House of the Dragon Season 3 Will Have TV’s Biggest Battle Ever

“Probably the craziest episode of television ever made.” This is how showrunner Ryan Condal describes the Battle of the Gosier, a gigantic confrontation which will open season 3…

After a season 2 spent preparing for the explosion, House of the Dragon will finally tip into total war.

And Ryan Condal didn’t do things by halves! The showrunner of the HBO series describes the famous Battle of the Gullet – which will open season 3 – as “probably the craziest episode of television ever made!”

Yes, just that. In a long interview with Entertainment Weekly, Ryan Condal teases a season that is off to a banging start, with no installation phase. And according to the team’s first statements, HBO has put incredible resources into this maritime and air battle that has been anticipated since the start of the series.

Emma D’Arcy, who takes over the role of Rhaenyra Targaryen, also confirms the radical change of pace:

“This season is starting at 100 miles per hour. We can finally see the war that has been building for two seasons.”

And so this war begins with the Battle of the Gosier, well known to readers of George RR Martin, one of the most massive and destructive clashes in the entire Game of Thrones universe and recounted in Fire & Blood. The sequence will notably follow the Triarchy fleet led by Sharako Lohar confronting the Velaryons, while Jace Targaryen attacks from the air on the back of a dragon. In other words: ships, dragons, several simultaneous battlefields and probably a shower of gruesome deaths.

According to Ryan Condal, it took… four years to successfully construct this episode:

“Doing this story of the Dance of Dragons, without the Battle of the Gullet, would be like making The Lord of the Rings without Helm’s Deep… But if we were going to do it, we had to do it right. And that meant dragons, ships and multiple theaters of war at the same time.”

So a very big budget. HBO could thus reproduce the shock effect caused by the Battle of the Bastards in Game of Thrones, perhaps on an even greater scale.

And above all, this season 3 should finally transform House of the Dragon into what many have been waiting for from the start: a true fantasy war tragedy

Season 3 of House of the Dragon will be broadcast from June 22 on HBO and the HBO Max platform in France with one episode per week until August 10.