Rad: FYI, I didn’t actually watch [Game of Thrones]. I came into House of the Dragon Season 2 kind of cold. With that in mind, Sean, what did you make of the big finale?
Sean: Well, call me old fashioned, but I’m the kind of person who thinks that when a season of a television show builds to a big, epic battle, it should show the big, epic battle. And so for the second time this year — first with Shōgun, and now with House of the Dragon — I wound up being kind of disappointed by the end. But I understand why they made the decision that they made.
Even a show like House of the Dragon has a limited budget, and doing all those effects-intensive dragon sequences costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. They had a shorter season than they had the first time around; I’d imagine that changed the rhythm around a bit. It’s not maybe how I would have emphasized things towards the end, but I thought that as an episode it was so effective at building that tension. It was almost like a victim of its own success — like, if I hadn’t been so invested in all those fights happening, I wouldn’t have felt so disappointed. So in that way, it worked.
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