Game of Thrones was known for many things—nudity, scheming, weddings gone awry, Tyrion’s notable quotables—but above all that, viewers really relished its battles. While sometimes the lighting could be notoriously dark, there was still a thrill in watching the Battle of the Blackwater, the Battle of the Bastards, and the Battle of Winterfell come to life on the screen. The prequel series House of the Dragon has its own appointment with large-scale mayhem coming up in season three, when at long last the Dance of the Dragons will rip into the Battle of the Gullet.
In a twist from Game of Thrones‘ land and ice-based brawls, the Battle of the Gullet takes place at sea, and it’ll find the Triarchy, led by Admiral Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorn), going head-to-head with the fleet captained by Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), aka the Sea Snake. In a new Entertainment Weekly feature, we learn House of the Dragon won’t make us wait: the battle will be in the season three premiere.
According to co-creator and showrunner Ryan Condal, it was no easy task to put together. In addition to ships, there’s a skyward element as Westeros’ various dragonriders join the fight. Condal says the result will be “arguably the craziest episode of television ever made.”
He knew how important the battle was to the Targaryen saga. “To try to tell this story without doing the Gullet would be trying to film Lord of the Rings without doing the Battle of Helm’s Deep. If we were gonna do it, we had to do it right. And that meant dragons and ships and multiple theaters of conflict.”
Abubakar Salim, who plays Alyn of Hull—the Sea Snake’s first mate as well as his bastard son—had a blast filming the battle. He told EW, “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m on a theme park ride.’ I don’t even know how to begin to [describe] the euphoria that hit when I was on that set. It was like I was living my kiddish dreams come true of sailing the seas with a sword.”
We’ll see it for ourselves when House of the Dragon returns to HBO on June 21.
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