‘House of the Dragon’ creator explains why Jon Snow wasn’t in the season 2 finale

Warning: This article contains spoilers from the House of the Dragon season 2 finale.

House of the Dragon seemed to finally answer a major Game of Thrones debate during Sunday’s season 2 finale by featuring a cameo of Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and not Jon Snow (Kit Harington) when Daemon (Matt Smith) saw Aegon the Conqueror’s prophecy in a vision. But now House of the Dragon creator Ryan Condal is clarifying whether the decision to include Daenerys and not Jon (a.k.a. her Targaryen nephew) means that Dany is the fabled “Prince That Was Promised,” since the Game of Thrones series (and author George R.R. Martin‘s books) never answered that question definitively.

“We are not trying to make any kind of specific interpretation of a prophecy that has yet to be revealed by its author,” Condal told reporters during a Zoom press conference on Monday. “That is George’s world and George’s space to tell that story. We’re more interested in playing with the character drama that lives in and around that imagery.”

Thrones previously introduced the Prince That Was Promised as a prophesied savior, the reincarnation of Azor Ahai, a legendary warrior who forged the flaming sword Lightbringer and used it to defeat a great darkness. Missandai (Nathalie Emmanuel) pointed out that the prophecy is written in High Valyrian, and the word for “prince” in that language is gender neutral, so it could refer to a princess instead of a prince, leading fans to debate whether it refers to Dany or Jon. House of the Dragon season 1 revealed King Viserys (Paddy Considine) believed in Aegon the Conqueror’s vision that Westeros needed to unite under Targaryen rule to fight the arrival of a great winter coming from the North to swallow everything. That’s why Viserys named Rhaenyra as his successor, believing her to be the subject of the prophecy.

In the season 2 finale, Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin) helps Daemon connect to the current Three-Eyed Raven (who is not played by Max von Sydow or Struan Rodger, the previous actors behind the character on Thrones), who then gives Daemon a vision that’s similar (if not the exact same) to the one Aegon the Conqueror experienced. Daemon sees White Walkers marching in the North among other major Thrones moments, as well as important foreshadowing for what’s potentially to come in House of the Dragon. But the biggest shock came when he saw his future descendant, Daenerys Targaryen, at the moment in the Thrones season 1 finale when she emerged from the fire with three hatched dragons (only shown from the back, as Clarke did not return to film a cameo).

“There’s a whole lot to unpack in there,” Condal said. “It’s all kind of related, which is this idea that House of the Dragon is a prequel story to this very famous story, one of the biggest if not the biggest television story of all time. There needs to be some interconnectivity. And because so many years have passed, there are really no characters that would be alive from our time period that exists in the subsequent series, so we were always looking for this interconnectivity between the two.”

Condal went on to explain that this is “the story of the Targaryen dynasty and its evolution, from the flight from Old Valyria to its growth and retaking of power in the form of Aegon and his sisters and the conquest, to this period, which is the height of its power and its self destruction, in terms of this Shakespearean tragedy that we’re experiencing: The Dance of the Dragons, the dying of the dragons, as we know from Fire & Blood. And we don’t know how exactly the events play out in this history, but we do know at the end of it, there are no dragons left in the world, until they’re reborn to Daenerys in the end. That is the interconnectivity.”

The showrunner also explained that the House of the Dragon team is “very interested” in “the idea of how prophecy and these ideas of these messianic ideals that we always see interpreted in stories like this and in Harry Potter, in Star Wars, the ‘chosen one,’ the ‘one,’ the one who’s going to save us from everything, the Lightbringer, the Prince Who Was Promised/Azor Ahai, how those ideas are interpreted in George’s world, which is, as we know from all of the storytelling that he has taken us through to date, that these things are very rarely black and white and one thing or the other, and often can be cautionary tales for how ideas like this are interpreted by people in power.”

Condal continued, “Remember that Game of Thrones, A Song of Ice and Fire, House of the Dragon in many ways, or Fire & Blood in many ways, are warnings about the perils of power and people in power, and particularly, I think, in this world, absolute power. I will just say that we’re very interested in how those things play out in this world, and how once somebody, as we’ve seen Rhaenyra [Emma D’Arcy] be given this football to run with, that, ‘My father chose me. I was the one. There is a Prince Who Was Promised, it must be me. This dragon rider was delivered to me,’ and how that is going to see itself manifested over the course of the rest of this war.”

The decision to include Daenerys in the vision and not Jon does not mean that Condal wants to settle the debate over the “Prince That Was Promised.”

“It’s just a more complex idea,” he added. “The connectivity for us is specifically in and around the dragons. This is not a spoiler for anybody who hasn’t read the book, but we know that in this world, we have 17 dragons — whatever the exact number is at this at this point — and in the world where we first meet Daenerys and she’s staring across the Narrow Sea at her lost empire, there are zero dragons. The connectiveness between this family and the family to come, and Daemon seeing something that we know who that is watching that image, Daemon has no idea. That could be his future daughter with Rhaenyra who has three dragons born. He doesn’t know, but he is sensing that this was something that was shown to me for a specific reason.”

He continued, “We know Rhaenyra is already kind of running with this idea of the Prince Who Was Promised. If Daemon also believes that that is Rhaenyra, as we’ve seen him say to her in High Valyrian in [the finale], there’s a very interesting thing that can be done with his interpretation of that reality as we move forward. So for that reason, I think it was important that it was Daenerys, the image.”

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Now that Rhaenyra has seven adult dragons, Daemon re-pledged his loyalty and armies to her after getting spooked by the vision, and Alicent (Olivia Cooke) is offering King’s Landing and her son Aegon’s (Tom Glynn-Carney) head to Rhaenyra as an olive branch, it seems as if Team Black is ready to win this war. But Condal teases that season 3, which is “actively” being written now, isn’t going to be smooth sailing for Rhaenyra.

“You’re seeing growth — growth sometimes does not necessarily mean all positive,” he said. “You’re seeing her throw more and more into that idea of, ‘My father believed that to be me. He thought I was the one.’ She starts looking for signs and portents that seem to indicate Viserys was right. We know that that’s potentially a dangerous path for somebody in a position of power.”

House of the Dragon will return for season 3, which is tentatively slated to begin filming “in early-ish 2025,” according to Condal.