House of the Dragon Showrunner Addresses What’s Going on With Nettles and Rhaena

This article contains spoilers for House of the Dragon season 2 episode 8 and some details from Fire & Blood that could spoil future seasons.

HBO’s House of the Dragon is once again returning to roost as “The Queen Who Ever Was” brings this season to a close. Some were disappointed that House of the Dragon season 2 swapped battles for family feuds, while others have dubbed it the season of MIA characters after George R.R. Martin himself referred to Blood and Cheese’s Maelor the Missing. 

House of the Dragon is more a loose adaptation of Martin’s Fire & Blood, which works thanks to the book’s unreliable narrators. We’ve seen this through the likes of Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) burning Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carrey) at the Battle of Rook’s Rest, Alicent’s (Olivia Cooke) game-changing finale deal, and the whole “Blood and Cheese” debacle. Now, episode 8 has backed up those theories that the beloved Nettles will be sitting this one out.

While Nettles is a relatively minor player in the Dance of the Dragons, she’s an important part of Daemon Targaryen’s arc, rides the dragon known as Sheepstealer, and has her fate left up in the air. We were on the money with the idea that Rhaena Targaryen (Phoebe Campbell) would take on Nettles’ story, which has already caused complaints among fans for amalgamating two potentially powerhouse female POC characters. Although the book Velaryons are Caucasian, the show has switched this up, while Nettles is described as a “skinny, brown-skinned girl,” who was “foul-mouthed, filthy, and fearless.” 

The finale’s closing sizzle reel saw Rhaena’s trip to the Vale finally pay off as she came across the riderless Sheepstealer and, in one fell swoop, seemingly nixed our hopes of Nettles. We attended House of the Dragon season 2’s post-finale press conference, where showrunner Ryan Condal suggested that even if Rhaena becomes a live-action substitute for Nettles, the story might not play out how you’d expect. Despite it looking like Rhaena is destined to claim Sheepstealer, Condal explained, “Given where we are in the storytelling, I think that’s a, ‘Please stay tuned and keep watching the story.’”

Saying how the team loves Rhaena, Condal explained, “We’ve really done a lot of legwork to set her up from the beginning as someone in the Targaryen household as someone who does not have a dragon. We see how powerful an idea it is – we saw that with Aemond’s story. For someone who grows up in this family, even in a time of peace when you don’t have a dragon, how it changes how you’re identified within the family.” Rhaena was disappointed that she was shipped off to the Vale under the orders of Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy), although this was all part of the plan to set her on an ultimately more important path. 

Condal warns that Rhaena is desperate for “that self-identification as a dragonrider and is willing to go to fairly dangerous lengths.” We’ve already seen these dangerous lengths when she camped out in the charred carcasses of sheep while in the freezing hills of the Vale and trying to track the wild Sheepstealer. As for those swings away from the source material, the showrunner mused, “Part of the fun of adapting Fire & Blood is how we interpret the history that these three different historians sometimes argue about and wrote down…We’re not trying to tell the objective truth. We’re providing the television version of one objective truth of this history. And anybody who reads the book is free to interpret it however they want to.”

This comes with a caveat, and with several ways to interpret these accounts, Condal said, “I think the Rhaena story as we’re seeing it unfold is potentially one of those interesting interpretations that we have to offer. And I would just say that we don’t do any of this stuff lightly or without thought.” There’s clearly something big coming for Rhaena: “With many of these things, we’ve planned many seasons in advance. So I would just say, you know, buckle up and take the ride with us. Hopefully, you like the destination it’s going to.” He doesn’t specifically address Nettles or debunk her appearance further down the line, but it doesn’t exactly leave us hopeful for the plucky outcast’s debut in season 3.

At this point, it’s hard to see how Nettles would fit into the story. It’s true that the wild dragon known as the Cannibal and Grey Ghost are out there somewhere, but with them remaining riderless in the book and Nettles claiming them undoubtedly playing out in a similar way to Rhaena and Sheepstealer, it would feel like a heavy-handed way to shoehorn the former into the story. Nettles is also suspected of being Daemon’s lover, but with a prevalent theory in the book that she’s secretly his daughter, Rhaena’s role as Daemon’s (Matt Smith) actual daughter also fits the narrative.

Like Nettles, Rhaena’s book counterpart is a relatively minor addition to the Targaryen civil war, so combining two side characters into one larger part would help streamline things. That doesn’t mean we don’t still have questions about her dragon called Morning, that fourth egg given to her by Rhaenyra, and whether she’ll take Nettles’ place in upcoming bloodbaths like the Battle of the Gullet. Whatever Condal and co. have planned with Rhaena, the idea that Daemon runs off to a happy ending with Nettles just got a lot less likely.