SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details about the season one finale of House of the Dragon.
HBO’s prequel to the Game of Thrones ended its 10-episode run Sunday. Here, showrunner Ryan Condal talks about the meaning behind Daemon’s (Matt Smith) aggressive behavior toward Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy), why so many episodes looked so dark on our TV screens, and what we can expect from future episodes.
DEADLINE Was it always plan to bookend the season with, ahem, dead Targaryen infants?
RYAN CONDAL No. I mean there’s a lot of beautiful symmetry in this season. It also began with a dragon ride and ended with a dragon ride. There’s a lot of symbolism to take from it. But yes, I think we realized in the domino-ing of events that happened in the final episode, one aspect was linking the horrific birth that goes terribly wrong in the pilot with another horrific birth that goes wrong in the finale. It’s mother and daughter. It’s the daughter of the woman who died in the pilot now having this very difficult birth. That was always her fear, birth is a battlefield and now Rhaenyra finds herself at war and this is her going through her own battle. She’s having a miscarriage, She knows she’s not far enough along in her term that she’s going to have a viable infant. It’s medieval times. There is no premature baby unit in the maester’s hospital. It’s a nice piece of symmetry that we did not see at the outset.
Doesn’t Alicent’s son fulfill the song of ice and fire prophecy because he has Targaryen blood? Why is Rhaenyra so worried about it?
CONDAL It’s not as easy and clear cut as that. I think what Rhaenyra is struggling with is this idea that her father has entrusted this charge with her, and that she is the named heir, and the other side has seized the throne. She’s been told that Viserys changed his mind on his death bed but I don’t think Rhaenyra believes any of that for a minute, because he backed her. We saw him in episode eight climb the throne in that beautiful scene and essentially back her claim. So she’s dealing with the fact that she is the named heir and also that she thinks she is uniquely qualified to be somebody who keeps the realm at peace and to unite everybody. She does not think that Aegon is the guy to carry on the charge, nor does she believed that Viserys ever entrusted the secret with him. So she’s wrestling with the idea that she’s been asked to keep the realm of peace, but also she’s the rightful heir. That’s the thing that she’s really struggling with over the course of episode 10, when all the men around the table just want to charge off for war.
Game of Thrones didn’t end with fulfilling the prophecy of a Targaryen on the throne. Is that something you may end up addressing, that the prophecy doesn’t need to be so exact?
CONDAL Correct. I think that’s one of the lovely things about the way George R.R. Martin writes prophecy: it’s a bit messy. I think part of the fun of this series as it unfolds is that … we’ve seen how this ends. The fun is to play with it in the middle as everybody’s wrestling with what does this mean? Everybody takes a myopic worldview, or at least an autocratic worldview. When Aegon had the dream, he assumed that the White Walkers were gonna come across the wall in his lifetime. And when Viserys heard it, he assumed that it was gonna happen in his lifetime. And then Rhaenyra thinks it’s gonna happen early. They don’t realize that they’re preparing for an eventual future that is decades, if not centuries away. We know where it ends. We know the Titanic sinks in the end. What’s interesting is what happens along the way and how we got there.
How does it work with George? He’s not in the writers room routinely, correct?
CONDAL He was at the very beginning, way back when we had this very small group of writers, none of whom worked on the show once we officially got picked up. So he was involved with that. Generally it’s George and I in communication. I send him everything. I send him outlines, I send him scripts, I send him cuts, I send him text messages, I send him questions, Why did you do this? What does this mean? Who is this person? We stay in constant communication. He’s very active and reads a lot and gives a lot of feedback. Other times he just sort of defers and says, go with the Gods. I keep him in constant contact with the materials so he can know what’s going on if he chooses to. But he is a very busy guy. It’s really hard for him to engage with us at the pace that we would need him to, to weigh in on every single little decision. The train is moving too fast. But he always knows what’s going on. That’s the thing that I promised him from the beginning: I might not always do exactly the thing that he wants me to do, but we will always talk about it. We will always have the discussion, and I’ve honored that.
So let me back up: did you feel like you finally arrived into the Game of Thrones universe when viewers started complaining about how dark some of the episodes were?
