The House of the Dragon co-creator and showrunner took some questions from the press on Monday following a second season finale that had some fans feeling short-changed.
In a virtual press conference moderated by journalist Joanna Robinson, showrunner Ryan Condal was asked about the eight-episode second season ending right before a highly anticipated battle sequence, the decision to include a surprise Daenerys Targaryen (played by Emilia Clarke in Game of Thrones) cameo, and more.
In one bit of news, Condal confirmed that the series will very likely conclude with season four (“No, I think it’s four,” he said when asked if the fantasy drama will run five seasons). And he noted the rest of the story’s plan was mapped out after the first season. He also said season three will go into production early next year. In addition, the next season will likely also consist of eight episodes.
About the finale and the decision to push the The Battle of the Gullet to season three, Condal gave a lengthy reply, but it seemed to come down to resource management.
“One of the challenges of making television at any scale [is] nobody has infinite time and resources,” he said. “When you’re as a showrunner, you’re always in the position of having to balance storytelling and the resources that you have available to tell that story. One of the things that came into play in season two is: What is the final destination of the series and where are we going? It was a combination of factors that led us to rebalance the season knowing now where we’re going. We wanted to rebalance the story in such a way that we had three great seasons of television [after season one] to round out and tell this story. When you’re trying to mount the show, which requires a tremendous amount of resources, construction, armor, costumes, visual effects … we are trying to give The Gullet — which is arguably the second most anticipated action event of Fire & Blood — trying to give it the time and the space that it deserves.”
He continued, “We are building to that event that will happen very shortly in terms of the storytelling, and it should be the biggest thing to date that we’ve we’ve pulled off. We just wanted to have the time and the space to do that at a level that is going to excite and satisfy the fans in the way it’s deserved. We also wanted to build some anticipation toward it. So I apologize for the wait, but … with the team that we have together, we’re going to pull off a hell of a win with The Battle of the Gullet.”
Another question was about the decision to have Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) see a vision of Daenerys Targaryen in the finale and why not, say, Jon Snow (played by Kit Harington in GoT)? Does this confirm Daenerys was the fabled “Prince That Was Promised”? And, why are there so many nods to Game of Thrones?
“House of the Dragon is a prequel to a famous story, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, television story of all time,” he said. “There needs to be some interconnectivity. And because so many years have passed, there are really no characters that would be alive from from our time period that exists in the the subsequent series. So we were always looking for this interconnectivity between the two. And the story of the Targaryen dynasty … which is the height of Targaryen power, in terms of this Shakespearean tragedy we’re experiencing in the Dance of the Dragons, the dying of the dragons, we don’t know how exactly the events will play out in this history. But we do know at the end it, there are no dragons left in the world until they’re reborn to Daenerys … The thing we are very interested in as storytellers is the idea of how prophecy and these messianic ideals that we always see in stories like this — in Harry Potter, in Star Wars — [there is a] ‘Chosen One’ who is going to save us from everything. The Light Bringer, the Prince Who Was Promise, how those ideas are interpreted in George’s world — which we all know from his 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.”
He continued, “Remember that Game of Thrones, A Song of Ice and Fire, House of the Dragon in many ways, are warnings about the perils of power and people in power and absolute power … [and the reason there was no Jon Snow was] the connectivity for us is specifically in and around the dragons … The connectedness between this family and the family to come … We know who Daenerys is watching that image, but Daemon has no idea — that could be his future daughter with Rhaenyra … So for that reason, I think it was important that it was Daenerys the image. We are not trying to make any kind of specific interpretation of a prophecy that has yet to be revealed by its author. That is George’s space to tell that story.”
For the book readers, Condal was asked whether Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell) has assumed the character of Nettles’ storyline from George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood book.
“I think that’s a ‘please stay tuned and keep watching the story,’” he said. “I will say we love Rhaena as a character and we’ve we’ve really done a lot of legwork to set her up from the beginning as somebody in this Targaryen household who does not have a dragon and we see how powerful an idea it is … we’ve seen how with Aemond’s character, somebody that grows up in a family, even at the time of peace, when you don’t have a dragon, how it changes how you’re identified even within the family and how how desperate Rhaena is for that sort of self identification as a dragon rider and is willing to go to fairly dangerous lengths to try to see that realized … We’re providing the television version of one objective truth of this history and anybody who reads the book is free to interpret it however they want to, but there is a there are a lot of paths to interpretation through this and I think the the Rhaena story, as we’re seeing it unfold, is potentially one of those interesting interpretations that we have to offer and I would just say that we don’t do any of this stuff lightly.”