‘House of the Dragon’ Showrunner Ryan Condal Shares Season 3 Revelations
If you’ve been following House of the Dragon this season, you’ll know that the show has taken some huge steps in its past two episodes, truly solidifying the fate of Rhaenyra Targaryen. This past week brought us an incredibly pensive episode that showed the true burden that comes with sitting on the Iron Throne. Much like his show’s protagonist, showrunner Ryan Condal also feels that weight in delivering to fans of the Game of Thrones universe. We were lucky enough to attend a press conference with him as he previewed what’s to come in Season 3 of the epic series.
From its debut season, House of the Dragon had a major advantage from its HBO predecessor, Game of Thrones, in that the story was already captured in Chapters 12-16 of George R.R. Martin’s novel Fire and Blood. As such, there’s a clear roadmap that Condal is following for the remaining episodes of the series’ third and fourth seasons. Prior to the debut of the first episode, Condal was able to sit down to a very fun press conference, where he answered questions regarding the events of the first two episodes and the events to come for the next six episodes of Season 3.
The first major question out of the gate was about The Battle of the Gullet in the first episode of the season. The battle was a massive medieval naval conflict, with some of the best action sequences we’d seen in the Game Of Thrones universe. Condal stated, “This kind of episode is the thing you typically build to within the season. Whereas we decided to shake up the rhythm this year and just come out of the gate with it, which I felt was bold and unique. It also helped get it made, frankly, because we were selling it as the one that we were going to premiere the show with. It’s the thing everybody’s going to review. It’s the thing you’re going to show in the big theater when you premiere the show. So it helped, and it’s definitely feature quality made on a feature scale.”
Feature scale indeed. The battle featured three different dragons battling in flight, several giant naval ships, and numerous important deaths and consequences. It received rave reviews from both critics and fans, with many declaring it a return to form for the GOT universe. “This episode has been in my mind since I read the book for the first time, before it was even published,” stated Condal. “It was like, ‘that sounds cool but how the hell do we do that? And how the hell would we do that?’ That has really been a better part of a four-year long process discussion to get us to this point, because there was a lot of engineering that had to go into it, because this is not a thing… that anybody has really done before… It’s a medieval sea battle. There are multiple ships on both sides. There are dragons involved. There’s water interaction, there’s ship interaction. Most sea battles are in the canon era, so… it’s projectile fighting. You don’t have this ship to ship combat, the way you had to do in medieval times. These things were really gnarly, and we wanted to dramatize that and put that on screen. Show people how awful this was, and also thrilling and exciting for the people that are not in the sea battle.”
Condal was asked a terrific question about audience satisfaction after the second season of the show, which left many viewers disappointed that the season did not end with The Battle of the Gullet. “It’s enthusiasm and impatience, and unfortunately, we just live in a world of immediate satisfaction and impatience,” Condal stated. And he’s right. “I’m in the last vestiges of Gen X. So I grew up in a time where you had to wait three years between sequels, and with no information, either. You had to wait for those Starlog magazines to get published to figure out what was happening in the next Batman movie. To me, it’s like that stuff [online discourse] is all noise, and it’s temporary noise. In the end, this is just really one story that has to be broken into these four different chapters, so that we can make the show. If you can just watch this back to back, and I don’t, I don’t think there will be as much of a sense of the passing between seasons, because we’re not doing the thing where a lot of shows do… where you jump forward in time and everybody’s in a new place, so you’re catching up. It’s not that show. [Each episode] picks up moments after the last one… No time at all has passed, so I think when people start forgiving and being less aware of the fact that two years pass between [the release of seasons], because they’re just watching it in on a run, I think they’ll understand what it is, and the way it was all laid out to work.”
The next question was about the four-season structure of the show and The Battle of the Gullet being the mid-point. “I think we always kind of saw it as that. I came up as a feature film writer. And I was a writer that always looked at movies as — not three-act movies — but four-act movies. Where Act Two is so long, it’s part of a 60-page act. In order to be able to get your head around it, you really had to break it into part one and part two. And that ends with the midpoint of the script. In a movie, it’s the hour mark… That’s the belly of the beast. That’s when Pinocchio goes into the belly of the whale, and [you wonder] how is Pinocchio going to get out of this thing? I think that’s very much where we leave people off at the end of Season Two. And the makings of The Battle of the Gullet really are the midpoint. There’s the time before, and then there’s the time after. Both for the individual characters, and then for the war itself. And this is really the thing that happens during this battle that uncorks something that you can’t put back into the bottle.”