CONDAL It is a bit of a rite of passage on this show. The difference between making television and making movies is when you make a movie, you calibrate the thing that you’re making, the master file for this idealized movie theater experience. You know it’s going to go into a professionally calibrated environment, run by a professional projectionist on a professional sound system. The problem with making television is you do all of that, you make the show on millions of dollars worth of equipment. You make this perfect file in a perfect environment and on great equipment that’s perfectly calibrated by professionals. And then you release it into the wild, and it goes to different distributors who compress the file differently. Some air it in 4k, some in 10 EP, some over-crank the brightness, some under-crank the brightness, some make the sound different. You’re also releasing it to tens of millions of different television sets that are all different technology, calibrated differently and set up differently in different viewing environments. It’s almost impossible to account for all those variables when you’re making the television show. So yes, I heard the note and we’re aware. But I will tell you that it looked phenomenal when we posted it and released it. And it looked great on my television, which has been professionally calibrated. [Laughs].
So many people fell in love with Milly Alcock. Would there have been enough story to have Milly hang around for a full season or would that have gotten boring?
CONDAL I loved Millie too. She did a great job, and so did Emily Carey, by the way. They were both phenomenal young actors. I’m jealous of them ‘cuz they have such an incredible career ahead of them and they’re just in their early twenties. The challenge with this season was providing enough of the seeds and backstory, the prologue to what happens without getting mired in it. Viserys’ entire reign is a period of peace. It becomes potentially dangerous in terms of making television to live in that world for too long, without the incident that everybody knows is coming. So sure, it would been great to have an extra episode of time to do this and do that. But the writers worked really hard and we spent many months writing and debating where to end the young women’s story. It was that point. The other things that happen in that timeline do not ultimately change what’s going to happen in the future.
Did you do any research to see if any other show had ever attempted this, change actors midseason? I’m projecting but that seemed scary as hell to execute.
CONDAL It did scare the hell outta me. It scare the hell out of HBO, too. But to their credit, I mean it’s really the best network in the world. They were bold and said ‘we’re HBO, we’re buying into this and we’re gonna do this.’ I’m incredibly grateful to them for it. But yeah, it scared the hell outta me. No one else has really done it before. I mean, the closest analog that I have is The Crown, one of my favorite dramas of the last 20 years. I’ve talked about The Crown more in our room than I did about most other shows other than the original Game of Thrones. They did it incredibly successfully. It was the proof that we could do it on a more accelerated timeline because it was so successful. They went from from Claire Foy and Matt Smith to Tobias Menzies and Olivia Coleman. You accepted that they were the same characters. The different thing is those are historical characters and you know who they are. But it was proof to me that if the drama was compelling enough and the story was compelling enough, that people would stay and follow the characters and not the actors. And sure enough, that’s what they did.
The scene where Daemon chokes Rhaenyra. Is that a red flag to show us that she made a huge mistake marrying her uncle?
CONDAL That’s such a loaded, multilayered question. A lot to unpack! Did Rhaenyra make the right choice in marrying her uncle? I don’t, in my opinion. That is an incredibly shocking scene and honestly, one of my favorite scenes of the finale that is beautifully performed by Emma and Matt. I don’t think as the writer of this series that there is very much new information in that scene about Daemon. I think Daemon has very much, through the course of this season, shown you a lot of colors that would not lead one to be all that shocked in that moment. That primal danger is always lurking beneath the surface, and it just happened to come out in that moment. It was made very obvious to him that his brother never really regarded him as the true heir of the throne. That infuriates him. It’s the worst hurt that he could experience to learn that Viserys kept [the prophecy] from him, that he so willingly shared with Rhaenyra. It just breaks Daemon in that moment, and that’s how he reacts.
Are we to assume now that dragons have a mind of their own?
CONDAL I think you should always assume that dragons have minds of their own. They’re living, breathing creatures that have a level of sentience to them. As Daenerys told us in the original series, dragons are not slaves. They have saddles on them, and they speak High Valerian to a degree and they listen and obey their riders. But when a wild animal is threatened, an animal will sometimes respond. If you go all the way back to the pilot, Viserys warns us that the idea that we control dragons is an illusion. He says that to Rhaenyra. He says they are a power that we should have never trifled with. That’s one of the cautionary tales that we’re setting up, the stance of the dragons. When you go to war with a bunch of nuclear weapons that have their own sentient thoughts and feelings to a degree, unexpected things can happen.
Where will you pick up the action next season? Minutes later?
CONDAL To be revealed. I will say, as a reward to our wonderful audience for following us through all the time jumps and recasts, they are done. We tell the story in real time from here forward. The actors are playing these characters until the end. We’re not recasting anybody. We’re not making any huge jumps forward in time. We are now in the Dance of the Dragons, and we’re gonna tell that story.