‘House of the Dragon’ Ep 3 Recap: Rhaenyra’s a Halfway Queen - Vulture

saved Save this article to read it later. Find this story in your account’s ‘Saved for Later’ section. Comment { "@context": "http://schema.org", "@type": "Review", "author": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Vulture" }, "itemReviewed": { "@type": "Episode", "partOfSeries": { "@type": "TVSeries", "name": "House of the Dragon" }, "partOfSeason": { "@type": "TVSeason", "name": "Season 3" }, "name": "Episode 3", "episodeNumber": "3" } , "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "worstRating": "1", "bestRating": "5", "ratingValue": "4" } } House of the Dragon Episode 3 Season 3 Episode 3 Editor’s Rating 4 stars **** «Previous Next « Previous Episode Next Episode » It’s the first days of Rhaenyra’s reign, when she should be at her most optimistic, and already the project feels doomed. Photo: HBO Team Black? Team Green? Or just Team Dragon? Join forces and dissecting House of the Dragon season three. “The air is thick with ghosts,” Rhaenyra observes to Daemon. It’s not as bad as it sounds, she assures him. (Needlessly, because he’s barely listening to her.) She’s spent most of her life in King’s Landing; raised young boys in King’s Landing. Her quest to be queen cost her sons their lives, and now that quest has taken her back to a place where she is close to them again. A place where the shadow of her father haunts her choices. There’s been a lot of discussion about HBO’s decision to hold House of the Dragon’s second season to eight episodes. (Originally, the Battle of the Gullet and its aftermath were meant to air in 2025.) So it makes sense that episode three feels like it could have worked as the season three premiere: it’s the start of a new story. New characters that were namechecked in “Salt and Sea, Fire and Blood” finally collide with the plot in a way that makes them relevant. Rhaenyra is on a new arc in a new theater of an old war. And that theater, her childhood home, is infested with rats. It’s her brother’s fault, because King Aegon had all the rat-catchers executed. Or it’s her husband’s fault, because Daemon had a rat-catcher assassinate Aegon’s son, which in turn caused the executions. The rats are a nuisance and a metaphor for Aegon’s massacrous reign. They’re a motif in an episode that occasionally pulses like a psychological horror film. The rats eat away at Rhaenyra’s sanity like they’re eating away at her stores of tallow. The score drips with a sinister ostinato as the rats scurry into every corner of her castle. Against this bedlam, Rhaenyra tries to fashion herself a real queen. She is determined to be a benevolent ruler, a protector of the vulnerable. Episode three opens with Daemon and Caraxes, flanked by Ulf on Silverwing and Hugh on Vermithor, meeting Lord Ormund Hightower’s host in an open field. Ormund was unable to cart a ballista with him from Oldtown, and so he has no real choice but to begrudgingly pledge fealty to the Black Queen and even surrender his ward: Alicent’s fourth-born child, a son called Daeron. Daemon tells Rhaenyra that she needs to kill the mute and remorseless young boy, though, of course, Daemon’s willingness to kill children is well-documented. Out of loyalty to her father, Rhaenyra refuses, eventually deciding to send him north to the Wall. It’s a very small mercy, and yet still, the Hightowers immediately prove undeserving. The boy turns out to be an imposter. While Rhaenyra is busy fretting about how to most humanely punish this random son of Westeros, Lord Hightower and his army march on Tumbleton and take the city hostage. It’s a dastardly scheme to nullify Blacks’ dragons. To burn Ormund out, Rhaenyra would have to cremate her own subjects. Rhaenyra also wants to be a queen of the people, who have been starving since she and Corlys conspired to blockade the mouth of Blackwater Bay. But the Blacks quickly learn there’s no gold in the coffers with which to feed the smallfolk. Some of the money was spent on the war, but much of the Crown’s gold was physically moved off-site by Tyland Lannister (RIP), back when he was Aegon’s Master of Coin. There’s enough cash on hand for Rhaenyra to administer the Seven Kingdoms for a fortnight, and no one remaining from the old regime — not Alicent, not Orwyle — knows where Lannister hid the rest of the ingots. Meanwhile, Lohar’s surviving mercenaries are plundering villages. There aren’t enough ships to protect the reopening trade routes from pirates. And the Crownlands farmers are on the verge of missing a planting season. To pay for the restoration of law and order, Rhaenyra decides to levy a tax on the great houses, which I doubt will make them fall in line. It’s the first day of her reign, when Rhaenyra should be at her most optimistic, and already the project feels doomed. She has no ladies-in-waiting and no Queen’s Guard. She has no Small Council. Rhaenyra has declared herself Lady of the Seven Kingdoms, but she lacks the trappings. It’s not vanity to want these things. To be effective, she needs to be seen as the rightful ruler of Westeros, with the same legitimacy as her father. When the Crown can’t afford the pageantry of a lavish coronation, she asks the High Septon to at least anoint her, as he did for Aegon. At Alicent’s suggestion, she even declares the Usurper dead, in part to facilitate it. But the High Septon refuses. He can’t declare God has yet another chosen vessel, he tells her, because it undermines the Faith of the Seven. To Rhaenyra, of course, the opposite is true. It undermines the Church to ignore the presence of the one true queen, who must be God’s vessel, otherwise she wouldn’t be here, surrounded by a menagerie of dragons. This is the part the Targaryens don’t get. People are awed by the destructive force of their dragons, but they do not revere them or associate them with godliness. For his part, the High Septon fails to grasp the enormity of the Targaryens’ power: we’ve seen more smallfolk cower from Vhagar’s shadow than drop to their knees in prayer. The Septon isn’t the last person Rhaenyra alienates. Alicent, who believes she held up her side of their deal as best she could, wants the freedom she was assured. It’s a shame that Aegon wasn’t at home as promised, Alicent argues, but he’s a walking staph infection; given how much of his body is covered in third-degree burns, he’s