It's an interesting time in Westeros at the moment. In a few short weeks, HBO will premiere its highly-anticipated third season of House of the Dragon, its epic Game of Thrones spinoff which depicts a brutal civil war between rival branches of House Targaryen. The network also debuted the first season of its other spinoff earlier this year, the small-scale dramedy A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, to much rejoicing from fans and newcomers alike. It seems like the Game of Thrones television universe is booming more than ever, but for House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal, it sounds like the end is in sight.
Condal is currently on the press trail promoting season 3. During a recent interview with Deadline, he got into all the details about the upcoming Battle of the Gullet setpiece, confirming it spans around 25 minutes of the season premiere episode, as well as his plans for filming the show's fourth and final season. He also seemingly confirmed that after House of the Dragon, he'll be stepping back from helming shows set in Westeros.
“I’m an ‘all good things come to an end’ type person,” he explained. “I don’t know what I will feel yet [when it finishes] because right now the show is almost like a snake eating its tail, very rarely are you doing one thing. Right now, we’re crafting Season 4 before we’ve even finished Season 3 and released it to the world.”
Condal recently signed a new overall deal to develop projects with HBO that extends into 2029, a year after House of the Dragon is planned to end. But it sounds like that deal isn't Westeros-specific, with Condal clarifying that it's “to kind of establish the beginning of the next chapter, whatever that happens to be.”
“Anything is possible but I think I have said what I have to say about Westeros,” he said.
Condal is responsible for bringing one of HBO's biggest shows of all time to life, on the nigh-impossible standard of following up the biggest show of all time, Game of Thrones. What he's achieved so far is incredible, though I can't help but side-eye this statement about departing and wonder if the showrunner's schism with author George R.R. Martin is a factor as well. Ever since Condal and Martin's very public falling out, fans have dialed up the toxicity online by orders of magnitude. I imagine there's an element of Condal's job at this point that feels rather thankless, even as he makes some truly groundbreaking television — regardless of its warts and issues in conversation with the source material.
That's me reading between the lines of course. But I'm not surprised Condal is planning to move on, all things considered.
House of the Dragon season 4 "the biggest season" of the series
Regardless of Condal's plans for the future, for now he's dialed all the way in on the final two seasons of House of the Dragon. Season 3 is about to start airing, but work is already well underway on season 4 as well. Currently, Condal and his writers are breaking season 4. He said that the show's final chapter will “be on a pretty similar cadence to what we’ve done” in terms of the episode count. However, “the ambition” for season 4 is “massive.” So expect it to be eight episodes just like seasons 2 and 3, but for some of those episodes to be absolute showstoppers.
“It will be the biggest season we have made, for sure,” Condal told Deadline, sharing that while the filming schedule is “a bit beholden to the British weather, and particularly the light,” the plan is for production on season 4 to begin sometime in spring 2027.
“We always have to straddle the British summer, which just means starting filming in the spring then wrapping before it gets dark again,” he said. “And because it takes over a year to prep and then shoot the show, it just sort of slots it into this place where we are in the year.”
By this point, House of the Dragon is a well-oiled machine. I have no doubt that things will run smoothly through its final season, and the end of Condal's tenure.
Ryan Condal reasserts that the Battle of the Gullet is "the craziest thing ever attempted on television"
But before we get to season 4 and beyond, we still have season 3 ahead — including its big opener, the Battle of the Gullet. Condal teased that season 3 is “very much the midpoint, the belly of the beast, the point of no return.”
“There is no turning back,” he said. “With that comes a gravity, a tension, a darkness. Maybe earlier we saw more signs of hope that things wouldn’t get worse, but now I think there is this feeling of the snowball running down the hill, a sense of inevitability.”
From where I'm sitting, that sounds pretty good. House of the Dragon is essentially a Shakesperean tragedy set in Westeros, and in George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood, that inevitable doom is apparent right from the jump. In my opinion we've needed to feel it more in House of the Dragon, so I'm all for a darker, more brutal season 3.
As for the premiere opener, Condal is setting expectations about as high as they come.
“I’m not here to review my own episode,” he said, before emphasizing the sheer scale of the Gullet production, which saw the show's team built two tanks and three unique ship sets. “The ambition of doing that for a single hour of television for me does push it into that category arguably of being the craziest thing ever attempted on television. I am very proud of what we pulled off.”
It's a sweeping statement, but perhaps it'll pan out. We won't have to wait long to see, at any rate. House of the Dragon season 3 premieres on June 21 on HBO and HBO Max. See you at the Gullet!
Add us as a preferred source on Google