The Possible Reason House of the Dragon Season 2 Ended So Abruptly
No, you're not imagining the uneven pacing of House of the Dragon season 2 and there was a likely reason for it.
House of the Dragon season 2 may not have deployed the sheer number of time jumps that the first season did, but that doesn’t mean that its pacing was perfect. In fact, one of the biggest complaints about this season is that the pacing felt off, especially with regards to the season finale. Many thought that episode 8 “The Queen Who Ever Was” was anticlimactic compared to the amount of tension that had been building toward the war all season, and it now seems like there is more than one reason for it.
We already knew that the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) strike in 2023 impacted the season. Even though House of the Dragon is filmed primarily in the U.K. and Europe, showrunner Ryan Condal and his lead writing partner Sara Hess are members of the WGA, which meant that they couldn’t rewrite any scenes during filming even though they were still allowed to be on set as producers. The only reason that the show was even able to finish filming at all is because the actors weren’t part of the American-based actors union SAG-AFTRA, who went on their own strike soon after.
The show could only film the prepared scripts as-written for any filming that occurred during the WGA strike. Usually productions are able to change scenes as needed if they realize that something isn’t working as it’s translated from the page to filming in person. House of the Dragon season 2 wasn’t able to do that.
On top of that, there’s been some speculation by westeros.org’s Elio Garcia that HBO’s decision to cut season 2 from 10 episodes to eight only a month or so before filming also had an impact. Garcia co-wrote the encyclopedic The World of Ice and Fire with George R.R. Martin, so even though he isn’t involved with the production of the show, he is pretty familiar with how the sausage is made, so to speak.
While Garcia’s words specifically are gaining traction amongst fans who have been looking for a reason why this season has felt a little lackluster, Deadline actually reported on the shortened season all the way back in March of 2023. Their source, an unnamed HBO spokesperson insisted that the change was “story-driven,” but given the intense cost-cutting measures taken by HBO parent company Warner Bros. Discovery in recent years, it’s hard to believe that that was the only reason.
In Entertainment Weekly’s big lead-up article before the season 2 premiere, writer Sara Hess declined to comment on the decision to cut the season down to eight episodes, but did say that “it wasn’t really our choice.” Sure, both things could be true – it wasn’t the writers’ choice to cut and it was cut for narrative reasons. But if that were the case, it seems like Hess and Condal, as the primary crafters and creators of said story, would be able to be more forthright with the reasoning behind the decision.
Showrunner Ryan Condal also told Entertainment Weekly that, even though they were pretty happy with the scripts that they went into filming with, they also had to “accelerate the polish schedule, where you take aboard all the actor feedback as they come on, production feedback as directors come on. Usually we go through a very methodical process of taking those things one layer at a time, but knowing that [the strike] was coming, we compressed probably two months of polishing into a month.”
Saying that season 2 of House of the Dragon was doomed from the start is a bit of an exaggeration, but doesn’t seem to be too far off from the truth either. Even though the timeline of the season’s episode reduction hasn’t been confirmed, the timing of Deadline’s article lines up with Garcia’s speculations. Cutting a 10-episode plan down to eight a month or so before filming begins when scripts are already done is already a herculean task, but add on to that the rush of needing to figure it all out in preparation for a strike that is likely to occur around the same time is a recipe for uneven pacing.
House of the Dragon season 2 is streaming now on Max.
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Brynna Arens (she/her) is a freelance writer who studies movies, TV, and pop culture through an intersectional feminist lens. She'll watch almost anything tbh, but it's…