Carly Lane

Published Jun 29, 2026, 11:45 AM EDT

Carly Lane is an Atlanta-based writer and critic who has been with Collider in some form or fashion since 2021. She considers herself a television nerd, diehard romance/sci-fi/fantasy reader, and nascent horror lover. Her fondness of books is only eclipsed by the towering TBR that her shelves can’t possibly contain.

She is the author of A REGENCY GUIDE TO MODERN LIFE: 1800s ADVICE ON 21ST CENTURY LOVE, FRIENDS, FUN AND MORE, published through DK Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House) and currently available wherever books are sold.

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Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 2.

Two weeks into House of the Dragon’s return, Season 3 has already dropped more than a few shocking twists. While the premiere began with the devastating Battle of the Gullet, which saw several characters’ fates either sealed or left up in the air, Episode 2 sees Alicent (Olivia Cooke) quietly making moves in King’s Landing to pave the way for Rhaenyra’s (Emma D’Arcy) bloodless takeover — only for the queen of Team Black to ascend the Iron Throne after carrying out the devastating execution of a surprising prisoner who’s been held within the Red Keep this entire time: Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans).

While the death is shocking on its own, it’s rendered even more horrifying because it doesn’t go according to plan. Not only is Otto a somewhat spontaneous substitution for Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), both of whom are nowhere near King’s Landing despite Rhaenyra and Alicent’s previous agreement, but Rhaenyra’s execution of her father’s former Hand of the King is painfully botched, with the queen forced to take more than one swing to finally separate Otto’s head from his body. It all culminates in a cliffhanger that likely had fans screaming at their televisions last night, when Alicent walks into the Great Hall just in time to bear witness to the bloody aftermath of her father’s death.

Your answers point to the great house whose words, values, and way of surviving in Westeros match your own. Bend the knee — or don’t. That’s very much up to you.

Winter is Coming — and you have always known it. You prepare not out of fear but out of duty, because the people who depend on you deserve someone who takes the long view.

You understand the game — its rules, its exceptions, and exactly when the rules become the exception. You play it without illusions and without apology.

You carry a sense of destiny that is difficult to explain and impossible to ignore — the feeling that you are not simply participating in the world but meant to reshape it.

You are a force — direct, powerful, and difficult to ignore when you enter a room or a conflict. You do not negotiate with challenges. You meet them.

You understand that power does not always announce itself — that sometimes it arrives with flowers, good wine, and a smile that doesn’t quite reach the eyes.

Ahead of the Season 3 premiere, Collider spoke with several House of the Dragon cast members about Episode 2’s brutal Great Hall cliffhanger, including those who play members of House Hightower, about how Otto’s surviving descendants will react to his execution. While we don’t yet know what will play out in the coming weeks, Cooke didn’t hesitate to confirm whether Alicent perceives the act as Rhaenyra going back on her word, given their truce about a bloodless takeover:

“Yeah, I think it does. It’s not only a very public political act, but it’s also her own father. I know Otto and Rhaenyra didn’t have the best relationship, but it’s Alicent’s father, who — for all intents and purposes, Alicent doesn’t know where he’s been for this whole time, so he could have been Rhaenyra’s prisoner, and this is the first thing that she’s enacted as ruler. So, yeah, it’s a big slap in the face for Alicent, and I think for her, it’s just like, ‘Okay, we’re playing it like that.’ I think she’s just like, ‘Well, all bets are off.’”

While Alicent’s brother Gwayne has been somewhat occupied on the frontlines of battle, there’s no doubt that word of his father’s death will ultimately reach him, and it turns out he’ll have an immensely complicated response to it. Speaking with Collider, Freddie Fox teased how Gwayne might react once he learns about what Rhaenyra did to Otto in the service of the pursuit of power — and how it’ll actually inform his character’s overall arc in Season 3:

“It’s difficult with his relationship with his father — because, of course, he never really had a relationship with his father, and it’s the [absenteeism] of Otto that is the greatest figure in Gwayne’s life and gives him a great deal of reason to be the kind of mentor figure that he becomes to another character in the story, that you will soon meet. And yet [Otto] is also his dad, and there are elements of his father, his approval, and his style that Gwayne desperately wanted to covet or recreate. So, I think… pain, and the sort of inertia that comes with losing somebody like that who was never really present in his life.”

New episodes of House of the Dragon Season 3 premiere Sundays on HBO and HBO Max. Stay tuned at Collider for more!

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