‘House of the Dragon’ Season 3 review: HBO prequel finally takes flight

TV review

“House of the Dragon” Season 3 honors a storytelling tenet the previous season didn’t: It goes somewhere. Gone is the narrative wheel-spinning and exhaustive table-setting that characterized Season 2. Done is the puttering, the meandering; key players such as Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith, eating everyone’s lunch despite having little to do) at last get to move, to disrupt, to inflict themselves on their surroundings so that the proceedings stay interesting. Finally, HBO’s sprawling, uneven “Game of Thrones” prequel can get down to business.

Season 3, premiering Sunday, escalates the Targaryen civil war with pomp and circumstance aplenty. Rhaenyra (a fabulous Emma D’Arcy) has arranged with Alicent Hightower (an underused Olivia Cooke) the taking of King’s Landing and the seizure of the Iron Throne, opening up new fronts in the war and placing her in even greater danger than before. Further threatening Rhaenyra’s tenuous grip on the realm is the cunning Ormund Hightower (franchise newcomer James Norton), who marches on her forces with a rival claimant in tow.

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Visually, “House of the Dragon” remains peerless. The four episodes made available for review are in turns rousing and breathtaking, delivering long-promised battles and oft-teased payoffs. The Battle of the Gullet is a showstopper, as good as any clash in “Game of Thrones” and somehow even more vivid and transportive. Showrunner Ryan Condal herds us into the fray, hammering us with spectacle so uncompromising, so visceral it feels like he’s putting our guts in a blender. Arrows loosed through swirling curtains of ash and cinder, dragons bouncing and shuddering on scalding updrafts, combatants sidestepping bunched and bloodied entrails: The carnage in the Gullet ranks among the bloodiest naval battles in Westerosi history, and Condal exhausts every resource to make it worth the two-year wait.

But he seems so eager to make up for the previous season’s flaws that he unwittingly injects a quiet, corrupting panic into a story he’s worked so hard to tell. Character arcs suffer. Moments end sooner than they should. Important players reappear only to be murdered within moments of their return, suggesting that Condal and Co. don’t quite know what to do with characters who’ve left the fold.

It all plays out like a story related under duress, an adaptation cognizant of fandom ire but already too deep in its telling to course correct. Frenzied editing and frantic pacing further compromise the season, robbing key events of the breathing room necessary for them to land the way they need to.

Don’t get it too twisted, though: “House of the Dragon” is as thrilling and surprising as ever, even if Condal’s interpretation is beginning to show signs of strain. Ramin Djawadi’s score continues to haunt and enchant, and the cast, more assured than ever and without a single weak link, further cements itself as one of the best ensembles on TV. D’Arcy, Smith and Steve Toussaint are especially brilliant, each of them embodying the brokenness of their respective characters without compromising the strength that makes them so rewarding to watch.

If you’ve enjoyed “House of the Dragon” so far, you’ll find plenty to admire in Season 3.

‘House of the Dragon’ Season 3
Season 3 premieres June 21 on HBO and streams on HBO Max, with new episodes dropping Sundays through Aug. 9.

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