The House of the Dragon 2 season finale is Westeros at its best and worst

“There is more than one way to fight a war,” Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) explains to Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy). What she wants to tell her ruler is that war is not limited to battlefields; there are ways to fight that involve politics, deception, and strategy. But perhaps House of the Dragon should take his own character’s advice and consider the monotony of this second season’s “war”: endlessly strategizing and mobilizing for undramatic outcomes. Last season, almost every episode — except those involving actual combat — ended with a winking, sly “OK, now it’s a kind of transition from ‘war’ type, to then falling back on endless small council meetings and advisory one-on-one conversations.

The final of House of the Dragon‘s second season exemplified the show’s best and worst qualities – a talky episode that shattered the season’s loose promise of violence and chaos in the face of ongoing strategizing and private deals. There’s been plenty of setup over the course of the season, whether it’s Matt Smith’s Daemon swelling Harrenhal, Rhaenyra teaching lowly Targaryen bastards how to ride a dragon, or the sudden upheaval of King’s Landing, with Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) taking flight in place of his wounded brother Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney). It’s not so much that these potential setups aren’t interesting in their own right, but the show otherwise seems content to leave out the most compelling bits. We see far more of Daemon’s dreams than of his time with the Strongs or the Tullys, the Targaryen bastards have already made their way to Rhaeynra’s war room, and Aemond remains one of the show’s cyphers. Throughout the second season, we’ve seen characters discuss what they’ll do or react to what happened, rather than any interiority into why or how.

The Season 2 finale, “The Queen Who Ever Was,” offers up some tantalizing possibilities for the way forward, from Tyland Lannister (Jefferson Hall) teaming up with sailor Sharako Lohar (a terrific Abigail Thorn) on an adventure in Lys, to Larys (Matthew Needham) and Aegon’s plans to overthrow the wounded king’s brother, but none of those possibilities come to fruition in the episode we have now. Will we ever really to see The Lannisters and the Sea Snake battle? Will Aegon retreat and take revenge on Aemond? It’ll be at least a year before we know. Season finales often have cliffhangers; we know that. Still, the final episode does a lot of touching on things, including an entire city being slaughtered by Aemond, or Rhaena’s (Phoebe Campbell) journey to a dragon. But an entire episode built around half a dozen cliffhangers leaves little memory of what did happen instead of what could be.

There are a few moments of resolution and clarity in the episode, an unexpectedly ugly spat between Corlys and his bastard son, Addam Van Hull (Clinton Liberty). Though the former attempts to make amends with his unclaimed son, Hull rejects his offer of peace. The two are little more than colleagues, nothing more and nothing less—they reject the heartwarming embrace that Corlys hoped for in his time of loneliness. It’s a nice touch, one that underscores what often works best about House of the Dragon: the mix of the personal and the political, and how the two are balanced. Some of these characters are forced into uneasy alliances — such is the nature of politics itself — but rarely do these relationships bear fruit. Some of the best parts of House of the Dragon‘s predecessor Game of Thrones took place when characters who didn’t like or agree with each other were forced to join forces for the greater good. Sometimes these alliances blossomed (like Jaime and Brienne); other times they developed into a reluctant admiration (The Hound and Ayra). Addam and Corlys agreeing to fight together feels like at least one of the show’s many storylines that pays off.

Later, Rhaenyra finally tracks down Daemon, who has been hiding and hallucinating in Harrenhal with Ser Simon Strong (the wonderful Simon Russell Beale) and Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin). Daemon’s storyline is one of the worst of the season. His repetitive, boring, unsatisfying existential dreams have done little to inspire memories of last season, with cameos from Milly Alcock and Paddy Considine. In this finale, he finally gets the vision his brother did: a glimpse of the Song of Ice and Fire—or, rather, of Game of Thrones. This reckoning allows Daemon to make peace with Rhaenyra when she arrives at Harrenhal, a change that feels too abrupt to trust. Perhaps that’s because the episode saves its greatest reunion for last: an illicit conversation between Rhaenyra and Alicent at Dragonstone, in which the latter offers Aegon’s head for peace between them. It’s emotional, abrupt, and tragic — these characters waited too long, and yet lost too much.

The most frustrating thing about the war these characters are waging is that it separates everyone from their most interesting adversaries. Rhaenyra and Alicent only spend 10 minutes together this season; little more can be said for Rhaenyra and Daemon. D’Arcy and Cooke have such great natural chemistry, even in their moments of disagreement, and their separation doesn’t live up to how great the show was when they clashed. Likewise, Aegon and Aemond, so different in their leadership styles, no longer share much screen time after the former is injured in battle. Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) has been banished, depriving Alicent of her battles with him. Only one compelling new couple in this second season has stood the test of the past few episodes: Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) and Ser Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox — think they bond over their alliterative names?). The two share the battlefield, the war camps. They bicker and spar against each other. They live in the reality of the world these other characters have created, and the violence and passivity of their leaders has made them bitter and ironic.

Photo: Theo Whiteman/HBO

Corlys warns Rhaenyra that she must crush this beast by the head before too many days have passed, but the days are already flying by. It’s an entire season of days gone by. Perhaps the frustrating pace of the season is reminiscent of what real-time histories used to feel like. While we could cram the events of something like the Seven Years’ War into a few pages of a textbook, the real-time events were undoubtedly slogs of politics and blood. This second season of House of the Dragonnever quite merging action and politics, the former standing as a given while the latter never goes beyond a raised eyebrow. “We must do this,” the characters say; “i want to that,” they add. Everything projects forward while the present feels still and silent. It is possible that there was another future for the show, if they had not continued to work despite last year’s strikesWith limited staff and a tight timeline, what we see is a show shot with few adjustments along the way who could have adjusted the drama to the pace and allowed for experimentation. What we see on screen is always tied to the original concepts, and always keeps turning.

In their final, tearful conversation, Alicent admits, “I’ve lost my way, or rather, it’s been taken from me.” We’re meant to believe that her long, solo trek through the forest has given her a clarity we can’t see, just as we watch the aftermath of Aemond’s attack on Sharp Point rise from the ashes. What the moment between the queens confirms is that neither of them wants what’s been handed to them. They’re resigned and frustrated by their fates, but they don’t know any other way forward. These characters, and the creators of this show, know that a new path lies ahead, as long as they’re willing to take the first steps, rather than just talk about it.