YouTuber Preston Jacobs wasted no time when he started his House of the Dragon after-party livestream: “I’m going to say right up [top], I think at this point this is my jump-the-shark moment. I don’t think that this show is salvageable anymore.” Sunday’s season finale, he says, “really ruins everything.” Plotlines contradicted each other, some story arcs went nowhere, he said. It was a mess. And while Preston has had divisive Game of Thrones opinions in the past, on this point, lots of fans agreed with him—both in his livestream’s comments and across the internet.
This is not the place for House of the Dragon Season 2 finale spoilers—you’ll have to watch for yourself for that—but the long and short of it is that the episode abruptly ended just when it was starting to get good. After weeks of promoting a major battle between the Greens and the Blacks of the Targaryen family tree, no such battle materialized. As The Hollywood Reporter put it, “HBO cutting to black hasn’t annoyed this many TV fans since The Sopranos ended.”
The Sopranos comparison is both hyperbolic and little apropos. House of the Dragon is far from the beloved critical darling that Sopranos was, but it does now get the kind of scrutiny that its prestige predecessor once did. Following Game of Thrones’ womp-womp 2019 series finale some fans have hoped House could regain some of its predecessor’s former glory, while others worried it would make the same mistakes. Sunday’s episode seemed to indicate to many it might be all dragons, no fire.
“Y’all basically made this season a build up now we gotta wait a whole fkn 2 years” for the next season, wrote @Tata_Onika on X, referring to rumors that the next season won’t come until at least 2026. “Really pissed me off,” wrote another X user. “Did I just watch a 70-minute trailer for Season 3?” asked another—a sentiment that others echoed. Over on Reddit, fans were “mildly butthurt” and lamenting, “I didn’t see a CRUMB of consequential action.”
Another personal fave: “We had to deal with Freud dreams for this?!!”
Season 2’s finale may also be a sign of the times. HBO, Max, and all of its affiliated properties have been going through a lot of upheaval since parent company Warner Bros. merged with Discovery. While big shows like Dragon and The Last of Us haven’t been hit as hard as other properties, this season was only eight episodes, whereas last season was 10, and this one was shot during the Hollywood strikes, thanks in part to many of its cast being in a different union that wasn’t striking. Deadline also reported last year that a “major battle” was moved from Season 2 to Season 3, and in so doing the show may have been left with a humdrum finale.
Will House of the Dragon recover? Eh, probably. Season 2 already didn’t quite hit the viewership heights the show’s first season hit. But as the streaming wars continue and people drop services or contemplate, in the case of Max, switching to ad-based tiers that are also going up in price, comparing one season’s numbers to another’s feels like a fool’s errand. HBO greenlit a third season—cocreator Ryan Condal revealed Monday it’ll end with the fourth season—which could very well open with the confrontation fans had hoped for. Until then, everyone is just going to have to wait while this drags on.