In House of the Dragon Season 2, It’s Not Just War — It’s Nuclear War

Near the beginning of a long press day with the cast and co-creator of House of the Dragon, the second season’s most important allegory comes into focus: Talking with a small group of journalists, showrunner Ryan Condal says that when trying to find optimism and hope in the dark HBO fantasy drama, he hopes audiences hook into “these characters that we know love each other, and maybe have been separated by the war. Seeing them come back together — I think those are the things we’ll look forward to, to try to find some light in the darkness of a nuclear war.”

Condal’s offhand mention of the show’s conflicts as essentially nuclear war makes a shocking amount of sense in that moment, and during the rest of the day’s interviews it keeps coming up. For, while the series takes place in a fictional kingdom where superstition and the sword rule, the presence of dragons — many dragons, ridden by many characters into battle — does make the metaphor work. When both sides of a war have the ability to rain down unfathomable destruction, how does that change the field of play?

“This is why fantasy is so brilliant, because it’s discussing something incredibly serious about the world in a way that’s palatable and interesting,” co-star Matthew Needham says. “What would the world be like if you had dragons? It would be like this, it would be hellish. Whoever has the bomb has the power — it’s scary times we’re in.”

Adds Needham, “I don’t think it’s one of those finger-wagging shows, going ‘Look at all the parallels between modern life [and the series]. It just is like, ‘The world is scary and awful, and there are no winners in war.’ And that’s just unfortunately a universal truth. But yeah, I love that they’re nuclear weapons — it’s scary.”

It’s a metaphor that has helped Eve Best play the role of Princess Rhaenys from the beginning, she says. “The first time we rehearsed with the Black Council, and we were talking about dragons, the whole conversation was, ‘Should we send in the dragons?’ And I said to Ryan, ‘What’s our context for this? How can we make this real for us in some way?’ And he said, ‘Nuclear war.’”

The idea also makes sense to co-star Steve Toussaint, “because [dragons] are the ultimate sanction in Westeros. As I think someone says in one of the episodes, once you unleash the dragons, you can’t call them back. You drop a nuclear bomb, it’s over. The movie Oppenheimer, he makes this thing and then he regrets it for the rest of his life, ‘Look what I’ve done.’ And I think that’s the same kind of equivalent. Should anybody have that kind of power? Should anybody have the power to destroy mankind, ultimately?’”

That, if nothing else, is part of why Toussaint thinks that his character doesn’t trust dragons. “The power’s too much.”

Best agrees, noting that “the crucial thing, what Rhaenys is trying all the way through the season to steer them towards, is that when you have that kind of power, you have this enormous responsibility and the responsibility to choose a peaceful way.”

House of the Dragon (HBO)