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Spoilers ahead for the Season 3 premiere of House of the Dragon.
Despite Game of Thrones' controversial finale, fans have returned to Westeros thanks to the spinoffs A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and House of the Dragon. The latter is finally back for Season 3, and the book to screen adaptation started off with an epic battle for those with a HBO Max subscription. The Battle of the Gullet was awesome, and the way it was shot is truly blowing my mind.
House of the Dragon Season 3 is here, and the showrunner had been teasing The Battle of the Gullet for a while now. The event was largely a naval fight, although a few of HOTD's Dragons got involved in the air as well. I had the chance to speak with the show's cast in round table interviews, where Baela Targaryen actress Bethany Antonia revealed how the dragon riders were kept in the loop. As she put it:
I'll say like right from the get before we'd even gone into shooting, we were in pre-production and we had this big meeting with Lonnie. When that we went in and we watched, he had the whole sequence from beginning to end. Pre-animated, pre-ready for us to see each character's POV. And there was like a different version for each character so that we could see what we had to work with. And that was amazing. I've never experienced anything like that before. And just like, he was really specific in what he wanted us to, to feel that we were seeing, which I think made such a difference when it came to us doing all of our stuff alone.
Talk about attention to detail. While it would have been easy to ask the actors who were riding on dragon back to simply imagine what's happening below them when filming, that's not what House of the Dragon did. Instead, they were given the full scope of the sequence, allowing them to visualize the crazy Battle of the Gullet and act appropriately to bring their part of it to life.
Later in that same conversation, Antonia shared more about just how much work went into the dragon rider's POV for House of the Dragon's Season 3 premiere battle. In her words:
When we were on the book, they had this iPad so we could hold it up and it would show us like already in the edit, it was sort of like in real-time. Sort of got like in the moment VFX. Which is insane. I was like, 'This is crazy.' We were in a sci-fi movie about like, dragons going wrong. It was like wild. And it was just a way of showing us, because we hadn't got anyone else there, a way of showing us what we were sort of faced with. And that was really cool.
"Dragons gone wrong" would also work as an alternate title for House of the Dragon, and especially that first episode of Season 3. Because in the midst of the naval conflict Baela arrived on Moondancer, Jace showed up with Vermax and then (in a plot twist) Rhaena flew in on Sheepstealer. Unfortunately the latter's decision was a huge misstep, because the wild dragon didn't obey her commands. And the episode ended with yet another major character death.
House of the Dragon airs new episodes Sundays on HBO as part of the 2026 TV schedule. We'll have to see how many more epic battles and dragon fights happen throughout the following episodes.
