We’re just a few weeks away from the return of House of the Dragon, and all signs point to the bloodiest, most destruction-heavy season yet. The marketing thus far has screamed “war” and “agony“; the show’s co-creator and showrunner, Ryan Condal, has promised “arguably the craziest episode of television ever” with the season-opening Battle of the Gullet. At the recent ATX TV Festival, he again emphasized how wild the Dance of the Dragons is going to get, going so far as to use nuclear war as a comparison. As reported by Deadline, Condal spoke about how many practical effects are involved in the first episode of season three, which will vividly bring the seafaring excitement to life. However, there’s another element to Westeros warfare of this period that goes well beyond ships firing on each other: those Targaryen dragons blazing at each other in the sky. “There is a lot of dragon action,” Condal teased. “There are new ones that we haven’t really spent any time with at all that you’ll be very excited to see, and some old favorites come back in and get lots of exciting screen time and action.”
When dragons are involved, that raises the stakes to a new level, which Condal used the language of nuclear war to describe: “mutually assured destruction.” It’s something we didn’t see in Game of Thrones, which did have some dragons in play, of course, but not on the level of the battle-ready beasts that populate House of the Dragon.
