House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 6, ‘Faceless Men,’ kills off Criston Cole, sends Alicent to murder her own son, and invents almost an entire hour of Fire & Blood to do it.
Six episodes into House of the Dragon Season 3, the honest logline is that the show’s wild deviations from the source material are, at this point, a matter of course. In the latest episode, “Faceless Men,” Criston Cole finally meets his end, Corlys gets kidnapped, Baela and Addam fall into bed, Rhaenyra dispatches Alicent on a suicide errand to kill Aemond, and Alys Rivers produces a clutch of dragon eggs out of thin air. And only the first of those is really in George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood at all.
Even the title, “Faceless Men,” points to one of the season’s biggest inventions: a murder mystery in King’s Landing with no basis in the source. And it now flirts openly with the assassin cult from the main saga. So let’s sort the faithful from the fabricated, starting with the one major death the book actually gives us.
(WARNING: Major spoilers for Fire & Blood and potential spoilers for the rest of House of the Dragon ahead. You can read our non-book-spoiler review of “Faceless Men” here.)
Criston Cole dies, but the book hits harder.
Criston’s death is on-book in outline and softened in the details. In Fire & Blood, cornered by the riverlords, he demands a three-on-one duel against Roddy the Ruin, Garibald Grey, and Pate of Longleaf. Then Black Aly Blackwood cuts him down with arrows before any glory can be had. The show keeps Black Aly’s arrows and Roddy, but it trims the challenge to two-on-one. It drops Garibald and Pate entirely, folding the book’s crowd of one-scene riverlords into a tighter cast.
What it also loses is the book’s savage punchline. In the source, as Criston lies dying, Garibald Grey refuses him the songs he craved. He spits that there are tens of thousands dead on his account. The show lets Criston chase a romantic death for Alicent — his “beacon,” a woman who by this point plainly doesn’t even like him — without delivering that final, damning verdict out loud.
It’s the same theme, played as tragedy rather than indictment. The bigger structural change is upstream, though. the book largely blames Criston for starting the war (it’s his push that crowns Aegon). But the show shifted that guilt onto Otto, Alicent, and Aegon, leaving this Criston a smaller, sadder figure than the kingmaker the page destroys. Rest in…well, not power.
The gold cloak murders and the “faceless men.”
As we pointed out last week, the episode’s title thread — gold cloaks turning up disemboweled in broad daylight, no witnesses, killers who never show their faces — is a wholesale show invention. Fire & Blood has no such mystery. The series layers in a tie to the Faceless Men, the Braavosi assassin guild, and Arya joins in the main saga, through a trail of breadcrumbs. They include the unwitnessed daylight kills, the heavy talk of Braavos, Larys’s Iron Bank gold, and now the title itself.
Whether it pays that off literally or leaves it as a menace, it’s pure addition. And it does real plot work by keeping Daemon and a grieving Rhaenyra chasing a phantom while the war’s actual events happen elsewhere. We do get a glimpse of one of the killers, a man with differing eye colors. He claims to be a supporter of Daeron, but little of this makes much sense.
For one thing, he may be one of the King’s Landing soldiers we saw earlier in the season. And, oddly, he’d be a supporter of Daeron when Aemond is still reportedly alive, and Aegon isn’t exactly confirmed dead. He talks like a true believer, not a man paid by Ormund to assassinate Rhaenyra’s allies. There is something else going on here, and the show grabs from its own ideas instead of the book’s to advance the mystery.
Rhaenyra sends Alicent to kill Aemond.
None of this is in the book. Rhaenyra, wanting Aemond dead but concerned he’ll flee at the first sign of danger, decides to send Alicent — the boy’s own mother — to lure him to his own killing. Namely because Alicent is one of the few people Aemond would allow to get close enough for a knife to finish him. And she essentially coerces Alicent into doing this by holding the pregnant Helaena as leverage to force her hand.
It’s a startling, almost operatic bit of cruelty, especially for a show that has mostly withheld a lot of Rhaenyra’s cruelest actions in the book. And by the show’s own read, it’s at least partly Rhaenyra punishing the woman she blames for the war, forcing an impossible choice between one child and another.
It’s also the season’s clearest example of the show bending plot into odd shapes to keep its two leads in scenes together. The logistics strain — why march Alicent overland to Harrenhal when the queen has six dragons? Why expect a mother to so directly bring about her son’s killing? But the real payoff is more D’Arcy-and-Cooke, and the invented Alicent-Rhaenyra relationship remains the engine that the whole series is built on from the start. It does, at least, harden Rhaenyra past the point of begging for Alicent’s trust. She’s done asking. Now she’s simply using her old friend to clean up loose Aemonds. No wonder the throne finally cuts her.
Alys Rivers has a secret clutch of dragon eggs…?!
Here’s the episode’s wildest invention. To bind Aemond to her, Alys reveals a hidden clutch of dragon eggs. They were laid, the show tells us, by Dreamfyre, once the mount of old Queen Rhaena Targaryen. (Now belonging to Helaena.) The book does contain deep lore about Rhaena (a granddaughter of the Conqueror, whose lover, Elissa Farman, stole three dragon eggs and sailed west, and who died at Harrenhal decades before this story). But Alys possessing those eggs and dangling them before a Targaryen partner is entirely new.
The subtext is the season’s recurring one. Alys wants a Targaryen specifically for some reason. She pointedly didn’t show these to Daemon last year. But we do know marrying dragon blood to old-gods magic is coded as powerful and dangerous. It’s the same fusion the saga circles with figures like Bloodraven, for example.
Whether she means to hatch dragons, work a blood ritual, or raise green-seer children with Aemond, it’s a goth-power-couple future the chronicle never imagined. And it turns Harrenhal into the show’s true magical wild card. Perhaps staging an unexpected conclusion or twist for Alys that the books haven’t gotten to yet.
