House of the Dragon Showrunner Reveals What That Finale Means

Last night time’s gorgeous season finale of House of the Dragon left us with fairly a cliffhanger—and we’ll have to attend some time to see what comes subsequent. Shooting for season two of House of the Dragon will start in 2023 with its launch to be decided, however the Game of Thrones collection can possible be anticipated to bow in 2024. Showrunner Ryan Condal talked to Variety about how the top of season one will lead into the civil warfare generally known as the Dance of the Dragons.

Now about that ending: when requested if it was at all times deliberate to finish with Lucerys’ (Elliot Grihault) demise, Condal instructed Variety that the younger prince’s dying through dragon brawl was at all times the plan. “I looked back at the original bible that I wrote for the series back in May of 2019, and that was in there as the endpoind,” he stated explaining why he departed barely from writer Geroge R.R. Martin’s authentic plot. “It just felt like the one-two punch of Viserys dying, the Greens seizing the throne and telling that story from Alicent’s team’s perspective, Rhaenyra’s team finding out and putting in place the engines of war and then setting the dragons off and having this horrible thing happened over Storm’s End—the story is called the Dance of the Dragons. To kick off the war/end the first act of our story with the first dragons dancing seemed to be the right dramatic place to leave everybody off.”

As viewers noticed within the season finale, Queen Rhaenyra was first not inclined to instantly rush to warfare, a deliberate option to make her stand other than the lads of the realm. “You see her weighing her decisions—weighing her responsibility that she took with the Song of Ice and Fire, the thing she promised her father, that she would hold the realm united and at peace as he tried to do. But at the same time, her birthright has been stolen. Those things are diametrically opposed to one another. ‘How do I serve both? I can’t. It’s paradox. What do I do?’ She’s just not going to rush headlong into anything,” Condal defined. “You’re seeing what Viserys probably saw in her, that she’s capable of nuanced thought and the ability to think through problems. While all the men around the table, including Daemon, just want to immediately jump on dragons and go burn King’s Landing, she’s not quite ready to do that just yet.”

However, when information is acquired that Lucerys—affectionately generally known as Luke—was killed by Aemond’s (Ewan Mitchell) a lot bigger dragon, it doesn’t matter if the battle was began by the beasts. This flip of occasions finally breaks Rhaenyra’s coronary heart and lands the blow wanted to push the warfare to begin. Condal offers credit score to episode director Greg Yaitanes, who oversaw that highly effective final shot of Emma D’Arcy. “The very last action line of the script was, ‘Rhaenyra looks up and war is in her eyes.’ That was in the first draft of that script. That was always the plan for ending the season, because after all this internal debate that Rhaenyra goes through over the course of the episode, everything changes the moment that she learns about the treachery at Storm’s End and the death of her son,” Condal revealed, and added, “I think we probably did three or four takes of it. And Emma, man, did they nail it. Just incredible.”

House of the Dragon season one is out there to observe on HBO Max.

Want extra io9 information? Check out when to count on the newest Marvel and Star Wars releases, what’s subsequent for the DC Universe on movie and TV, and every little thing it is advisable learn about House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.