the king’s hand, and his ally Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox) making camp, seem to exist only to remind the audience that these characters exist.

It’s not until the last 20 minutes of the first episode, depicting the Battle of Gullet, that House of the Dragon briefly finds its footing. (A bit ironic, too, since so much of that ugly, violent battle comes down to desperate sailors and soldiers trying to stand their ground on a ship whose deck is slippery with blood and water.) At least when the show jumps around at this point, you sense how the characters are tethered to the same fragile reality.

“If this be victory, I hope I never see another,” says one character at one point, standing on a beach littered with corpses. House of the Dragon has a way of coming alive when it reminds us of the costs of war, especially in its depiction of the former King Aegon II. There’s a nice symmetry in Aegon II’s flight from King’s Landing, for it brings him back to the scene of the battle at Rook’s Rest from season two that left him a cripple. In this season’s most poignant moment, he catches sight of Meleye’s corpse, and you sense how he bears the war in his gaze.

House of the Dragon can shine when it takes the time to focus not just on what its characters are doing, but also on what they’re feeling. Another notable subplot of the season, notwithstanding some discordant comic relief, focuses on Ulf White (Tom Bennett) achieving the recognition that he always wanted and how this drunkard turned dragonrider gets a rude awakening about his wish-fulfilling ways when Rhanerya tells him in no uncertain terms that he’s no longer to hang out with his old friends. After all, he’s a commoner no longer.

But such patient character-building is the exception to the rule across House of the Dragon, whose general plot momentum leaves its best scenes feeling like the anchoring harpoons fired at dragons during the Battle of the Gullet. The show tries desperately to stay aloft, and sometimes reaches brilliant heights, but it just as often sinks beneath the water, dragged down by the as-yet-unfulfilled promise that all these characters and plots will eventually pay off.