House of the Dragon's Season 1 finale, "The Black Queen," delivers the kind of visual spectacle television has been unable to conjure up since Game of Thrones ended. It does so in a less surprising way -- book fans had been anticipating and even dreading the moment between Aemond and Lucerys -- but the show never falters when it comes to scale or the performances to back it up. The writing, however, undercuts both the source material and the actors in Episode 10, leaving what should have been an epic finale a little lackluster.
The show's first season, plagued with time jump after time jump, has been uneven at times. However, while its predecessor elevated actors to stars thanks to strong writing, the cast of House of the Dragon has managed to rescue what could have been an uninspired show that often relied too much on viewers to fill in storytelling gaps. Any other performer would have made Rhaenyra one-dimensional in her pain and unlikeable in her rage in the finale. Emma D'Arcy turns that grief and anger inwards and makes her not only justified but relatable. The final frame of this episode is worth, if not an Emmy, at least an Emmy nomination.
Matt Smith's Daemon Targaryen had everything to be, if not a straight-up villain, at least a wildly divisive figure. Instead, the performance manages to still maintain Daemon's impulsive and often destructive nature while giving it an outlet that feels justified in the eyes of viewers -- protecting his family's legacy. These aren't the heroes like Jon Snow becomes all those years after, but they are people driven not just by a thirst for power but by a genuine, if often messy, love for each other.
At least, they were until "The Black Queen," an episode that shows viewers the blacks post-Viserys' death and tries very hard to make both sides equal in a way that not only makes no storytelling sense but that fails to respect the progression that the show itself had set up. Daemon goes from a chaotic and tortured antagonist who truly loves his family to a man who chafes against his wife's power and resorts to violence against her for no good reason. Aemond's dangerous edges are softened enough to make him not only unrecognizable but boring. Though Daemon's turn is, at least, consistent with the character he was in the first few episodes, House of the Dragon spent way too much time setting up a change in the character that they never paid off before taking him back to his earlier persona with very little in the way of explanation.
House of the Dragon's major departures from the books -- Alicent's motivations for crowning Aegon and Aemond's motivations for killing Lucerys -- are, in many ways, part of the same problem: a desire to sanitize the storyline, to make the greens and the blacks equally bad. If everyone's covered in mud, it's hard to care about who is cleaner. This is likely the reason for Daemon's actions in this episode, too. It's okay for him to bend the knee to Rhaenyra and wage war in her name, but making it seem like he cares for her or she for him firmly establishes the blacks as the clear heroes of a story that's meant to have no heroes.
Then there's Rhaenys, whose journey from "I will not start this war" to "Let's fully support Rhaenyra" privileges plot over character. Rhaenyra herself is stripped of her agency in favor of the moral relativism the series seems to prefer. She shouldn't be "The Black Queen" only out of revenge, but that's what she ends up being, even though everything she has done up until this episode, including her marriage to Daemon, has been to secure her own position as heir to the Iron Throne. The show's progression translates to fickle characters instead of nuanced ones.
The biggest problem is that after nine episodes of setup, it's hard to stomach the middle-of-the-ground storytelling "The Black Queen" attempts to provide via both storytelling choices and directorial ones. Perhaps if the show had spent a little longer depicting these characters as what they presumably wanted them to be in the end, this hour would make sense. As it is, Episode 10 feels way too much like the show trying for an edge it has not earned and didn't need.
Ironically, House of the Dragon's "The Black Queen" had everything in place to be an episode about legacy. Going into the finale, it seemed like what drove Rhaenyra, Daemon, Corlys, Rhaenys, and the entirety of Team Black was a desire to live on in the next generation. That, in turn, could have translated to the next generation's desire to live up to the example they set. That could have been the perfect spark for the Dance of the Dragons.
"The Black Queen," however, much like "The Green Council," is an episode about how despite the power women hold --the power they're entitled to -- it's the men around them who ultimately make the calls that will decide this war. Alicent and Rhaenys before her and Rhaenyra in this episode might have power, but the realm and the storytelling will always look to the men first. The continued sidelining of these powerful women makes Episode 10 all the more frustrating.
Even more egregious, House of the Dragon's Season 1 finale once again reinforces that the biggest civil war in Westeros came down to a misunderstanding and an accident. Perhaps that makes for a more nuanced story but the setup for it was simply not there. For a show that branded itself not as a morality tale, but as a cautionary story against familial infighting, the decision to go this route is not just shocking -- it's immensely disappointing. Fans tuned in for a tale of fire and blood, but all they got is basic and predictable storytelling.
Perhaps the saddest thing about "The Black Queen" is how unsurprising these mistakes are. Fans have been here before, with this very same property. It's the final season of Game of Thrones all over again, except now, at least, the show is disappointing everyone early. On the bright side, that means that perhaps The House of the Dragon has a chance to fix the issues with "The Black Queen" going forward.
To catch up with the Targaryen family drama that led to the Dance of the Dragons, House of the Dragon Season 1 is available to stream on HBO Max.