The Rhaena-in-the-Vale plot keeps straining.
Because the Nettles arc now belongs to Rhaena, the show keeps improvising a Vale storyline that isn’t in the book. And this episode all but concedes its biggest drawbacks. Rhaena, hiding with Sheepstealer, spots Baela and Addam’s dragons and gives chase. Then, somehow, Vale knights haul her all the way up to the Eyrie for Lady Jeyne Arryn.
It’s odd because how in the world did they get her past her own wild dragon? Did Sheepstealer do nothing? Did Rhaena go with them willingly? The subsequent conversation between the two is a hostile dressing-down and a shove near the moon door. The logistics don’t track, and it’s plain why this is a plotline Martin himself specifically objects to.
It’s also connective tissue that the book simply doesn’t need. Because these riders and this whole reward-for-Aemond hunt play out through different people in Fire & Blood. The show continues to spend significant screen time patching holes its earlier Nettles change opened for reasons that might hopefully become clearer later. It might also have to do the same for Sabitha Frey, whose character is also vastly different.
Baela and Addam or Baela and Alyn?
Baela and Alyn hooking up has book roots (Baela does eventually marry a son of Corlys). But it arrives here on the show’s own terms. Weirdly, the official podcast calls them “deeply in love” after barely two conversations. Though the more consequential tweak is that the show made Alyn the elder of Corlys’s two bastards, so he’d inherit Driftmark if legitimized. In Fire & Blood, Addam is the older child. It’s a small change, sure. But one with real downstream implications for how the Hull brothers’ arcs resolve.
In Fire & Blood, Rhaenyra actually legitimizes Addam and Alyn at Corlys’s request. But the series had her refuse, and this episode keeps mining the fallout. Corlys sulked off to kill Triarchy pirates earlier in the season, and Alyn continued to nurse the old wound of a father who never claimed. The two keep failing to connect over and over again. It’s affecting, in theory, but it’s also a conflict manufactured by the show’s refusal in Episode 3. Now, it is being retread scene after scene, where the book simply granted the request and moved the pieces forward.
Also, there’s Ormund’s retaliation for Rhaenyra’s assassins. Bold Jon Roxton abducts Corlys at the end of the episode, leaving a blood-scrawled Baratheon surcoat as a taunt (“kick this dog and it will bite your hand”). None of this is based on book material. That includes Rhaenyra dressing killers in the clothes of a Baratheon peace envoy to murder Ormund. So Corlys, the Sea Snake, doesn’t get kidnapped by the Hightowers in retaliation.
The Helaena problem deepens.
The change Martin attacked most keeps compounding. Helaena — pregnant now, when the book already gave her the son Maelor by this point — is confined, denied the godswood, and, in “Faceless Men’s” most disturbing beat, served a “suspicious stew” by an Alicent who might’ve spiked it with leftover moon tea to end a pregnancy Helaena wants to keep. The show also, at last, has characters treat Helaena openly as a dreamer, a prophet in the mold of Daenys the Dreamer. Rhaenyra even seems to eye her as a possible oracle to legitimize her own claim.
All of this is invented psychological architecture around a character that the book handles very differently. And it’s the thread with the source’s author explicitly on record against it. The loaded toxic-caterpillar imagery from the last episode, the fixation on the coming full moon, the moon tea — the show keeps arming Chekhov’s guns around Helaena that Fire & Blood never loaded.
This also includes the tapestry Helaena makes that portends Aemonds location and separation from Vhagar. And it’s interesting because Alicent’s readiness to believe in Helaena’s powers also flies in the face of the Alicent from the books. Her piety in the Seven was resolute. So the show’s Alicent at least gives her a more conflicted acceptance of “dragon magic.” Further, it does look like the show wants to seriously hedge Helaena’s eventual death and what will truly cause it. The books offer multiple “explanations” for why it happens. And Maelor is the most defended one, to be sure. The show seems to be going in that same direction, just with different circumstances lighting the way.
Just one Tumbleton battle?
In the show, Ormund has an invented supremacist ideology. We never saw the Honeywine battle where Daeron became a “hero” worth rallying behind. Instead, he was offscreen for quite a while and unblooded until very recently. The show also appears to have cut the Fire & Blood figure of Hobert Hightower. He played a notable role at Tumbleton in the books. But the show handed that surname instead to an invented show-only character (Otto’s brother) back in Season 1.
And nearly all of these changes take aim at the same convergence point. Ormund holds Tumbleton with Hugh (whose wife has rejected him) and the embittered Ulf circling on their dragons. The book’s Betrayal and Sack of Tumbleton is the key moment where two dragonseeds turn on Rhaenyra. And it’s the setup the show has been humanly, painstakingly loading since the premiere. The season might climax there, or with the Dragonpit pressure, it keeps building in King’s Landing. Either way, the pieces are nearly in place thanks to “Faceless Men.”
Next week’s setup.
The books do have two Tumbleton battles, and a lot of major characters die in both. But the season didn’t properly set up at least some of these deaths. And it also looks like we’ll just get a simplified, single battle. Probably in the penultimate episode as the big sequence? Coming next week? Maybe?
Granted, some of these changes in “Faceless Men” are for the better. Like the choice to avoid making Hugh the Hammer as violent and irredeemable as in the books. Or with how Daeron has a more complicated relationship with the Hightowers. We even see him and Gwayne openly trying to get away from Ormund, whom they think is crazy. They’re not the only ones.
New episodes of House of the Dragon Season 3 air Sunday on HBO and HBO Max.
Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Jon is one of the co-founders of InBetweenDrafts. He hosts the podcasts Thank God for Movies, Mad Men Men, Rookie Pirate Radio, and Fantasy Writing for Barbarians. He doesn’t sleep, essentially.
