Emma D’Arcy Just Made ‘House of the Dragon’ History With the Show’s Highest-Rated Episode Yet
‘House of the Dragon’ has always lived in the long shadow of its predecessor, carrying the expectations of a fandom that spent years processing the ending of ‘Game of Thrones’. Season 3 arrived with that weight fully intact, and the early response has made clear the show is operating at a different level than it was even a year ago. On Rotten Tomatoes, the third season holds a 91% critics’ score, making it the highest-rated season of the HBO fantasy series thus far, topping season 1’s 90% and season 2’s 84%. After a long wait and a famously uneven road, the Targaryen civil war has finally found its footing.
Season 3 arrived with the kind of momentum built on the back of the Battle of the Gullet, the largest battle the show had ever staged, and showrunner Ryan Condal described it as “arguably” the “craziest episode of television ever made.” The season premiere pulled in 21.5 million viewers across three days, signaling that audiences had not only returned but were hungry for what came next.
What came next was ‘Queen’s Landing’, and it changed everything. Episode 2 of Season 3 surpassed the premiere’s already record-matching score to land a 9.4 on IMDb, becoming the highest-rated episode in the entire series. Within hours of airing, it sent social media into a frenzy, with the show trending globally and the name Emma D’Arcy appearing alongside it in virtually every conversation. Its only competition in the show’s history is the action-heavy Season 2 episode ‘The Red Dragon and the Gold’, which also holds a 9.4 rating.
The engine behind all of it is D’Arcy’s performance as Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen. The episode opens with Rhaenyra confronting her son Jacaerys’s body, and D’Arcy depicts her grief almost as a living thing: a sturdy denial giving way to a frantic, desperate disbelief, and then a visceral outpouring of emotion that is legitimately uncomfortable to watch. Speaking to Decider, D’Arcy admitted the scene was the only one in the entire series they had genuinely dreaded, saying, “Yeah, it’s hard. If I’m honest, that was the only scene in the series that I sort of dreaded.”
The episode’s second major sequence, in which Rhaenyra orders the execution of Otto Hightower, gave D’Arcy another canvas to work with. TV Insider spoke with Emma D’Arcy about the throne room scene, with the actor explaining: “I wanted Rhaenyra to be stripped of her adulthood by the time she reaches the throne. She finds herself in this position where she’s required to execute her father’s former best friend. When someone has known you from your childhood, I think it’s very hard to retain the jacket of your adult self.” Collider noted that D’Arcy’s work in that sequence represents a career-best performance, and one rarely seen in high-fantasy television.
Harry Collett, who played the deceased Jacaerys and lay still on set for the scene, praised D’Arcy directly, saying, “Emma did an amazing performance. All of the reactions you see in the room are all very real. There’s a scene where Bethany actually has a tear rolling down her face, and that’s real. That’s just a real reaction to Emma’s performance.”
Episode 3 of Season 3 is set to premiere on July 5, with the season consisting of eight episodes in total. The series still has to clear the exceptionally high bar that ‘Queen’s Landing’ has now set, and if this is the standard the show is operating at just two episodes in, what lies ahead could be something genuinely special. With Emmy season heating up and the internet already building a case, the question worth putting to ‘House of the Dragon’ fans is simple: do you think Emma D’Arcy’s performance in ‘Queen’s Landing’ is the finest acting the Targaryen saga has produced across either show?
