The House of the Dragon season 2 finale is Westeros at its best and worst

polygon.com:

“There is more than one way to fight a war,” Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) explains to Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy). What she means to tell her ruler is that war is not relegated to battlefields; there are modes of combat that include politics, deceit, and strategy. But perhaps House of the Dragon ought to take its own character’s advice and consider the monotony of what this second season’s “war” has consisted of: endless strategizing and mobilizing for little dramatic payoff. This past season ended nearly every episode — minus the one with an actual battle — with a winking, sly, “OK, now it’s war”-type of transition only to fall back on endless small council meetings and advisory one-on-ones.

The finale of House of the Dragon’s second season exemplified the show’s best and worst qualities — a talky episode that reneged on the season’s loose promise of violence and chaos in the face of continued strategizing and private deal-making. There’s been a lot of set-up over the course of the season, whether it’s Matt Smiths’ Daemon bulking up of Harrenhal, Rhaenyra teaching lowly Targaryen bastards how to dragon-ride, or the sudden upheaval of King’s Landing, with Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) ascending in place of his injured brother Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney). It’s not so much that these potential set-ups aren’t in and of themselves interesting, but the show seems otherwise content to elide the most fascinating parts. We see much more of Daemon’s dreams than we do his time with the Strongs or the Tullys, the Targaryen bastards have already taken to Rhaeynra’s war room, and Aemond remains one of the show’s cyphers. For the whole of the second season, we’ve seen characters discuss what they will do or react to what has happened, rather than any interiority into why or how.

Season 2’s last episode, “The Queen Who Ever Was,” sets up a number of compelling possibilities for the road ahead, from Tyland Lannister (Jefferson Hall) adventuring in Lys with the sailor Sharako Lohar (a great