House of the Dragon Star Breaks Down the Finale’s Most Confusing Plot Reveal And What Happens Next

Spoilers incoming! The House of the Dragon Season 3 finale saw Westeros changed forever. The First Battle of Tumbleton came to pass, wiping out several key players and robbing Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) of the advantage she enjoyed for most of the season. With Ulf the White (Tom Bennett) and his dragon, Silverwing, turned against Rhaenyra’s faction—dubbed the Blacks—the tide has turned in the most devastating fashion. The Targaryen civil war has reached its final phase, setting up what promises to be a spectacular Season 4. At King’s Landing, affairs proved just as harrowing. Rhaenyra’s mistreatment of Helaena (Phia Saban) reached new lows, and Alyn of Hull (Abubakar Salim) murders the High Septon under Rhaenyra’s orders. It all gets chaotic pretty quickly, slamming us with some juicy drama but making one of the finale’s quieter bombshells easier to overlook.

This development involves Rhaenyra sacking her close advisor (and lover) Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno), whom she promptly had whisked away for reasons she doesn’t disclose. It’s a confusing development, but according to a major House of the Dragon star, it makes a dark sort of sense. Speaking with TheWrap, D’Arcy explained Rhaenyra’s firing of Mysaria calling it “the red line” of the character’s “descent into tyrannical authoritarianism.” They add: “I think there’s something really nice this season where some of Rhaenyra’s constituent parts have been externalized — Alicent is the judge and Daemon is sort of the ego and Mysaria, I think, is sort of her conscience — certainly has been, I think in parts in this season and in Season 2. And I think the point at which you banish your conscience from the castle, you’ve set a much darker course.”

Mysaria Is Down, But Far from Out

While Mysaria no longer gets to whisper in Rhaenyra’s ear, she does still seem to have a part to play moving forward, if the glimpses of her in the crowd at Rhaenyra’s prophecy-laden “coronation” speech are anything to go by. We obviously don’t know what shape that part will take in Season 4, but in the books, Mysaria’s demise is one of the most miserable in the entire Dance of the Dragons. She dies midway through her Walk of Atonement, which viewers might recall as a form of torture Cersei endured in Game of Thrones. Because Mysaria did not leave King’s Landing as planned in House of the Dragon’s Season 3 finale, this fate can still befall her in the show.

Rhaenyra’s descent into madness has been hinted at throughout the season, and a key aspect of that is her dynamic with her uncle-husband Daemon (Matt Smith). Daemon has always lied more easily than he chews his food, but his most recent deceptions have hit Rhaenyra especially hard. D’Arcy spoke to this as well, adding that the familiarity of their decisions harkens to “a certain brand of Targaryen chaos mode,” adding:

“I think their unity — it feels sort of weirdly ageless to me because it refers back to a kind of much older form, sort of a Feudalism. I really have enjoyed the increased use of High Valyrian this season because … I’m sort of reminded that there’s something kind of alien about the Targaryens. There’s something so profoundly other, and I think at the end of that scene … they sort of transcend their peers in some way, in some sort of awful way, and become … [an] ultimate force.”

The moment Rhaenyra fires Mysaria is initially a confusing one, but D’Arcy’s comments shed a lot of light on what this decision represents and why it works. Framing Mysaria as her conscience is smart, and while their relationship was quite rocky at the end, it did benefit Rhaenyra far more than it hurt her.

Rhaenyra has changed so dramatically, so completely, throughout this season, that her decision to get rid of Mysaria makes even more sense in hindsight. If the show wants to show just how unhinged Rhaenyra can become — and it does — then it needs to make her path to madness as clear as possible.

Overall, House of the Dragon Season 3 got a lot done. It pushed the ball forward in all of the aforementioned ways, and it did so in a way that even set up the Game of Thrones film about Aegon the Conqueror.

House of the Dragon Season 4 is expected to air in 2028.