We went into House of the Dragon season 3 knowing things were going to be more intense than ever. Cast and crew had been signaling it for months that there would be more dragons, more war and higher stakes than anything the show had done before. What we did not expect was for it to hit us with its hardest blow in the very first episode.
Jacaerys Velaryon is dead. He died the way he lived, trying to protect his mother Rhaenyra. Before flying off into the chaos of the Battle of the Gullet, Jace locked Rhaenyra in her own chambers to stop her from joining the fight herself.
Harry Collett, who has played Jace across three seasons, addressed the moment directly in a recent interview with Vulture. When asked why Jace made that call, Collett clarified it was only fueled by his devotion to his mother as counterintuitive as it seemed.
"Nothing more than wanting to protect his mother and protect the realm," he explained. "A lot of people will watch it and see it as a betrayal. But as someone who's played Jace for a long time, there wasn't an inch of malice in his body when he did that."
From the very beginning, Jace's relationship with Rhaenyra has been one of the more genuine bonds we have seen so far. She is his north star and the reason he does any of it. One of my most lasting impressions of his character is how deeply that bond influences the decisions he makes, right up to his last breath.
What was going through Jace's mind as he died at the Gullet?
Speaking of last breaths, Collett went even further sharing what he imagined Jace was feeling in his very final moment.
"If Jace could speak from the dead, 'Mother' was what he was feeling when that second arrow hit," he said.
To think of it, that sort of reframes the whole sequence into something almost unbearably tender. On the question of sacrifice, Collett was equally clear about what Jace understood going in. "Rhaenyra probably had a better chance of surviving than Jace," he said, "but I thought he would have happily died to make that sacrifice. He just wanted to keep his mother safe, and I think he succeeded."
That is the quiet tragedy of it.
Of course, part of what made Jace's death feel so shattering is the youthful certainty that preceded it. He had a dragon and his mother was a queen but none of that prepared him for the reality of actual battle. Collett described that blind confidence in pretty stark terms.
"Jace was born to be a leader, but he had so much yet to learn. But he has a dragon, and his mother's a queen, and in his head he's gonna think, 'I have so much authority.' He's never gonna think of death! Everyone's gonna have horse blinders on: 'I'm the prince! Nothing can touch me! Nothing can hurt me!' Probably what he's been told his whole life, you know?"
That invincibility earned through a life of privilege and real accomplishment is exactly what the Gullet stripped away in minutes. And as audiences, we have been watching that gap between confidence and wisdom slowly widen all season. House of the Dragon has always been about the price of power, and Jace's death is perhaps another illustration of it.
The tragedy of the Dance of the Dragons is that almost everyone fighting it believes they are the exception and that their cause is just enough, their dragon fierce enough, their love strong enough to survive. Jace believed that too. He was wrong. And we, watching it happen, were almost complicit in believing it with him.
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