Is that Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen in the House of the Dragon finale?

The season 2 finale of House of the Dragon has aired on HBO and Max. At one point, the character of Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) lays his hand on a weirwood tree at the behest of Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin) and sees a vision. Peering into the future, he catches glimpses of the White Walkers, villains who won't play a large part in the story of House of the Dragon but who will be a major factor on Game of Thrones, a show set over 100 years later, long after Daemon is dead. He sees an image of Brynden Rivers, aka Bloodraven, aka the Three-Eyed Crow, an important figure in George R.R. Martin's mythology.

And he sees an image of a young woman with silver-blonde hair, sitting naked with three baby dragons around her. This is unmistakably Daenerys Targaryen, played by Emilia Clarke on Game of Thrones. Specifically, it's Daenerys as she appears at the end of that show's first season finale, "Fire and Blood," when she walks into the funeral pyre of her husband Khal Drogo and wakes up alive, finding that the three dragon eggs she's been carrying since the first episode of the series have hatched.

So that was definitely Daenerys, but did Emilia Clarke return to play her? Almost certainly no. We only saw the young Daenerys from the back, and that whole vision sequence made use of digital effects, the better to convey the strangeness of what was happening with Daemon. If the show actually had Emilia on set, it surely would have shown her face to make the moment more powerful.

As for Clarke herself, she hasn't seen House of the Dragon, at least she hadn't the last time she was asked in June of this year. "I still can't," she said. "I feel so content and happy with what my experience was, that I think watching the new one would just feel so odd."

But hey, now that House of the Dragon has shown a willingness to show us characters from Game of Thrones, who's to say it couldn't step things up in future seasons?

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