Spoilers for House of the Dragon season-two finale “The Queen Who Ever Was” below. House of the Dragon ’s second-season finale ends with a whimper rather than a bang. A few scenes do feel worthy of a tentpole HBO Sunday night show, though they’d be more at home as midseason development than blockbuster finale fodder.
There’s Alicent and Rhaenyra, of course, reminding us that this show does have a central relationship we care about. We got Criston doing his best Hamlet impression. There was Ulf with his feet on the dinner table, enjoying his recent elevation to functional godhood.
To a truly unfortunate extent, though, the end of season two feels like that awful sensation when you really need to sneeze but for some reason you just ...
don’t. There’s so much build-up, so many characters insisting that all of this really matters! Doom and death awaits! And then it ends with a shrug of a montage, before Rhaena even has a chance to get on the back of her new dragon. Season two was produced in the middle of the writers’ strike, which may have something to do with why it feels so underbaked.
It was cut to eight episodes rather than the original planned ten; reporting at the time suggested this was about how best to tell the story rather than how best to cut costs. Now that we’ve seen what that story actually looks like, though, it doesn’t not seem like the show cut short right before its big, expensive, two-episode closing hurrah. But underneath all of that, Hous.