‘House of the Dragon’ Season 3, episode 1: Criston Cole and Gwayne Hightower are worlds apart

House of the Dragon Season 3 sees some characters catapulted back into the action while others wait in the woods.

The latter, in episode 1, applies to our Westeros odd couple, Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) and Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox), a pair who couldn’t have a more contrasting attitude to The Times if they tried. The mission? Wait for Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) to show up on his colossal dragon Vhagar and take the crumbling castle of Harrenhal from Team Black. But where the hell are they?

On one hand, Cole’s really going through it. The traumatised Lord Commander fatalistically wallows in the “doom and ruin” surrounding him, especially after the massacre that was Rook’s Rest in Season 2. It’s a very different Cole from the man we first met in the very first season, who found himself swept up in court politics, heartbreak, and ended up covered in blood. At the start of Season 3, he’s all nihilism.

“He’s on the road, all of his stuff is so isolated, so you’re not dealing with so much plot,” Frankel told Mashable. “First two seasons, especially in the Small Council…that stuff is so dense material-wise. It takes so long to shoot and it’s almost always plot, which needs to happen, but it’s not massively about character development in that sense.”

On the other hand, we’ve got Gwayne, a knight of House Hightower, and a man of principles with big Rob Stark energy. And as the troops wait, he’s constantly asking his Lord Commander to be a good manager, to keep his men in line.

“It’s very difficult, they have such opposing views on how to see this war out, and when you’re second-in-command to someone who has, in some sense, got a death wish, you’ve got this load on your back, and you don’t know how to shift out from under it,” Fox told Mashable. “Especially if you’re trained in the school of honor, and respecting that hierarchy that Gwayne would have obviously grown up around. Do you break your principles to honor, or do you go, ‘we just have to survive’? It’s a rock and a hard place.

“He’s obviously been schooled in the way that knights would have been trained in a training ground — jousting and all of that stuff — and when it comes up against actual war, an almost nuclear holocaust style of war that the dragons represent, it’s a really sobering, immediate maturing. He realises that if, unless I am ultra responsible, there’s no way through here for anybody, least of all, my men, who I am responsible for.”

Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox).
Credit: Ollie Upton / HBO

How will they sort it out this season? Time will tell — especially if Aemond doesn’t get here soon.

House of the Dragon Season 3 premieres June 21 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, with a new episode every Sunday.

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