Home of the Dragon Season 2 delivered a few of its most gripping dragon motion but in episode 3, with Baela Targaryen (Bethany Antonia) and her dragon Moondancer chasing down Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel). Whereas HBO teased the scene closely in trailers, it nearly did not make it to the display within the first place.
As episode 3 director Geeta Vasant Patel instructed Mashable, her first studying of the scene left her confused. “One of my notes [to the writers] was, ‘I don’t understand why this scene is here. I can take it out and nothing changes,'” Patel mentioned. “So they took it out. And I was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, don’t take it out! Let’s just fix it.'”
‘Home of the Dragon’ director Geeta Vasant Patel breaks down Rhaenyra and Alicent’s pivotal assembly
From there, Patel labored with episode author David Hancock, assistant director Jason Rickwood, and cinematographer Catherine Goldschmidt to make sure Baela’s pursuit of Criston was completely essential to the story. The place to begin turned getting Baela excellent.
“One of the reasons I didn’t care about the scene at first was I didn’t care about Baela, because I didn’t know her,” mentioned Patel. “We had to build her character, then get to that scene.”
Bethany Antonia and Phoebe Campbell in “House of the Dragon.”
Credit score: Ollie Upton / HBO
Season 2 marks an enormous turning level for Baela and her twin sister Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell), with each taking up bigger roles of their service to Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy). “Yet we didn’t know much about them,” Patel mentioned. “One of the great things about the writing of this show is that [the writers] don’t like exposition. They don’t have characters come and go, ‘This is who I am,’ for an entire scene. So the challenge of working on this show is actually bringing exposition in between sentences, and I felt like the challenge with Rhaena and Baela was introducing them without words.”
Mashable Prime Tales
Daemon’s Harrenhal imaginative and prescient in ‘Home of the Dragon’ Season 2, episode 3, defined
To achieve a greater understanding of Baela and Rhaena, and to carry that understanding to the display, Patel, Antonia, and Campbell hung out collectively improvising the characters’ complete backstories. What ache do they carry? What are the defining moments of their lives? Whereas the viewers may not see these moments play out on-screen, sensing the load of them within the interactions between Rhaena and Baela would show essential.
“By the end of that workshop, we felt like we had found and birthed these two characters in a way that we didn’t need to in Season 1,” Patel mentioned. “It was absolutely brilliant, the way the two of them were able to improvise.”
Bethany Antonia in “House of the Dragon.”
Credit score: Ollie Upton / HBO
Having a extra concrete sense of Baela as a personality helped cement her motivations within the Criston chase. “As we were figuring out how to introduce Baela, [showrunner] Ryan [Condal] said, ‘She’s Maverick from Top Gun,’ and that crystallized it. When that decision was made, we could run with it,” Patel defined.
Except for being an ace dragonrider, Baela shares fairly a little bit of the boldness — and rashness — that characterizes Tom Cruise’s Prime Gun pilot. As we be taught later within the episode, Rhaenyra is anxious that Baela disobeyed her orders to fly at an incredible peak and never interact anybody she noticed whereas patrolling the mainland. With a little bit of cheekiness, Baela responds that she “didn’t engage. Not exactly.” It is the sort of defiance and “I know what I’m doing” perspective one would sometimes affiliate with Daemon (Matt Smith). Like father, like daughter! Plus, who would not take a possibility to scare the armor off of Criston Cole?
We would not have gotten these character-building moments had Baela’s encounter with Criston been lower completely. Nor would we’ve gotten a reasonably sizable plot improvement: After going through hazard with an uncovered host, Criston is now going to be main his troops below the bushes, marking a shift in how wartime will likely be enjoying out going ahead.
With these components safe, Patel felt much more assured about maintaining Baela and Moondancer’s flight within the episode. “We spent the time to really perfect it, even reshoot parts of it to make sure Baela was crystal clear to everyone,” she mentioned. “We worked so hard on that sequence, and it finally made it back in.”
New episodes of Home of the Dragon air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.
