House of the Dragon showrunner walks back the idea that those were Daenerys Targaryen's dragon eggs

A couple weeks ago, House of the Dragon surprised fans by including a massive Easter egg which seemingly tied the series to its predecessor, Game of Thrones. During the third episode of its second season, "The Burning Mill," Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy) entrusted her step-daughter Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell) with shepherding her youngest children to the safety of the Vale of Arryn. Rhaena chafed at the mission, since it would take her far from the fighting, but there was one silver lining: she was taking four dragon eggs with her. Since Rhaena has yet to claim a dragon of her own, that means she's now primed to get one should any of them hatch.

The inclusion of these dragon eggs and the way that Rhaenyra frames Rhaena's mission as carrying the "hope for the future" of House Targaryen led to an inevitable question among fans: were those the dragon eggs which would one day belong to Daenerys Targaryen, the Mother of Dragons played by Emilia Clarke? On Game of Thrones, those eggs hatched into Dany's dragons Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion, so they're a big deal.

George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood, the source material for House of the Dragon, seems to say otherwise, since the book strongly hints that Dany's eggs were brought to Essos decades earlier by a woman named Elissa Farman, who stole them from her estranged lover Rhaena Targaryen. (Not House of the Dragon's Rhaena, a different one who was the sister of Jaehaerys the Conciliator.) Book fans were quick to point out Elissa Farman's story and put the kabosh on the theory that House of the Dragon had included Dany's eggs.

But then Geeta Vasant Patel, the director of "The Burning Mill," surprised us all by confirming that yes, those were in fact Daenerys Targaryen's dragon eggs. "Those are Daenerys' eggs," Patel told Mashable. "All of us who work on this show are big Game of Thrones fans, so it was very exciting to shoot that scene."

House of the Dragon showrunner says those may not be Daenerys' dragon eggs after all

Now, a week after Patel confirmed they were Dany's dragon eggs, showrunner Ryan Condal is walking that comment back. “I think the fun of the history as it was written is that there’s room for interpretation,” he told Entertainment Weekly when asked for clarification on the eggs. “I like to think of it as one possible future.”

So there you have it. They could be Dany's eggs, but they could also not be Dany's eggs. Personally, I think this is kind of an absurd tack to take. When Condal references "the history as it was written" leaving "room for interpretation," he's talking about the fact that Fire & Blood is not a traditional novel, but rather a fake history book filled with purposeful ambiguity. The entire thing is presented as the account of a maester historian who is sifting through various records and testimonies from the early years of the House Targaryen's reign, most of which are colored with their own biases. Martin intentionally leaves lots of things open for readers to draw their own conclusions, or casts doubt on whether we can ever know the truth of events when looking through the lens of history.

And for Fire & Blood, that works spectacularly. It's a fun book and it's perfect at what it tries to do. But what House of the Dragon is doing with these dragon eggs isn't quite the same. Here we have one director saying the eggs are Dany's, and then the showrunner saying it's only a "possible future" that they end up with Dany — which implies there are other possible futures where they aren't with her. And that just...doesn't make sense. Sure, history is clouded, but Daenerys got the eggs that Daenerys got. This isn't the Game of Thrones multiverse, where branching futures could still happen; we've seen Dany's dragons in Thrones, and House of the Dragon has gone to great lengths to tie these two shows together as much as it can while still doing its own thing.

Yes, Fire & Blood uses ambiguity, but that's very different than imagining possible outcomes with an Easter egg that a television show intentionally staged. In the book, Rhaena takes three eggs to the Vale with her and one of them eventually hatches. The show changed it to four eggs for a reason. If anything, seeing events play out in House of the Dragon strips them of the ambiguity that they often had in the book, because we get to actually witness what's occurring and have the established future of Game of Thrones as a reference point. That's the whole reason this Song of Ice and Fire prophecy business works at all, when it hasn't been explained anywhere near this explicitly in Martin's written works.

Either House of the Dragon will leave off in such a way that it would make sense for those eggs to eventually find their way to Daenerys, or it won't. The show could have left this ambiguous by having its story straight about whether they are or aren't Dany's eggs, but to give fans conflicting comments about them and ultimately settle on the idea of the future still being unwritten feels more like damage control than anything else. My read is that Patel said something she might not have been supposed to say, Condal course corrected to throw off fans, and ultimately settled on this hogwash about possible futures that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Ultimately, this is a small potatoes problem and not one that's likely to have all that large an impact on House of the Dragon. But it is an example of unnecessary fan service cranked up to 11, and until we know what House of the Dragon's doing with those eggs, Condal's noncommittal explanation is the one we've got to run with.

House of the Dragon premieres new episodes Sunday nights on HBO and Max. Its latest, the spectacular "The Red Dragon and the Gold," is setting new viewership records for its second season:

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