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[Warning: At some point in this review, there’s a good chance that I’m going to confuse Rhaenyra and Rhaena and possibly even Rhaenys (RIP). I’m going to goof and mention Aegon when I mean Aemond, or possibly Alyn when I’m taking about Alys. If you’re the sort of person who’s going to get sanctimonious about this, please stop reading and come back when I next write about a show with between five or 10 characters, each with names like “Bob” and “Kim.”]

The problem with the third season of HBO‘s House of the Dragon, premiering on June 21, is Andor, or rather Andor Syndrome. It’s a condition wherein people like a thing until a subset of the thing proves to be so exceptional that some people decide that the subset of the thing should simply be the thing. Get it? The Mandalorian was fun and good and Star Wars-y, but then Andor came along and it was like, “Holy CRAP, this is what Star Wars can be?” That sentiment became so pervasive that when something like Skeleton Crew came along and it was merely fun and good and Star Wars-y,  many people responded with, “Why can’t this be Andor?” 

Not everything can be Andor and not everything needs to be Andor. But what if Andor just proved that Andor is the thing that I like at this moment?

When it premiered in January, nobody said that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was all that Game of Thrones and its myriad potential spinoffs necessarily needed to be, but the series’ amiable simplicity — six short episodes, a fully contained and completed storyline, no dragons — was focused and well-executed.

That has never been the case for the first two seasons of House of the Dragon, with its surfeit of…everything. Too many similar-looking characters with similar-sounding names and similar versions of “complexity” and, yes, too many darned dragons. 

Simultaneously too much and too little, House of the Dragon has always been packed with promising elements and intriguing mythology, but with only 10 episodes in the first season and eight in the second — and then with two years between each batch of episodes — there has been no way for momentum to build. The first season spun its wheels, got cool, squandered the momentum with a time jump, threatened to get cool by the end, and squandered the momentum again with a gap between seasons. The second season spent the whole time building to the brink of coolness again and then…here we are two years later.

I don’t know whether it’s creative ambition or industry tumult or corporate preference or some combination of the three, but it’s a bad way to tell a story and it’s a worse way to treat an audience. 

Through the four episodes sent to critics, the third season of House of the Dragon is, in many ways, the same. Scenes of entertaining brutality and entertaining inspiration are placed directly next to scenes with characters and situations that dissipate the pleasure of what came before. The series is still too packed, too narratively rushed and, as much as I’m certain passionate fans will disagree, the surplus of dragons and special effects has become somewhat anticlimactic. Just because you have the technological capacity to do a battle scene with four dragons and thousands of CG boats doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be better with two dragons and, heaven forbid, some practical effects, but… 

But!

The third episode of the season and, to a lesser degree, the fourth were my favorite House of the Dragon episodes to date. Why? Because they were funnier, smarter and a little more intimate in scale, albeit with episode lengths of between 56 and 64 minutes and, yes, lots of dragons. They weren’t exactly House of the Dragon doing A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, but I could pretend that the things I liked about that show were being brought to the surface in this one. 

We left things on the brink of conflict. 

Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy), reassured that her uncle/husband Daemon (Matt Smith) was on her side, is ready to stake her claim to the Iron Throne. She’s got a navy led by Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), three freshly minted bastard dragon-riders in Ulf (Tom Bennett), Addam (Clinton Liberty) and Hugh (Kieran Bew), and the assurance by frenemy Alicent (Olivia Cooke) that she’ll facilitate Rhaenyra’s arrival in King’s Landing in order to protect her own family. 

Alicent, however, does not speak for her mentally unstable sons. Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) is hideously burnt and incapacitated with pain, but ruthlessly ambitious. Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), down an eye but up a dragon, is thoroughly psychotic and unlikely to surrender willingly. Plus, Tyland Lannister (Jefferson Hall) has secured the help of the Triarchy fleet by virtue of mud-wrestling Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorn), the fleet’s admiral.

There are dozens of other characters doing dozens of other things. 

The first episode builds to the Battle of the Gullet, a major naval campaign so awash in effects work that I never for a second believed any of it was taking place at sea. But it’s artificially huge and artificially bloody and there are dragons doing dragon things.

Sure, I guess. 

Oh and in the first couple of episodes, there are deaths, big deaths, big meaningless deaths. Game of Thrones, especially in its first few seasons, had one of the best ratios of impactful deaths of any show in TV history. House of the Dragons has inherited its predecessor’s willingness to kill anybody at any time, but you don’t care about the characters. That continues.

So if you want spectacle, without much behind it, you’ll be pleased.

What to say, then, about the third and fourth episodes without spoiling things?

They are, like much of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and some of my favorite pieces of Game of Thrones, a reminder that in Westeros, as in our very real world today, the elite clash for power and call it a game, but for the little people, it hardly matters. No matter who ends up on the Iron Throne, the common people get screwed. 

The third episode begins a process in which we see what it would be like for Rhaenyra to possibly rule — I’m not saying where or under what circumstances — and it’s nothing like she expected. Or did she even get as far as expecting what it would be like to rule? She spent so many years convincing herself that she was entitled to rule, but did Rhaenyra ever have an agenda? Did Alicent when she ruled? Does Daemon, even if he allegedly decided that he wasn’t going to pursue the throne himself? 

The result is borderline Succession-esque in its level of absurdity, and D’Arcy, so reliably tormented, gets to show sides of the character that have never even been hinted at before. They get to be funny and off-kilter. You don’t need to have read the George R.R. Martin source material to know exactly where Rhaenyra is heading, psychologically, but it’s actually fun to watch. Throw in strong work from Smith and Cooke, my two favorite parts of the cast in seasons past, and you get a show that has suddenly remembered that it can be entertaining without filling the frame with dragons. 

The third and fourth episodes, which deserved to be stretched over a full season, are also borderline The Wire-esque, because they weave in budgetary crises and expose faltering institutions across Westeros — failings of bureaucracy that happen because the country is ruled by battling oligarchs who couldn’t care less about the 99 percent. 

Forget House of the Dragon as an origin story for the events later depicted in Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. This season should be the origin story for a democratic socialist contender for the Iron Throne. Martin wishes he were capable of coming up with a name like “Zohran Mamdani.” Without ever using the words, this House of the Dragon season evokes all-too-real fears about police funding, abridgment of freedom of speech and the insidiousness of theocratic rule. With dragons! And even the dragons almost count as a faltering institution.

D’Arcy has never been better. Smith remains wonderfully hammy. I enjoyed spending more time with Sonoya Mizuno’s Mysaria, whose conspiratorial whispering only increases this season, though I’ll never understand why Mysaria talks with a French accent half of the time. Any scene is improved with the presence of Gayle Rankin’s unsettling Alys, and the more they give Phoebe Campbell’s Rhaena to do — she was last seen discovering a wild dragon— the better and more haunted she is.

The new season offers a bunch of new faces, because what the show needed was new characters, with James Norton the best of the lot as Ormund Hightower, an ally to the Alicent/Aemond/Aegon power junta whose own motivations are only slowly revealing themselves. 

Anyway, this all boils down to me really liking the third episode, liking portions of the fourth and fearing that no matter how much I like the change of direction that occurs in much of those two episodes, House of the Dragon has too much on its plate and too little time to do everything. 

What I enjoyed was probably more a blip than a full evolution, so don’t worry if you get to those episodes and think, “Just because A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms worked doesn’t mean smaller is better in Westeros.”