It’s Always Been Alicent and Rhaenyra

Spoilers follow for House of the Dragon’s third-season finale, which premiered on HBO on August 9.

Every season finale of House of the Dragon has affirmed this series’ core relationship between childhood friends turned dueling queens Alicent and Rhaenyra, and how its ebbs and flows have impacted the realm, mostly for the worse. The girls who grew up together, who as adults still think of their past selves when they look at each other, and who increasingly realize that their current positions of power will never allow them to be aligned again, are the engine powering this show, more so than Aegon’s prophecy, the Targaryens’ dragons, or incest. And although Alicent and Rhaenyra don’t share screen time in the season-three finale, the episode’s most ominous, harrowing move is how it maneuvers these women into a confrontation that will certainly fuel the fourth and final season, too. The queens being at odds is familiar. The ramifications now are more devastating than ever.

HOTD is littered with pairs of people who have complicated histories and conflicting goals, many of which come into stark relief in this finale. There was already tension between Addam and Alyn over their shared attraction to niece Baela; by the end of the episode, Addam has called Alyn a royalist toady, an insult that isn’t exactly negated by Alyn killing the High Septon at Rhaenyra’s behest. Aegon and Aemond hated each other their entire lives, a friction that Aegon is still clinging to when he hunts down Aemond at Harrenhal and orders his contrite sibling to join him in the ongoing war. Daemon and Corlys have both struggled with Rhaenyra’s refusal to give either of them what they want — world domination and legitimacy for his sons, respectively — and they differ on tactics at the Battle of Tumbleton. But no one has history like Alicent and Rhaenyra, and HOTD crafted their interactions this season to emphasize how that shared experience continues to shape what they do and don’t understand about each other, and how those misconceptions and misunderstandings continue to broaden the schism between them. The battle sequences in this finale are awful, elaborate, and grotesque, especially Ormund using children as human shields and Daemon burning them alive. But HOTD has long understood that children are often the first victims of war; Rhaenyra and Alicent have been teaching us that lesson since the beginning.

In the first-season finale, Rhaenyra suffers a miscarriage after learning that the Greens facilitated Aegon’s coronation — Alicent’s eldest son rises while Rhaenyra’s youngest child dies. In the second-season finale, some time after Aemond had killed Alicent’s son Luke, Alicent arrives in secret to Dragonstone to barter Aegon’s life in exchange for peace, and safety in particular for her daughter (and Aegon’s wife) Helaena. It’s a twist on the scenario from the preceding finale, with Alicent’s children now serving as bargaining chips because they’re the only power she has; she doesn’t have a crown or an army of her own, like Rhaenyra. And like all these women’s good intentions in this series, it doesn’t work out. Aegon flees, ruining Alicent’s offer to Rhaenyra and knocking over a series of dominoes: In order to clear Rhaenyra’s runway to the throne, Aemond gets shooed off to Harrenhal, where he loses Vhagar and almost dies; Rhaenyra kills Alicent’s father, Otto, and takes Alicent and Helaena prisoner; and Alicent’s youngest son, Daeron, eventually ends up in Rhaenyra’s crosshairs, too. Alicent’s offer of one child ends up putting all of them in danger.

With Alicent and Helaena under Rhaenyra’s thumb, Olivia Cooke and Emma D’Arcy share the most screen time together since season one. Nearly every season-three conversation between them was an argument that allowed for the actors’ grasp on these characters to shine and underlined how their bond best reflects the series’ ideas on how power corrupts. In third episode “Rhaenyra Triumphant,” Cooke shifts Alicent into a resigned, irritated mode when Rhaenyra keeps badgering her about the realm’s missing gold and the absent Aegon. “I have done all I could. Will you blame me only for what men have done?” Cooke says, her peeved tone reminding Rhaenyra that they’ve experienced the same hardships because of their gender. In a later conversation in that same episode, the women’s roles are switched — Rhaenyra is no longer the impatient interrogator but an aggrieved ruler who has no idea how to govern; Alicent is the soothing confidant offering wisdom to welcome ears. Rhaenyra has never been more like her father than in this moment, turning to Alicent for comfort as her crown goes heavy. Rhaenyra isn’t happy about Alicent’s reply that “you may not rule and remain yourself,” a line that also points to their past, how Rhaenyra was raised sentimentally by Viserys and Alicent connivingly by Otto.

But every time the season brought these two actors together onscreen, it pushed their characters further and further from each other. As Rhaenyra grows more deranged and Alicent more desperate, with Rhaenyra sending Alicent on a mission to kill Aemond and keeping Helaena and her unborn child as hostages, we again see offspring and heirs as leverage. (The finale confirms that Alicent failed in killing Aemond, and in doing so destroys whatever vestige of a relationship she had left with her son after that weird kiss in the premiere.) For the first time, though, they aren’t using their own children; Rhaenyra is in enough of a position of power that she can force Alicent to do what she wants, putting an unrepairable crack in a relationship between these women who are unlikely mirrors of each other. The finale underlines that break in its final scenes, cross-cutting between the former friends as Alicent makes her first and only appearance in the episode at the exact moment the full tragedy of Rhaenyra’s upper hand becomes apparent. 

Burdened with the knowledge that Rhaenyra would never allow Helaena to be anything more than a captive and a pawn, the young woman who dreamed of raising her children on a farm rather than sitting on a throne throws herself out of a window, killing herself and her unborn son — deaths that Alicent may not yet understand but senses in the dozens of blue butterflies that flutter around her as she gets closer to the Red Keep. Rhaenyra has newly styled herself as a warrior, decked out in armor and declaring herself “the Prince that was Promised” to the commonfolk gathered outside the Great Sept, but the look on D’Arcy’s face when Rhaenyra discovers Helaena’s abandoned embroidery and the open shutters is that of a coward, someone intent on covering up their misdeeds. D’Arcy closes the window with an air of steely resolve, and in doing so declares the Rhaenyra who might have mourned her half-sister as dead and gone. And Cooke, the season’s MVP of revealing expressions and reaction shots, conveys through Alicent’s uncertain and frightened face at all those butterflies a dawning realization of the betrayal she’s suffered. This is all an inversion of Rhaenyra and Alicent coming together in conversation and attempted collaboration in the second-season finale, and an immolation of the most enduring relationship in these women’s lives.

Until this point, Alicent and Rhaenyra could both claim they weren’t fully complicit in some of the hurtful situations in which they found themselves. Alicent didn’t know Otto planned to steal the throne from Rhaenyra regardless of Alicent’s misinterpretation of the prophecy her husband shared on his deathbed; Rhaenyra couldn’t have guessed that Otto would be dragged out of the castle’s dungeons and delivered to her feet, or that Daemon would encourage her to kill him to send a message. In these moments and others, HOTD has sometimes espoused a form of gender essentialism that suggests Rhaenyra and Alicent are both inherently kinder and better than the men around them. In its third season, and especially in the finale’s final moments, the series finally drops that pretext. “Your father lived in a world of his own construct. You and I have never suffered that,” Alicent told Rhaenyra when trying to help her understand the endless responsibilities involved in ruling the realm. Now, Rhaenyra and Alicent have to live in the world they’ve made, and they don’t even have each other. Like Helaena’s nightshade-eating caterpillar, their metamorphosis is complete, and who they are now has nothing, and everything, to do with who they once were.