The season two finale of House of the Dragon certainly left some people wondering. My colleague Martin Shore even went so far as to say that he felt “cheated” by the eighth and final episode of the season. I don’t know if I would go that far, but I certainly felt that the show was playing to its weaknesses with this season’s ending.
So on Monday (August 5th) I was already worried about what was going to happen next with the series. Then came the announcement that season 4 would be the final season of the series. This news came from House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal and when I saw this news, alarm bells rang in my head.
But when I saw that season 3 would probably only have eight episodes (h/t The Hollywood Reporter), I panicked. Eight episodes were already too few for this season, and now we were getting another shortened season? Yuck.
The real reason I’m panicking, of course, is that we’ve seen this before. Game of Thrones famously struggled with pacing in its last two seasons. In the previous six seasons, we took 10 episodes per season to carefully build the world George RR Martin created in A Song of Ice and Fire, and then suddenly we rushed through the final act of the story in just 13 episodes. We went from a marathon to a sprint without warning, and by the end we were completely desperate.
“House of the Dragon” must take into account the pacing errors of “Game of Thrones”
While my colleague Martin and I felt similarly about the season 2 finale, we disagree about Condal’s announcement that the series will end with season 4. He believes that this is the perfect time to tell the real story of the Dance of Dragons from Fire and Blood and fix the series’ biggest problem – its slow start.
However, I think that with his well-reasoned argument, he highlights exactly why I’m panicking. As Martin notes, George RR Martin wrote in 2022 that HBO would need “four full seasons of 10 episodes each to do The Dance of Dragons justice from start to finish.”
For the sake of completeness, I’d like to say that I agree with that assessment. 40 episodes seems like a reasonable amount of time to tell the story. The problem is that if the next two seasons are eight episodes each, like Season 2, we’re now heading for 34 episodes. That’s six hours of story that’s just been lost – thrown out the window like a Stark.
And we need every second of that available narrative time, after spending a lot of time on Rhaerya and Alicent’s childhoods in Season 1—time well spent, in my opinion—and several hours in Season 2 devoted to Daemon Targaryen’s LSD trip at Harrenhall, which was probably more than we needed to spend there.
Maybe I’m worrying for nothing and there are other explanations for the choices the show is making. Season 2 was affected by the Writers Guild of America strike and while Season 3 is planned to be eight episodes, that may not be a given yet. I’m even cynical enough to think that we were denied an epic battle at the end of Season 2 because HBO wants to keep certain characters alive so the actors can promote Season 3 in two years.
Both “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon” succeeded in implementing a balanced, methodical narrative.
If season 3 officially only has eight episodes, perhaps budget concerns are the reason we’re only getting eight episodes in 2026. Condal all but admitted that in his press conference on Monday. In theory, if we’re getting fewer episodes due to budget concerns, the episodes we get should be more spectacular than expected.
But I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Both Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon managed to create a balanced, methodical narrative. And while we don’t like the pacing of the final few episodes of the first season (among other things), there were certainly some spectacular moments. The problem was that they were rushed and sometimes even undeserved. The budget and spectacle were there, but ultimately unsatisfying.
I’m not alone in having these concerns, though, and I’m sure the showrunners have heard them from voices more influential than me. Maybe we’ll end up getting the “four full seasons” that GRRM felt were necessary to deliver the dance he promised. If that’s the case, I’m confident from what we’ve seen so far that House of the Dragon will avoid the ignominious ending that befell its predecessor. But if the next two seasons are only eight episodes each, I’m convinced the show’s pacing will repeat the mistakes that ultimately doomed Game of Thrones.