Condal continued, “This was always on the horizon. We always knew we had to figure it out. This was not something that we would have been able to get away with. Not dramatizing, either. Some things you can do well… It was always going to feel cheap and cheated if we did anything other than what we have done in Episode One, which is put it right there in front of you, and sit you in it for a long time to make you really feel like you’ve been through it. To understand that before and after. And also this is such an emblem of how dark and unforgiving and tragic this war has become. This episode exemplifies all of that.”
Condal was asked about how he coordinated and executed The Battle of the Gullet with his writers and directors. “First of all, you know, the Sea Snake and Alyn of Hull are holding a blockade. So in theory an attack will come from somewhere at some point. It might be Vhagar. It might be another navy. Maybe The Lannisters, or The Greyjoys. There’s nothing in their mind that prepares them for the Triarchy coming back at them with the size of the fleet that they have. So I think that’s the first unexpected turn. Then once the dragons enter the battle, all bets are off, because they create such havoc and chaos within it. And that’s the intent. To show that war is fucking chaos. And people don’t plan for it. It becomes about Corlys and Sharako trying to keep the strategy alive for their entire fleets. And they have this plan and eventually the bombs start going off. Then it becomes ‘what’s the strategy for our ship?’ And then ‘what’s the strategy for me in this pitched combat?’ And it becomes more and more narrow. You’re in the eye of the storm, and that’s that. Being on those two ships and up with those two dragons. So, yeah, there definitely was a strategy. But I think the introduction of all those rogue elements into it was it.
“It’s very challenging and very stress-inducing to do. But we start with POV. Whose story are we telling here? And it’s Sharako, Alyn, and The Sea Snake… Then in the sky with our dragons and their riders. And so the events of this battle will be told through those different points of view. Where are we in the story? Then it helps you map what’s happening. The bigger moves; the objective shots in the story. But even though the objective shots are being used to get you into one of the dragons, and what the riders are experiencing, or get you back down to the ships, and what they’re experiencing, it’s massive. There’s 120 vessels involved in this fight, plus dragons. You can’t be on every deck of every ship. So, you understand that this big thing is going on… But it’s like telling the story of World War II through the eyes of this platoon… You have the sense this much bigger thing is playing out, but there are individual stories on all these different decks of the ship. These are the POVs that we’re choosing to show you, because these are the characters that you know and hopefully you care about, or at least are fascinated in.”
Star Emma D’Arcy’s tremendous performances over the past three weeks on the show were brought up, and Condal was asked about what it was like to work with them. “Emma is an incandescent performer, and it’s very much putting our trust in them to take what’s on the page, understand in the pre-conversations through the rehearsal period, and our table read period, then do the thing where you say, ‘okay, go do what you do best.’ I was there on stage that day, and I will tell you that people were in tears watching the performance. Never mind seeing it all cut together on TV. It was a tough day to be on set, because you’re watching this person that you care about a lot go to this very dark place. To get there, and have to go there… you don’t just do it once, and call it a day. It was eight hours of going into that well again and again. It was incredible. It’s remarkable, and you know it’s why they are the lead of our show.”
Condal was asked about the flawed characters of the series. “Having flawed characters is the recipe for making what Game of Thrones is, and what A Song of Ice and Fire is. We didn’t want our show to be any different. I think, frankly, it would be boring if you had a character that everybody was singularly rooting for to be on the throne… Are there good guys? Rhaenyra has done this thing that everybody applauds, but she’s put three strangers [Ulf, Hugh, and Addam] in charge of nuclear weapons. Ulf sitting on Silverwing reminds me a lot of Slim Pickens on the nuclear bomb at the end of Dr. Strangelove. Is that really a thing that we want? I think that micro-story of the dragon seeds is a story of desperation and the lengths that people will go to, and the compromises, both ethical and moral, that people will make to win. And though you want to see Rhaenyra on the throne… what does that actually mean? And what are the consequences of that? Those are things that are yet to play out in the show.”
When prodded about what is yet to play out for the rest of the season, Condal teased, “There’s lots of fireworks, literal and otherwise, to come. It’s definitely our biggest, most massive season by a wide margin. And I think people will be very excited to see how it unfolds.”
In short, no answers. We’ll just have to wait and see how The Dance of Dragons unfolds, when the rest of Season Three of House of the Dragon debuts. Be sure to catch all the action Sundays on HBO.
