House of the Dragon Season 3 Premiere Review - “Salt and Sea, Fire and Blood”
There is a particular kind of dramatic irony that House of the Dragon has always done better than almost anything else on television: the gap between what a character believes they are doing and what they are actually setting in motion.
Jacaerys Velaryon dies in the Battle of the Gullet because he has an unchecked hero complex. Rhaenyra is trapped in a locked room – confined there by Jace’s own orders, the most consequential act of well-intentioned filial protection imaginable – as her eldest child is reduced to a target floating on driftwood, riddled with Triarchy arrows.
“Salt and Sea, Fire and Blood” arrives after considerable criticism arrived at the end of House of the Dragon’s second season accusing the show of favoring political maneuvering over visceral payoff – for building and building without the release valve of climactic battle. Those criticisms have now been thoroughly disproven and negated. The Battle of the Gullet is the most sustained piece of large-scale combat the show has produced, a genuinely chaotic naval engagement staged with the commitment of a series that has found its action footing. A dragon soars across the water’s surface in a shot of such incidental grandeur that it recalibrates your sense of scale. A surface-to-air harpoon – serrated, attached to an anvil – arrives as the kind of tactical innovation that reframes everything you thought you understood about the strategic value of aerial fire-breathing in this world.
Episode director Loni Peristere devotes the episode’s first act to careful reestablishment: Rhaena’s fragile new bond with the wild dragon Sheepstealer, Aegon’s enfeebled capture, Alicent’s characteristic resourcefulness in maneuvering Aemond into fleeing to Harrenhal through a combination of maternal flattery and barely-concealed fear.
Emma D’Arcy continues to find new registers of complexity in Rhaenyra. Locked in her quarters as the battle rages, complaining to Mysaria that she has the heart of a king, she is not wrong about herself. What she fails to account for is that having the heart of a king has never, in Westeros, been the relevant qualification. The crown is not given to the person most deserving of it. It is taken by the person most willing to pay what taking requires.
Whether she responds to these losses with her principled instinct toward peace or her family’s darker credo of fire and blood is what this season is now positioned to explore, and the premiere has announced emphatically that it intends to make that exploration worthwhile.