Ahead of the House of the Dragon season 3 premiere, it seemed as though Fabien Frankel was beginning to grow just as frustrated with the creative decisions being made for Ser Criston Cole as the fans. During a press day ahead of the show, Frankel made a series of comments that, while perhaps designed to be sarcastic, certainly seemed to paint a picture that he wasn’t exactly thrilled with choices made about his character.
At the top of the interview, which gained momentum on Reddit, Frankel remarked that the “writers want to keep me unlikable.” As his co-star and frequent scene partner Olivia Cooke tried to suggest that the show did try to show different sides of Cole, Frankel quipped that showrunner Ryan Condal and executive producer Sara Hess always want to keep Cole down in the dumps – hinting that this comes at the expense of scenes that paint the character in another light.
“Yeah, they got cut. Anytime we try to bring a little bit of humanity to the thing, Ryan and Sara just want me f—king really down in the dumps,” Frankel noted.
As the interview continued, Frankel continued to hint at his overall displeasure with the character by taking a jab at how the character’s moral code is always changing and questioning whether he actually even has a code these days.
“I don’t know. I mean, does he have a code? His code’s always changing. “It’s like one second his code is he supports Rhaenyra, and his code is honor, and then that code is gone. Then he takes the white cloak and sleeps with the queen and Rhaenyra, and that code is gone. Then he’s on Alicent’s team, but he betrays her and the small council. I mean, what’s his code? I don’t know what his code is.”
Following the interview, Frankel’s remarks were played off as being made sarcastically. Looking back on that particular interview now that we’ve seen the first two episodes of House of the Dragon season 3, though, we can’t help but feel the comments were masking an overall frustration with his character’s direction, which feels more than justified.
House of the Dragon season 3 is wasting what are likely Fabien Frankel’s final episodes
Having seen the first two episodes of House of the Dragon season 3 now, it’s clear the writers don’t seem to know what to do with Ser Criston Cole and aren’t viewing him as a priority to the season’s narrative.
The first two episodes of the season both came in with a runtime over an hour, yet Fabien Frankel’s airtime in the two episodes combined to 2 minutes and 9 seconds of screen time. That’s right, 2 minutes and 9 seconds. We’ve literally seen Cole appear in just two scenes across the two episodes, with the premiere basically relegating him to arts and crafts, and episode 2 giving him two lines of dialogue as he and his men watched Aemond and Vhagar fly over their camp in the direction of Harrenhal.
We’re a fourth of the way through the season at this point, and the writers have treated Cole as an afterthought. Sure, he’s at least appeared in the episodes, but his scenes were so brief and inconsequential to the events unfolding throughout the episode that you have to wonder what the point of even including them was.
Given how central Cole was in the first two seasons, it feels strange for the character to be so underutilized this season. We’d understand if the writers chose to give him little airtime but made the most of the scenes he was in were via brief moments that helped to drive the narrative, but the scenes have served no purpose in advancing Cole’s storyline or the overarching narrative of the season.
What makes this even more frustrating is knowing that Cole’s time on the show is nearly over.
Preseason leaks suggested that Frankel filmed his final scenes for House of the Dragon in late September, with reports indicating Cole’s death will occur in the sixth episode of season 3. If this turns out to be true, that means that the show has essentially squandered a third of Frankel’s final episodes. That feels almost criminal.
It’s frustrating to see the writers take a character who was such a central part of the first two seasons and cast him aside, giving him nothing to work with in what will be his final episodes on the show. And we certainly would not blame Frankel if he shared these frustrations and they led him to make the remarks he did before the season about some of the choices made about his character.
We can only hope that the upcoming episodes will give Cole more to do than paint and watch a dragon fly by, but at this point we’re starting to accept that the writers are going to waste Frankel’s talents this season.
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