Commentary: 'House of the Dragon' has a major problem: It forgot to create a hero to root for
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Set us as preferred This article contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of “House of the Dragon.”If you give a man a dragon, he’ll ask for a glass of ale to go with it.Also a knighthood and a castle and certainly social status that ensures he won’t be treated like scum.
For those “House of the Dragon” viewers who wondered about Rhaenyra Targaryen’s (Emma D’Arcy) decision to start handing out dragons to any illegitimate Targaryen, well, the bigger problem seems to be the benefits package.For most of Season 3, many of those riders have come to realize that dragon riding is a whole lot of work with very little pay and they are still treated like second-class citizens.None more than Ulf (Tom Bennett), an Everyman drunkard and raconteur who bristled at all the rules and regs.
Rhaenyra and Daemon (Matt Smith) treated Ulf so badly that he defected to the scheming Lord Ormund Hightower (James Norton), who wound up being just as abusive.So when, in the season finale, Ormund drags him from the privy to demand that Ulf and his dragon defend Ormund’s forces in Oldtown from Daemon’s army, Ulf does what he’s told and then opens fire on Ormund, too, leaving Old Town a smoking wreck.Workers of the world unite? Television In Season 3, Rhaenyra Targaryen finally gets to pick up a weapon, a feat that Emma D’Arcy says was a long time coming and nearly hampered by an ACL injury.Elsewhere, brothers Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) and Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) reunited at Harrenhal; Rhaenyra ordered the murder of the High Sept and publicly proclaimed herself the “prince who was promised” while poor old Helaena (Phia Saban) took herself and her unborn child out of political prison permanently.
And with that, Season 3 of HBO’s “House of the Dragon” concluded, leaving us pretty much back where we started, with Rhaenyra faci...