The House of the Dragon season 2 finale is Westeros at its best and worst

“There is more than one way to fight a war,” Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) explains to Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy). What she means to tell her ruler is that war is not relegated to battlefields; there are modes of combat that include politics, deceit, and strategy. But perhaps House of the Dragon ought to take its own character’s advice and consider the monotony of what this second season’s “war” has consisted of: endless strategizing and mobilizing for little dramatic payoff. This past season ended nearly every episode — minus the one with an actual battle — with a winking, sly, “OK, now it’s war”-type of transition only to fall back on endless small council meetings and advisory one-on-ones.

The finale of House of the Dragon’s second season exemplified the show’s best and worst qualities — a talky episode that reneged on the season’s loose promise of violence and chaos in the face of continued strategizing and private deal-making. There’s been a lot of set-up over the course of the season, whether it’s Matt Smiths’ Daemon bulking up of Harrenhal, Rhaenyra teaching lowly Targaryen bastards how to dragon-ride, or the sudden upheaval of King’s Landing, with Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) ascending in place of his injured brother Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney). It’s not so much that these potential set-ups aren’t in and of themselves interesting, but the show seems otherwise content to elide the most fascinating parts. We see much more of Daemon’s dreams than we do his time with the Strongs or the Tullys, the Targaryen bastards have already taken to Rhaeynra’s war room, and Aemond remains one of the show’s cyphers. For the whole of the second season, we’ve seen characters discuss what they will do or react to what has happened, rather than any interiority into why or how.

Season 2’s last episode, “The Queen Who Ever Was,” sets up a number of compelling possibilities for the road ahead, from Tyland Lannister (Jefferson Hall) adventuring in Lys with the sailor Sharako Lohar (a great Abigail Thorn), to Larys (Matthew Needham) and Aegon’s plotting to overthrow the injured king’s brother, but neither of these possibilities come to pass in the episode at hand. Will we ever actually see naval combat between the Lannisters and the Sea Snake? Will Aegon withdraw and seek revenge on Aemond? It will be more than a year, at least, until any of us know. Season finales often have cliffhangers; this, we know. Still, there’s much brushed against in the final episode, including a whole town massacred by Aemond, or Rhaena’s (Phoebe Campbell) journey to a dragon. A whole episode, however, formed around a half-dozen cliffhangers leaves little lingering memory for what did happen in place of what could.

Photo: Ollie Upton/HBO

There are a few moments of resolution and clarity within the episode, an unexpectedly ugly argument between Corlys and his bastard son Addam of Hull (Clinton Liberty). Though the former tries to make amends towards his unclaimed son, Hull rejects this peace offering. The two are little more than coworkers, nothing more or less — rejecting the heartwarming embrace that Corlys hoped for in his time of loneliness. It’s a nice detail, one that highlights what often works best about House of the Dragon: the blend of personal and political, and how those two balance out. A number of these characters have been forced into uneasy alliances — this is the nature of politics itself — but rarely do these relationships bear fruit. Some of the best parts of House of the Dragon’s predecessor Game of Thrones occurred when characters who didn’t like each other and didn’t agree were forced to combine their powers towards a greater good. Sometimes these alliances bloomed (like Jaime and Brienne); other times they arrived at a begrudging respect (The Hound and Ayra). That Addam and Corlys agree to ride out to battle together feels like at least one of the show’s many plotlines bearing fruit.

Later, Rhaenyra finally tracks down Daemon, who has been hiding out and hallucinating at Harrenhal with Ser Simon Strong (the outstanding Simon Russell Beale) and Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin). Daemon’s storyline has been some of the season at its worst. His repetitive, tedious, unfulfilling existential dreams have amounted to little outside of reminders of the past season with cameos from Milly Alcock and Paddy Considine. In this finale, he finally gets the vision his brother got: the glimpse at the Song of Ice and Fire — or, rather, all of Game of Thrones. This reckoning allows Daemon to make peace with Rhaenyra when she arrives at Harrenhal, a shift that feels too abrupt to trust. Perhaps that’s because the episode saves its biggest reunion for last: an illicit conversation between Rhaenyra and Alicent in Dragonstone, in which the latter offers up Aegon’s head for peace between them. It’s emotional, abrupt, and tragic — these characters waited too long and still lost too much.

The most frustrating part of the war these characters fight is that it separates everyone from their most interesting foils. Rhaenyra and Alicent spent all of 10 minutes together this season, scarcely more can be said for Rhaenyra and Daemon. D’Arcy and Cooke have such great natural chemistry, even in moments of strife, and the separation of them can’t live up to how great the show was when they were butting heads. Similarly, Aegon and Aemond, so different in their leadership styles, no longer share much screen time after the former was injured in battle. Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) has been banished, robbing Alicent of her battles with him. Only one compelling new pairing in this second season stood the test of the past few episodes: Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) and Ser Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox — do you think they bond over their alliterative names?). The two share the battlefield, the war camps. They bicker and spar against one another. They are living in the realities of the world these other characters have established, and the violence and inaction of their leaders have turned them bitter and ironic.

Photo: Theo Whiteman/HBO

Corlys warns Rhaenyra that she must crush this beast at its head before too many days have flown, but the days are already flying by. It’s been a whole season of days flown. Perhaps the frustrating pace of the season is reminiscent of how histories felt in real time. While we can cram the events of something like the Seven Years War into a few pages of a textbook, the real-time events were no doubt slogs of politics and blood. This second season of House of the Dragon, however, never quite blended action and politics, the former standing as set piece while the latter never transcends more than arched eyebrow set-up. “We must do this,” the characters say; “I want that,” they add. Everything projects forward while the present feels staid, still. It’s possible another future existed for the show, had they not continued to work amid the strikes of last year. With limited staff and a crunched timeline, what we see is a show shot with few on-the-go adjustments that could have helped adapt the drama to the pace and offered room to experiment. What we see on screen is ever-beholden to its original drafts, ever spinning its wheels.

In their teary-eyed final conversation, Alicent admits, “I lost my way, or rather, it was taken from me.” We’re to believe her long, solo trek into the woods granted her a clarity we cannot see, just as we watch the aftermath of Aemond’s attack on Sharp Point from the ashes. What the moment between the queens cements is that neither wants what’s being presented to them. They are resigned and frustrated by their fates, yet know no other way forward. These characters, and this show’s creators, know there is a new path ahead, so long as they’re willing to take the first steps, rather than just talking about it.