Here’s What To Expect In The “House Of The Dragon” Season 3 Premiere

House of the Dragon is set to return to Philippine screens on June 22 with dragons in the sky, war at sea, and losses that could reshape Westeros forever.

Warning: This article may contain major spoilers for House of the Dragon

HBO has been building toward something monstrous for two full seasons, and on June 22nd at 9AM on HBO Max, it’ll finally arrive. Season 3 of House of the Dragon is set to open in the Battle of the Gullet: a naval confrontation so vast and so expensive-looking that showrunner Ryan Condal has already called it “arguably the craziest episode of television ever made,” a claim that, given what the show has already put on screen, should probably be taken seriously.

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Where We Left Off In House Of The Dragon Season 2

To understand what’ll make this premiere land with such force, it helps to remember exactly where Season 2 left us. The war between the Blacks; Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) and her faction; and the Greens, Aegon II and the Hightowers, had been grinding forward in fits of political theater and one spectacular misfire of violence after another. King Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) spent much of the season incapacitated, leaving Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) to increasingly run the show from King’s Landing, a development he seemed to enjoy far too much.

Rhaenyra, meanwhile, spent her season recruiting dragonseed riders, ordinary people with Targaryen blood willing to bond with wild, unclaimed dragons. Then, in the final moments of the Season 2 finale, Tyland Lannister (Jefferson Hall) arrived with a fleet from the Triarchy, the maritime alliance of the Free Cities, sailing straight for the Gullet, the strategic strait that Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) had spent the entire season blockading around King’s Landing. On the side of the Greens, we find the dowager Queen Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) herself resigned and humbled after a secret confrontation with Rhaenyra on Dragonstone. 

The Battle Of The Gullet

Season 3 will pick up exactly there. The premiere will run 72 minutes, the longest single episode in the show’s history, and won’t spend a single one of those minutes easing the audience back in. The Triarchy’s fleet will collide with Corlys Velaryon’s navy in a battle fought simultaneously at sea and in the air, because of course there will be dragons.

The Blacks will hold the upper hand for much of it, but the Triarchy will carry a crucial advantage, given that many of their sailors had fought against Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) and his dragon Caraxes during the War in the Stepstones years earlier. This means they understand how to engage a dragon rather than simply flee from one, which will make them far more dangerous than any ordinary naval force Rhaenyra might’ve anticipated.

Jace Flies Into The Fight

Among the dragonriders entering the fray will be Jace (Harry Collett), Rhaenyra’s eldest surviving son, riding his dragon Vermax. The show has been building toward this moment with the same patience it brought to Lucerys’s death at the end of Season 1, and for readers of George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood, the dread of what’s coming sits heavy in the chest well before it arrives. 

In the source material, Jace flies into the thick of the battle; crossbowmen wound Vermax badly enough that the dragon plunges, and Jace leaps free, survives the fall, then dies anyway. The Blacks will hold the Gullet and drive off what remains of the Triarchy’s fleet, with only 28 of the original 90 ships making it home, but Rhaenyra will lose another son in the process, the second in what’s becoming a devastating pattern of watching her children die in a war she started to protect them. 

The Princes in Peril

For those who haven’t read the book, the premiere will carry another shock running parallel to the battle itself. Rhaenyra had arranged for her two youngest sons, the princes Aegon and Viserys, to sail toward Pentos for safekeeping; however, their ship, the Gay Abandon, will sail directly into the oncoming Triarchy fleet. Young Aegon will escape on his dragon Stormcloud, while Viserys, who has no dragon, will end up captive aboard a Tyroshi captain’s vessel and disappear into the Free Cities for what turns out to be years. Both boys will enter the episode as minor background figures and leave it entirely changed.

A War With No Exit

What the premiere will set in motion for the rest of the season is a war entering its most brutal and irreversible phase. Rhaenyra will command more dragons than any ruler in recent Targaryen history, but commanding dragons and commanding a war are two entirely different skills, and the show has spent two seasons establishing exactly how many ways the latter can go wrong. The dragonseed riders she’s assembled will prove unpredictable: they’re not yet fully loyal, and some of them (Hugh Hammer and Ulf the White) will carry ambitions of their own that the show has been seeding with care. 

House of the Dragon has confirmed it’ll run four seasons total, which places Season 3 at the exact center of the story, the point at which the war stops being something anyone can still walk away from and becomes something everyone has to survive (or not). With 72 minutes of television, one naval catastrophe, at least one royal death, and the whole third act of the Targaryen civil war waiting on the other side, June 22nd cannot arrive fast enough.

Photos courtesy of HBO