Everything We Know About ‘House Of The Dragon’ Season 2

House of the Dragon was renewed for season 2 before the second episode of the series even aired, as it’s the kind of hit HBO wanted, and a revival of the Game of Thrones universe now that the main show has ended. And it’s doing a great job making us forget about that last season of Game of Thrones itself.

So we know season 2 is coming, likely at least a year from now, and with it, another ten episodes. Without getting into actual Fire and Blood book spoilers, here’s what we know about season 2 of House of the Dragon so far, via a new interview with Ryan Condal, the showrunner:

• Condal says the narrative of season 1 was deliberately slowed down so we got to know the characters and got invested in them. I’d argue the show felt like it moved too fast with all the leaps forward in time, but I digress. Condal says: “We will get to the spectacle. But you have to understand these people’s complexities before they’re thrown into war.”
• Condal also says that the show is going to shift into what the middle few seasons of Game of Thrones was like, which many would argue was the best era of that series: “Series two will hit the rhythms people came to expect from the middle run of Game of Thrones, but it will have been earned, and viewers will feel the tragedies because we put the work in.”
• Finally, Condal says that they will try to incorporate “natural pathways into moments of levity” in the very, serious, dark show, but says that’s tough without a character like Tyrion. But he says he thinks Matt Smith is hilarious, and that Daemon might be the vessel for a bit of comedy in the future. Can a guy cutting another guy’s head in half be funny? The comedic timing of that was kind of on point (“he can keep his tongue”).

What is not yet clear is whether House of the Dragon plans to wrap up the source material in one more season, or if there are larger scale plans to continue. Once upon a time, the idea was floated that this could turn into a Targaryen anthology series, past Fire and Blood and the Dance of Dragons, and go to different eras in the past and future of the house. But of course, that would require total recasting and starting from scratch in many ways. My guess is probably at least three total seasons to get through the current story with the current cast, but we’ll have to see. Of course, there are close to a half dozen other Game of Thrones prequels and spin-offs also in the works right now, and more of those will be arriving in the years to come.

Again, there’s no date yet for season 2. Filming is supposed to start in late 2022, and we are…pretty much in late 2022, so that should be soon. Barring another pandemic, we should get back to a fairly normal production schedule, and the best guess is probably 1-1.5 years for a new season, as tends to be the norm for this sort of thing, but more on specific dates later.

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