The third season of House of the Dragon will debut on HBO on June 21, and it will kick off with what showrunner Ryan Condal describes as “arguably the craziest episode of television ever made.“
The third season premiere will begin with the Battle of the Gullet, an all-out battle between the Greens and the Blacks, taking place on both the sea and the sky. The last two seasons have been building to this moment, and it sounds like it’s going to be one hell of a battle.
Condal told Entertainment Weekly that it’s been a “four-year quest” to make this episode, but he knew they had to get it right. “To try to tell this story without doing the Gullet would be trying to film Lord of the Rings without doing the Battle of Helm’s Deep,” he said. “If we were gonna do it, we had to do it right. And that meant dragons and ships and multiple theaters of conflict.“
Emma D’Arcy, who plays Rhaenyra Targaryen, teased that the new season “starts at 60 miles an hour. We’re finally watching a war that has been building for two seasons…. I’m so impressed by Ryan and the team, because it’s to really hold your nerve to stage a conflict that has been, until now, primarily interpersonal, interfamily — and then [to] finally, in one huge gesture, allow that conflict to unleash on the realm as a whole, I think is some very classy plotting.“
HBO Chief Casey Bloys recently confirmed that House of the Dragon will conclude with season 4. “Yes, that is the idea,” he said. “The idea has always been to follow the history of the Targaryens. If you know the books, you know how the Targaryens end up. So there is a natural end to this particular history of that House of the Targaryens.“
Bloys isn’t sure how many episodes will be included in the final season. “Ryan is working, like any show like this; he is finishing post on Season 3 and working with the writers on what Season 4 looks like,” he said. “I don’t know where he’s landed on the episode count yet.“