This story contains spoilers for the House of the Dragon season 3 finale.
Two years ago, House of the Dragon fans were cursing Ryan Condal’s name. The showrunner for HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel was forced to push a much-anticipated battle from the season 2 finale to the start of season 3 due to just about every catastrophe imaginable. The spin-off was plagued with budget constraints, shortened postproduction time, a pandemic, a writers strike, and a very public falling-out with creator George R.R. Martin over the series’ direction. Critics ripped apart the pacing. Fans compared the lukewarm season 2 finale to the disappointment of the Thrones ending. All the while, the crew soldiered on toward season 3—knowing that they were about to film two of the largest battles that the series has ever seen.
Their work paid off. “The Battle of the Gullet” kicked off the season 3 premiere to fanfare from critics and fans alike. The civil war between rival Targaryen families and their fire-breathing dragons finally felt as though it had reached an emotional turning point. The medieval fantasy series that everyone fell in love with was back, and after the usual ebbs and flows, Condal and his team capped off the latest season with another giant battle in the finale: “The Treason of Tumbleton.” For the showrunner, the strong reception was no surprise.
“I feel like it’s the best thing that we’ve made thus far,” Condal tells me over the phone, a few days ahead of the finale. “Whenever you do one of these big episodes, there’s always a lot of nerves that go into it because, really, you have spent a lot of time and money.” Plus, he adds, “I know how the fan base hangs their hat on these gigantic episodes.”
The episode has everything a Thrones fan should want in a finale. The buildup to a bloody conflict in Tumbleton led to a full-scale invasion of the city. The season’s new villain received his just deserts, and the show fought its way through adapting another one of the book’s most impactful events ahead of the fourth and final season. It wasn’t easy. From how Condal describes it, wrestling season 3 together was a bit like riding a wild dragon.
“So much of the season built to this point, and we really wanted to move all the chess pieces on the board in a way that felt really satisfying,” Condal says. “But the machine of production can only absorb so many of these [big battles]. It’s really just logistics. How many shoot days can you possibly fit into one season? The demand on your crew, who can only be in so many places at once? So we have to resource-plan. On season 3, unlike the other seasons, you felt the rivet starting to pop in terms of our ability to keep our arms around the whole thing.”
It’s also worth mentioning: No one ever likes the prequels, until they do. Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy received mixed reviews despite becoming one of the highest-grossing film series of all time. Most famously, Star Wars fans trashed George Lucas’s prequel trilogy until the films were reappraised and cherished ten years later. But as harsh as critics are on House of the Dragon, Condal also had his hands on another Thrones prequel series: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
The story of a brave knight and his tiny, crass companion debuted to universal acclaim earlier this year and quickly nabbed a well-deserved season 2 renewal. Condal first pitched HBO on Dunk and Egg’s more down-to-earth spin-off based on Martin’s novellas six years before House of the Dragon debuted. Ironically, HBO ended up green-lighting Knight years later—with Condal serving as executive producer—when House of the Dragon’s critics directly called for a smaller story in the world of Westeros. Out of all the planned spin-offs and sequels for Game of Thrones that have fallen on their own swords on the battlefield, what is it about Condal that has made him the only person to take two shows to air?
“I just have good taste in writers,” he says with a laugh. “No, look, I don’t want to overstate my influence. I’m insanely proud of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. That is total credit to [showrunner] Ira Parker. My role in that was simply trying to help do the matchmaking. But success is preparation meets opportunity, and Ira just had the voice down. His very demented and quirky sense of humor wasn’t always appropriate for our show, which is more of a tragedy. But it’s great that we have these two things that are really admired and beloved in the same universe. Fans should just feel very fortunate.”
Condal still has a job to finish before we can call House of the Dragon a definitive success one way or the other. Season 4 will (likely) return in 2028, following another two years of filming and editing the epic conclusion to the series.
Once he finishes writing and closes the back cover like Samwell Tarly on Thrones, Condal says he plans to move on from Westeros. House of the Dragon took up the past ten years of his life. Next? He’s excited to test out some original story ideas in the world of science fiction. He hasn’t been in that space since he cocreated The Colony for the USA Network in 2015, which followed a military occupation in a futuristic, dystopian Los Angeles. Plus, there are “other worlds that really interest me,” he teases.
For now, Condal shares his thoughts on the reception to season 3, why he made certain changes from the source material, and the experiments that should separate season 4 from House of the Dragon’s past criticism.
