House of the Dragon S3E3 Review: Rhaenyra Rules, Daemon Wins with Dragons

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Full spoilers follow for House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 3.

They say that in the Game Of Thrones, you either win or you die. But there’s another stage: sometimes you win the throne but are then beset by a thousand petty decisions that only you can make, and each one could either secure your position or leave you fatally vulnerable. Oh, and there are rats everywhere: literal ones, for once, and not just the traitorous kind. That’s the dilemma for Emma D’Arcy’s Rhaenyra in this episode, and it’s surprisingly compelling.

We open, however, with one of the more striking images in Westeros’ TV history. Ormund Hightower (James Norton) rides out from his thousands-strong army to surrender to Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith), who stands alone, his sword still sheathed. It’s only when the camera pans around and you see that Daemon is backed up by not just his own Caraxes but two other dragons that the scale of the threat becomes clear. Ormund’s shiny armour would only help him to cook evenly; all his neat rows of soldiers are just dragonfeed if he doesn’t make the deal. So Ormund swears fealty to Rhaenyra and, after a Columbo-style “one more thing” from Daemon, very reluctantly throws in his nephew Daeron as a hostage. Daeron is the youngest son of the late Viserys and Alicent (Olivia Cooke), raised by the Hightowers, and specifically Ormund, for years. You’d be forgiven for having forgotten he exists.

But, psych! The big twist of this episode is that the child Ormund hands over, the one that Daemon is going to spend the episode recommending that Rhaenyra assassinate, the one that she wrings her hands over repeatedly, is just some kid. The real Daeron has been safe with Ormund the whole time. Rhaenyra learns this in an interesting way: she brings Alicent in to see “Daeron” before – compromise! – sending him to the Wall for life, and Alicent is visibly disconcerted for a moment. Her mind goes into overdrive, trying to figure out if this is Rhaenyra playing a trick or something else. Then she just admits it.

It was almost a smart play by Ormund, who’s soon revealed to have immediately broken his oath of fealty and taken control of the small city of Tumbleton; we’d never heard of it before except as the place dragonrider Hugh the Hammer’s (Kieran Bew) wife has gone to live with her brother, which may become relevant later. After the Hightowers’ very brief intro in the season opener, and what looked to be a “so long, and thanks for nearly fighting” at the start of this episode, it’s now clear that Ormund will be a major player, and Norton is going to have something to do. All this, and he has fancy armour. Fun!

Elsewhere, Rhaenyra is experiencing death by a thousand cuts: not literally (worth specifying on this show) but in the sense that everyone wants a piece of her or her treasury and she doesn’t have nearly enough to go around. There are rats everywhere in the palace because all the ratcatchers were executed last season. She tries to cope with the problem by inviting some minor nobles to dinner, wooing them for a few moments and then hitting them with a) a rat-based main course and b) the news that she’s raiding their houses for hoarded food that she can share with the hungry smallfolk. Communism is alive and well in King’s Landing! I’m sure none of these rich people will be deeply offended.

Rhaenyra wants to be good, and to rule effectively, but as Alicent sadly points out, you can’t do both – especially with the contents of the treasury missing, the city starving, the palace filled with Hightower loyalists, the dragonseeds asking for their promised rewards, and Corlys deeply pissed off when Rhaenyra refuses to legitimize his sons, worried that that will highlight how clearly illegitimate her own are. She’s been on the throne for a matter of days, and trouble seems to be brewing.

While she has, for now, taken Mysaria’s (Sonoya Mizuno) advice to look out for her people, she’s worryingly obsessed with her coronation, and her confrontation with the High Septon, leader of the faith, is also concerning. He not only refuses to formally crown her because there’s no sign of Aegon II’s (Tom Glynn-Carney) body – because hey, he’s not actually dead – but also because he considers dragons an abomination and the workings of dark magic. This is unfair because they’re all good lizards, Septon, 15 out of 10. It’s the owners you can’t always rely on.

Speaking of which, Rhaenyra is also very anxious to find the person who rode Sheepstealer and introduce them to a new definition of pain and suffering, so Daemon is dispatched to the Vale to look for the miscreant (unbeknownst to him, the rider’s actually his daughter Rhaena) and also to collect some gold from the Lady of the Vale, who promised troops but who has notably failed to send any. Before he goes, Daemon correctly points out that they could just say buggeration to the whole thing, conquer a different kingdom – Dorne, perhaps, for the weather – or fly off into the sunset on their giant scaly pets. “You will have an empire, unassailable…I style us gods, Rhaenyra, as we were always meant to be.” No one ever accused him of having a small ego. She resists, pointing out that her father valued restraint more than power, but he dismisses that as weakness and a lack of force. There’s an element of truth to both sides.

It's the next day when Rhaenyra learns from a dragonkeeper who barely escaped the town that Ormund has taken Tumbleton and she has to figure out how to respond. If she flies over and torches the place, she’ll be flambéing her loyal subjects. If she ignores the provocation, she leaves a place to potentially rally the Greens to continue fighting. And Aemond is still MIA, which would be good news if he didn’t have a gigantic flamethrower with him of unpredictable behaviour. Rhaenyra may think she’s won the war, but she’s finding that holding the throne is going to be a whole other struggle. The drama already feels unbearably tense.