This post contains spoilers for “House of the Dragon” season 2.
“House of the Dragon” season 2 just ended this past Sunday night, and HBO has announced that season 3 will be shooting early next year, so the show likely won’t be back until sometime in 2026. More importantly, a fourth season has been given the green light, and season 4 will mark the end of this series. I know several people who are genuinely thrilled with this show, and I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but the way that season finale ended — by wrapping up this chapter of the story without actually getting to the confrontation it had been teasing the whole time — proved to me that this season only had about four hours worth of story in it that was stretched across eight episodes.
Daemon wandering around the halls of Harrenhal, Baela running around in the highlands for god knows how long in that finale episode, and Rhaenyra spending huge chunks of the season just kind of standing around at Dragonstone … there are so many examples of characters who are essentially frozen in place solely because the plot dictated that they couldn’t progress at an appropriate pace. Even the most ardent fans of the series would probably admit that the pacing is just way off in this thing.
Unfortunately, showrunner Ryan Condal has said that he anticipates the cadence of the next two seasons, “from a dramatic storytelling perspective, will continue to be the same from season 2 on.” That’s bad news for anyone hoping this season might have been a blip.
Pacing problems may haunt House of the Dragon for its entire run
I’m of two minds about Condal’s comment. I’m glad HBO announced that season 4 will be the end, because that means the showrunner and his team have a concrete end in sight and a goal line to write to. But I am also not personally looking forward to sitting through two more seasons of a show that has the same frustrating pacing that season 2 had. There were some good — and even a few great — moments this season, and the finale had some impressive scenes and exciting interactions between characters, but I can already tell that I would much rather see a version of this show that trims things down to the essentials. (Someone call Topher Grace!)
And for me, there’s a big difference between feeling that way about an eight-episode season of an HBO show versus a 20-something episode season of a network show like “Lost.” A show like that was operating under an entirely different set of circumstances than a mega-budgeted HBO fantasy series, and in some ways, the room that “Lost” had to get weird and take risks over the course of a season was part of the point. It was baked in to the business model of making network TV. It gave the writers time to explore things and evolve the story organically and beef up some characters and phase out others. Maybe “House of the Dragon” fans would say they appreciated those moments in this show — the asides and repetition and interactions that happened during the huge chunks of the season that I felt like were nothing but wheel-spinning.
But when you look at what happened to Daemon this season, and the way he saw the future in the finale and seemingly completely changed his entire personality because he’s seen the Song of Ice and Fire in a vision now, it’s tough for me to appreciate a show that feels like it’s vacillating between slamming on the brakes and putting the pedal to the metal, oftentimes within the same episode of TV. I spoke about this on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which you can listen to below:
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