Fabien Frankel Finally Opens Up About Criston Cole’s Brutal, Glory-Free Ending

‘House of the Dragon’ has spent its third season stripping away any illusions that this is a story with tidy, satisfying farewells. Every major exit this year has landed with a gut punch rather than a bow, and fans have been bracing themselves for who might be next as the Dance of the Dragons grinds toward its bloody conclusion.

Few characters have carried as much baggage into that grinding conflict as Ser Criston Cole. The steward’s son turned Kingsguard knight made his last stand in the sixth episode of Season 3, a battle fans have come to know as the Butcher’s Ball. It was the culmination of a character arc that began with quiet loyalty and curdled into obsession, resentment, and outright villainy over three seasons.

In that episode, titled “Faceless Men,” Cole and his remaining men were ambushed by Rivermen soldiers playing dead, and after fighting them off, found themselves surrounded by Lord Roderick Dustin and his Winter Wolves. Cole challenged his enemies to face him two at a time in hopes of a warrior’s death, but instead Lady Alysanne Blackwood put three arrows in him without ceremony. It was, by any measure, an anticlimactic end for a man who spent his final episodes insisting he deserved a glorious one.

That anticlimax was entirely intentional, according to Fabien Frankel himself. Speaking to The New York Times in an interview published Monday, the actor admitted he was “relieved, to a degree” by how the death played out, explaining that Criston Cole went out in the way he wanted him to, in a manner he felt honored George R.R. Martin’s original writing. Frankel added that he had read every piece of fan commentary calling for the character’s downfall and never felt more certain that “this guy has to go.”

Frankel has been candid elsewhere about why he thinks the lack of a hero’s send-off actually suits Cole better than the glory he craved. He told GQ that the death was poetically written, noting that where the show could have easily given Cole a villain’s ending, it instead let him ask his enemies to spare his men before he died, calling that at least a somewhat honorable final moment even if the journey there wasn’t.

The actor has also been reflecting on how deeply he’s had to defend a character most of the fandom loves to hate. Frankel spoke with Variety to unpack Criston’s suicidal final mission, explaining that he can only understand why audiences feel the way they do about the character but that it serves no purpose for him personally to see Cole that way, since an actor always has to be the bastion of whoever he’s playing.

Reaction online has been just as split as Frankel predicted. The unceremonious nature of the death sparked a wave of viral commentary, with House of the Dragon fans sounding off on the abrupt way one of the show’s most divisive figures was written out. With only two episodes left in the season, the stakes for everyone still standing have never felt higher.

Do you think Ser Criston Cole earned even a sliver of redemption in his final moments, or was this exactly the undignified ending he deserved all along?