more likely to die of sepsis than stage a re-usurping. As she did over the fate of fake-Daeron, Rhaenyra fumbles for some psychological middle ground between what is true and what is prudent. Did Alicent keep her commitments to Rhaenyra? Basically. Should Rhaenyra kill her? Absolutely. That’s how you play this game. You kill enemies, you kill threats, you kill people you can’t trust. Alicent is all of that, plus she’s her evil stepmother. Killing her is the shrewd thing to do. Instead, Rhaenyra compromises. Alicent and Helaena will be held prisoner until Aemond is found and killed. She’s willing to give her half-sister Heleana sporadic child visitation rights, a halfway solution that has the unique appeal of satisfying absolutely no one. Rhaenyra’s a halfway queen. Even amongst her closest allies, strife is appearing. Ulf, Addam, and Hugh are formally bestowed the title of Ser, but you can’t eat a knighthood. Rhaenyra promises them houses on Visenya Hill, in the shadow of the Great Sept of Baelor… eventually. But how are you going to tell a man with a dragon to wait his turn? Hugh Hammer’s wife grew so desperate in King’s Landing that she fled to her brother’s house in Tumbleton, where she’s now either dead or living under Ormund’s reign of terror. What Rhaenyra needs is a sounding board — a trusted friend with insight, a ghost of her father, really. But after she jettisons the men who held her back on Dragonstone from her Small Council, all Rhaenyra’s left with is her husband, yes-man Mysaria as Mistress of Whispers, and Ser Corlys as her Hand. By the end of the episode, the tiny group will shrink further. Corlys invites the queen to meet the secret sons she already knows and hard-launches his plan to legitimize Addam and Alyn with the Velaryon name. Throughout the episode, we’ve watched Rhaenyra grapple, over and over, with the “right” thing to do. But at dinner with her own family, she’s decisive and wrong. Given the rumours about her own children, she contends, incomprehensively, that elevating those born outside the nobility could endanger Joffrey’s claim to the throne. The Seasnake, who has lost his wife and his heir to her war, is justifiably livid. For all to hear, he shouts that Rhaeynyra’s dead sons — his own grandchildren, kinda — are bastards, before storming out of the Red Keep. (To where? There’s no way to be sure. Corlys has also lost his home to the Dance of the Dragons.) In the end, Rhaenyra must settle for becoming queen simply by dint of doing the job. She’s a bundle of nerves as she prepares to sit the Iron Throne and hear petitions from the smallfolk for the first time. She’s not sure what to say or what to wear. In a particularly under-elucidated moment, Rhaenyra discovers she has her period just before taking the audience. The clunky discovery brims with nauseating narrative possibility: Is she too emotional to be a leader? Too soft? Too frail? Too female? The smallfolk bring her more problems. There are sheep shortages and game shortages. Rhaenyra is unsteady in her responses but creative. She suggests that the hunting grounds could be extended to include the Kingswood. When her Hand suggests that might be an insult to previous rulers, she adapts on the fly. They can hunt hares, not stags. Easy-peasy. But another petitioner, Sylvi, brings a troubling complaint against King’s Landing’s highborn, who filled their storehouses while the city’s normies struggled to fill their dinner plates. Rhaenyra seems genuinely shocked, but also motivated. She can’t find Sheepstealer from her post in the Red Keep. She can’t kill Aemond or Vhagar or Aegon. But a small group of greedy families of middling significance? This is an enemy she can chew up and spit out. Rhaenyra invites her new subjects over for a dinner party. At first, I thought the banquet was going to be a proxy for her coronation — a toned-down celebration of new alliances. Instead, the night plays more like The Menu. When guests pledge their allegiance, Rhaenyra tells them thank you, if only they’d done it sooner. We miss the first course, but, for the entrée, her honored guests are served the finest roast rat, captured rooting around the illustrious halls of the Red Keep. While the highborn have been entertained at the castle, she reveals to them that the Gold Cloaks have been repossessing their food surpluses. All are aghast, save Ser Torrhen Manderly, who applauds the farce. The next day, the Queen and Mysaria take a cart into town and redistribute the food themselves. The people cheer, probably because they take this as a sign of things to come and not a photo op. People have been starving for months, and Rhaenyra just handed someone a half-loaf of sourdough and four apples. It’s a goodwill gesture, but she’ll need money and allies to maintain her rule. She’ll need the support of the great houses, too, if she has a chance of ever commanding the realm as peacefully as her father did. Episode three is preoccupied with the idea of what it would mean for Rhaneyra to rule like Viserys. To expansionist Daemon, it means to never reach the full expression of your power. With six dragons, Rhaenyra could rule Dorne, the Free Cities, the farflung Yi Ti. She shouldn’t be raiding sheds in Westeros; she should be tithing from princes and sultans, taking from the men with wings who some say live at the edge of the map. The Septor won’t anoint Rhaenyra because he worries she’s not been chosen by God; Daemon believes the Targaryens are gods themselves. What else could it mean to harness the most powerful force on earth? In one of their tête-à-têtes, Alicent tells Rhaenyra that being queen will press her to be colder and harder than she’s ever been. She will shut down the part of herself that was ever soft in the face of suffering. (Put in your moon cup and quit crying about it.) But Viserys ruled humanely, at least in his daughter’s eyes. Is the air of the Red Keep thick with ghosts, or is Rhaenyra seeing what she longs to see? The son who oriented her, the father who guided her. Ghosts are the one enemy dragons can do nothing to vanquish. Meet New York staffers in the comments section to discuss the same burning questions we’re trying to answer in House of the Dragon Club, our subscriber-exclusive newsletter. Sign up here or enter your email below to get the latest editions. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.