In Season 2, was House of the Dragon finally about the dragons?

They can fly, they can spit fire, and they can serve as a metaphor for everything from interpersonal tensions to nuclear war.

At least, that's what culture critics Sean T. Collins and Alison Herman took away from the dragons on screen in this season of HBO's hit drama House of the Dragon.

Today on Commotion, Collins and Herman join guest host Rad Simonpillai to react to the Season 2 finale, and discuss whether this prequel to Game of Thrones has what it takes to stand on its own.

Please note: this discussion contains spoilers for Season 2 of House of the Dragon. We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

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.

Rad: Interesting. Alison, this season had some banger cliffhangers throughout, so it is kind of interesting that the finale ended the way it did. We're seeing a lot of frustrated responses like Sean's. What did you make of the finale?

Alison: I'm certainly one of the finale's defenders, I would say. I do agree it's objectively anti-climactic, especially by the standards of Game of Thrones, which is a show and a franchise that has really trained us to expect big battles, big deaths, not being afraid to kill off major characters. House of the Dragon, unlike Game of Thrones, is based on a completed story, so people with the book knowledge go in knowing that the big battles are coming and specific deaths are coming.

I actually think the show has sort of used that to its advantage. I think the show is best when it is forcing you to sit in the stomach-sinking inevitability of this awful, unproductive war that isn't going to help anyone, and in fact it's going to significantly weaken Westeros' position against the threat that we know is coming in Game of Thrones. And so with the finale, I actually appreciated that it invested its time and resources into the smaller interpersonal dramas, rather than the big CGI battles that I tend to find less satisfying than those one-on-one moments.

Rad: I'm actually leaning in that direction too. I personally love the finale. But Sean, this is a show that lives up to its title, in the sense that it really was all about the dragons this year, right? So I'd love to know, what did you think about the role that dragons played in this season?

Sean: Well, just as a fantasy nerd and someone who's familiar with the history of the genre on the screen, I was really impressed. There has never been an attempt to show this many dragons at this level of detail for this amount of screen time, in broad daylight, fighting each other, doing things. There really was not a lot for them to base this off of. Even in the original Game of Thrones, you didn't have a lot of action like that, so I thought that was impressive.

At the same time, these dragons have to have personalities because they're all individuated. They are linked to different riders … like dogs and their owners have the same personality. And simultaneously, they also have to represent nuclear war. They're this living metaphor for the destructive capability of war and what human beings are capable of doing to one another when war is unleashed. So they had to thread a lot of needles with those dragons, and I think they did it very well.

Rad: Alison, what did you make of the role that dragons were playing this season?

Alison: I thought they overall did a really good job of using the dragons to draw out the human personalities. But on the other hand, I really liked the way they use the dragons to tell stories…. So I think the show does a really impressive job in showing the dragons in terms of special effects, but I think it understands that first and foremost this is a show about people, and the dragons exist to highlight and advance the interactions between the people.

Sean: You may not see the dragons fight too much in the finale, but you see how basically every major character has been changed by their proximity to these animals and what they can do. The dragons are great in and of themselves, but they really exist to further the human drama.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ty Callender.