Fire & Blood Files: Can ‘House Of The Dragon’ Do It All In Just 16 Episodes?

HBO’s House of the Dragon returns this Sunday, promising another season of political machinations, Grand Guignol-ian violence and dragon-on-dragon action after the (relatively) pastoral events of last winter’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. But with only two more seasons remaining – this upcoming third season and then a forthcoming fourth – in the series’ adaptation of the events of the “Dance of the Dragons” (as chronicled in the fictional history book Fire & Blood), it’s worth taking stock of the remaining key events in the Dance and examining whether or not there’s enough room left in the series to adequately adapt them all. This is largely because, following on from the abbreviated second season, each remaining season will only be eight episodes long, giving the creators roughly 16 hours to cover a lot of narrative ground.

**Major spoilers for the events of Fire & Blood and House of the Dragon below – don’t read this unless you already know what happens or don’t care if you know at least some of what will likely happen on the show.**

In part because the first season of the show smartly spent a fair amount of time setting up the characters and political background of the Dance and then the second season got cut short, the story of the “Dance of the Dragons” is much closer to being roughly a third adapted than it is to being halfway done. This despite the fact that House of the Dragon is now past its own halfway point. Yet by most accounts, these are the key events remaining for the series to adapt:

• The Battle of the Gullet
• The Fishfeed
• The Fall of King’s Landing
• The Butcher’s Ball
• First Tumbleton
• Fall of Dragonstone
• Battle Above the God’s Eye
• Storming of the Dragonpit
• Second Tumbleton
• The end of the Dance
• The Hour of the Wolf

That’s a lot of incident for the series to cover, to say nothing of the screentime necessary to perform the work of setting it all up and making it resonant for the audience in a way that is more than just a bunch of stuff happening (which is more or less how its presented in the book). With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at each event and the likelihood of it being dramatized on the show, significantly altered, or cut entirely.

The Battle of the Gullet

This battle, in which the Triarchy fleet battles the Velaryon fleet and engages nearly all of Rhaenyra’s (Emma D’Arcy) dragonriders (including her eldest son and heir), is what should have been the big action set piece to conclude the season. By all accounts it would have been, had the episode order not been shrunk by HBO’s corporate masters in an effort to trim the budget and make the Warner Bros. parent company more attractive to potential buyers. Based on the released trailers and early reviews, it is now what will be leading off the third season.

The Fishfeed

Cool as the Fishfeed is based on its description in the book (in which a mass of Aegon-supporting Green troops are overwhelmed by a combined force of Rhaenyra-backing Black Riverlanders and the newly-arrived Winter Wolves and essentially pushed by force into the Gods Eye lake to drown in their armor), I could easily see this being something that gets cut entirely, relegated to a “status update” delivered by one character to another. It doesn’t involve any of the story’s main characters and is strategically important but doesn’t offer any dramatic shifts in the story or in the fates of main characters.

And yet…the series needs to pay off the force it spent a lot of time showing Daemon (Matthew Smith) assemble last season, and waiting for the events of the Butcher’s Ball (which also features elements of that force) to do it might be stretching the timeline too much. Plus, the show has cast Tommy Flanagan as Roddy the Ruin, leader of the Stark-backed Winter Wolves, whose big introduction comes via the Fishfeed. Could we see it merged with the Butcher’s Ball? Possibly. But I still suspect we get some version of the Fishfeed onscreen sooner rather than later this season.

The Fall of King’s Landing

The fall here refers to the loss of the city by Aegon’s (Tom Glynn-Carney) followers to Rhaenyra’s, and the show has already set it up via Alicent’s (Olivia Cooke) visit to Dragonstone last season. (This continues the show’s ongoing trend of smartly implying the history as we know it has a significant male bias in its one-dimensionally villainous portrayals of the two women at the heart of this story.) It’s light on CGI spectacle, and I suspect it’ll go down in the second episode of this season (aka the proper season finale of the second season).

The Butcher’s Ball

The death of Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) absolutely will get adapted on screen, and I doubt he’s making it out of the third season. There’s a version where this is the event – the highwater mark of Rhaenyra’s success in the Dance – which closes out the third season, creating a nice symmetry with it starting on the Battle of the Gullet and concluding with Rhaenrya at the height of her power. But that would leave a lot for the fourth season to cover, much of it expensive to adapt (as it involves lots of people, dragons, and effects).

The Butcher’s Ball is also one of those things that could easily be scaled down. The key event – Criston’s death – is by design a lowkey event. The actual butchering that gives the battle its name could simply be alluded to offscreen, since few involved outside Criston factor into the wider story much. This also means this could fall earlier in the season, at its midpoint, akin to last season’s Battle of Rook’s Rest in “The Red and the Gold.”

First Tumbleton

In true George RR Martin fashion, there’s two notable battles that take place in and around Tumbleton. The first is essentially the beginning of the end for Rhaenyra. Yet, prior to a few events in the previous season, I easily could have seen the series relegating this to something that happens off-camera. Given that we’re getting Daeron (the third, heretofore unseen except as a smidge on a dragon’s back in last season’s finale montage, son of Alicent) and his dragon Tessarion proper in season 3, and the fact that Season 2 spent at least some time crafting characters out of dragonseeds Hugh Hammer (Kieran Bew) and Ulf White (Tom Bennett) and made a point to have Hugh’s wife namedrop Tumbleton, it definitely seems like we’ll get the “Treasons of Tumbleton” at the first battle fully dramatized.

The series though will probably also continue it’s “this is the REAL history” approach to making changes relative to what’s chronicled in Fire & Blood in the process, and make Hugh’s motivations for betrayal, at the very least, much more complex than what is presented in the book. And First Tumbleton, rather than the Butcher’s Ball, will probably be the big climatic event that closes out the season, creating a tidy bit of narrative business where the zenith of Rhaenyra’s success in the Dance falls entirely within one season.

The Fall of Dragonstone

The way Rhaenyra and Aegon ultimately swap seats of power in the course of the Dance is one of those “ridiculous but fun” bits of plotting. There’s definitely a way the series could save time and budget by leaving the actions of Aegon taking Dragonstone from under Rhaenyra’s nose entirely off-screen, saving the reveal to serve as a big surprise for the non-book reading audience as well as Rhaenyra when she is eventually forced to abandon King’s Landing and returns to her nominal home. That would also result in Aegon disappearing for a decent chunk of the series (unless the show is going to give him something else to do), which doesn’t seem like something the showrunners would want to do.

It would also take away a key moment from Baela (Bethany Antonia), who already is likely to lose out on seeing one of her pivotal plot points (marrying Alyn of Hull) at the end of the story adapted. That said, in the name of narrative expediency, the show might eschew this plotline entirely, and simply have Aegon steal back to King’s Landing at some point and one-up Rhaenyra there instead of back at Dragonstone.

Battle Above the Gods Eye

In the top 3 (if not the #1) sequences from the “Dance of Dragons” readers want to see adapted on screen (it’s certainly my #1), there’s no way we’re not getting the Battle Above the Gods Eye. It just becomes a question of when we’ll get it. There’s a world where it is the climax to the third season, but that would rob the show of Matt Smith (and Ewan Mitchell) for the entirety of the fourth season (and the Season 4 pre-release press tours).

It would also mean House of the Dragon would lose Criston Cole, Daemon and Aemond all in one season (unless they do something wonky like putting the Butcher’s Ball after the Battle Above the Gods Eye, which theoretically could work), and that seems like a lot of key characters departing in one go. Rather, this will likely be the big event which kicks off the fourth season, a la the Battle of the Gullet in Season 3, as the show leans into the new season structure forced on it by the wonky eight episode seasons.

Storming of the Dragonpit

Though it seems likely the details surrounding the Storming of the Dragonpit will be a lot different and/or more truncated (I doubt the Shephard will amount to much, if he appears at all; is Joffrey even old enough on the show to do what he does in the book?; will the Moon of The Three Kings even get a mention?) on the show relative to the book, the general idea of the smallfolk of King’s Landing storming the Dragonpit and wiping out all the dragons there absolutely will happen.

You simply can’t do a story that is, in part, about the dying of the dragons and then not dramatize one of the key events in that extinction — Especially after putting in the work to show both the impact of the war on the smallfolk and their shifting perspectives on dragons. (Skipping the Storming of the Dragonpit also means the show would need to concoct another reason to force Rhaenyra back to Dragonstone, which would probably be more work than just doing the Storming. Unless they’re going to cut out that plotline entirely.)

Second Tumbleton

Even if the series adapts First Tumbleton, it’s still possible it could skip over the Second Battle of Tumbleton. But just as the added development and screen time allocated to Hugh and Ulf creates an implicit promise to fully adapt First Tumbleton, the effort to make Addam of Hull (Clinton Liberty) an actual character in season 2 implies that Second Tumbleton, the character’s big standout moment, will make it on screen. Plus, once you commit to the Dragonseed concept in full, as the show did in season 2, it simply has to see it through to its essential end at Second Tumbleton.

The End of the Dance

It’s entirely possible House of the Dragon the series simply ends when Rhaenyra returns to Dragonstone, discovers it’s fallen to Aegon, and gets fed to Sunfyre. The show has largely been told from her perspective, and I’d argue she remains its central protagonist. Yet that’s not the proper end of the “Dance of Dragons,” which comes only after the brief resumption of Aegon’s reign, his assassination, and the wedding of his daughter to Rhaenrya’s sole (seemingly) surviving son, the new King Aegon (who is, according to the show, currently a baby apparently).

It’s also possible the series effectively ends with Rhaenyra’s death and then everything after that – including the end of Aegon’s claim on the throne – is handled via a montage/voiceover/epilogue of sorts, akin to the series’ introductory explanation of the Great Council that selected Viserys (Paddy Considine) as the heir of King Jaehaerys. But I think it’s still necessary to give Aegon a proper, onscreen sendoff, which means he’ll likely last at least one episode longer than Rhaenyra.

The Hour of the Wolf

The short regency of Cregan Stark (Tom Taylor) is, essentially, the Dance’s epilogue. While I appreciate the fact that the show made a point of introducing Cregan at the start of its second season, this is the part of the story that I think ultimately gets the voiceover/montage routine following Aegon’s death – if it’s not simply ignored on the grounds of “this is Rhaenrya’s story, and she’s dead, so it’s over” in the first place.

So where does that leave things?

Even if we assume the Fishfeed and Butcher’s Ball are somehow conflated and or stripped down, that Rhaenrya’s taking of King’s Landing is light on action spectacle, Aegon’s taking of Dragonstone goes down offscreen or not at all, and the Hour of the Wolf is punted entirely, that’s still a lot of incident to cram into 16 episodes (with a lot of it also being expensive to depict, if for no other reason than “armies” and “dragons”). The two Tumbletons, the Battle Above the Gods Eye, and the Storming of the Dragonpit alone are big enough to be the central event around which an entire eight episode season could be constructed, and the show will need to do them all in just two such seasons. Can House of the Dragon afford to pull it all off, and can they pull it off in a way that is both exciting (and understandable) to watch while satisfying to book readers?

One way or another, we’re going to find out!