‘House of the Dragon’ Season 3 Episode 3 review: “Rhaenyra Triumphant”

House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 3, “Rhaenyra Triumphant,” trades dragonfire for the grind of ruling in one of its finest hours yet.

For a little over two seasons, House of the Dragon has pointed toward a single prize, and “Rhaenyra Triumphant” hands it over on the first morning, then spends the rest of the hour showing what that prize truly costs. Rhaenyra sits on the Iron Throne at last. She also inherits an empty treasury, a starving city, a hostile faith, and a rat problem worthy of the plague. The title lands as pure irony, and the show revels in it.

(Note: The following is a spoiler-free review of the episode, but we’ve also been putting out special “book spoiler” explainers each week. You can find our write-ups for Episode 1 here and Episode 2 here. And we’ll also be doing a book-vs-show breakdown for this episode later this week.)

Director Clare Kilner and writer Sara Hess make a daring choice here. They trap us in a single POV of a single character. Save for a cold-open parley in the Reach, Emma D’Arcy appears in every scene, and the camera clings to Rhaenyra’s point of view through corridor after corridor of the Red Keep.

The bottle episode as power move.

The sprawl that usually defines this franchise gives way to claustrophobia. We stay when she stays. We suffer the petitioners when she suffers them. It plays like The West Wing rewritten by someone who loves Shakespeare’s history plays. The daily grind of governance is its own kind of battlefield.

Ramin Djawadi does some of his most inventive work on the franchise. A low rumble swells beneath the audio, a bell tolls, and the room drains of sound as Rhaenyra slips into a place private and frightening. The score treats her fraying mind as a haunted house, and D’Arcy meets it with a performance that lives almost entirely behind the eyes. When she glimpses Jace walking toward her in the hall — a serving boy, really — the whole apparatus of grief, insomnia, and Targaryen inheritance clicks into one devastating image. Book readers will hear the echo of Daenerys and the bells of season eight, and the show wants us to feel that dread.

The cold open earns its place, too. House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 3 begins with Daemon confronting Ormund Hightower with news of Rhaenyra’s victory, three of Team Black’s largest dragons at his back, and Matt Smith and James Norton spar with real relish. Ormund kneels, bares his Valyrian sword Vigilance in surrender, and hands over the boy he calls Daeron. Smith plays Daemon as the sole soul on this show still enjoying himself, half-hoping Ormund resists so he can burn the lot of them.

A body, a budget, and a room full of men.

The genius of House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 3 lies in how it links Rhaenyra’s private body to her public office. Elinda Massey dresses her for the throne, warns that Jace’s sword sends the wrong signal to the small folk, and then Rhaenyra discovers she has started her period, moments before her first appearance as queen. The show treats it as both a genuine annoyance and a sly answer to a book rumor that the throne rejected her because she bled upon it. House of the Dragon has often paid close attention to the realities of women’s bodies, and here it folds biology into the larger argument that monarchs stay human, as distractible as anyone.

Then come the men, one after another, each certain his problem ranks first. Tyland Lannister hid the crown’s gold before he died, and Rhaenyra beheaded the last man who might have known its location. The High Septon lectures her about dragons as “profane magic” and warns her against making an enemy of the Faith — a line any Maegor scholar will clock.

Also, Corlys confesses his bastards and begs her to legitimize Alyn and Addam. And when she demurs, he roars the very words that cost his own brother a head. Her first three sons stand as bastards. Rhaenyra spares him because she has no choice. Corlys is her Hand and also one of the most powerful men in Westeros. She needs him, so she suffers the wound. Yet again, Steve Toussaint and D’Arcy make their scenes together ache.

The bell tolls, and the twist lands.

Rhaenyra’s boldest stroke doubles as her biggest gamble. Rats overrun the Red Keep, so she cooks them and serves them to the hoarding nobles at a banquet, then sends her gold cloaks to raid the storehouses and feed the poor. She calls herself a conciliator, borrowing Jaehaerys’s title, and plays Robin Hood in a crown. The small folk will cheer; the lords will seethe; and Torrhen Manderly (Dan Fogler!), her likely new small council contestant, watches the chaos with a knowing grin. The move helps a certain number of people for a certain number of weeks, as one adviser dryly puts it, and earns her a fresh set of powerful enemies.

Daemon, meanwhile, pours Daenerys’s season-eight dream into her ear — conquer the realm, then Essos, then the city of winged men at the edge of the world, an empire for their children forever and a day. Rhaenyra answers with the Doom of Valyria, and the gulf between them widens. It’s no wonder she sends him out of King’s Landing on another errand, softly choosing Mysaria’s common-folk wisdom over his counsel.

And then the twist. The captured Daeron reveals himself as a bleached-haired decoy, Ormund’s real prince rides free, and the Hightower host takes Tumbleton with its people as hostages. “Rhaenyra Triumphant” ends with a queen who has won everything and grips a realm already slipping from her hands. Not since A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has HBO delivered an episode within the Game of Thrones universe with this much appetite for cinematic bravery. Rhaenyra might not be all that triumphant right now, but House of the Dragon sure is on its own soaring streak at the moment.

House of the Dragon Season 3 airs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.

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Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery.