House of the Dragon wrapped its third season with episode 8, and the reactions inside Barstool's group chat landed somewhere between euphoria and exhaustion. Robbie Fox came out of the gate hot with his recap, framing the episode as a resurrection for a season that had spent most of its runtime getting picked apart.
HE HAS RISEN - HOUSE OF THE DRAGON S3 FINALE RECAP | GAME OF STOOLS https://t.co/SNayNNV494
Gaz backed that up with maybe the most dramatic swing of the night. He's on record loving 95% of original Game of Thrones and basically hating 75% of House of the Dragon up to this point, which makes his 10/10 verdict on the finale a genuine outlier take. When a guy that skeptical flips that hard, it says something about how big the Battle of Tumbleton actually played.
I loved 95% of OG Game of Thrones. Best show I’ve ever watched. I’ve loved 100% of Knight of the Seven Kingdoms so far I’ve basically hated 75% of House of Dragon. But tonight’s finale ROCKED. 10/10
Not everyone left satisfied, though, and the target of most of the frustration was the same all season: Harrenhal. Jack Kennedy got darkly funny about it, pointing out the meta joke that the cursed castle from the books is also functioning as a literal quality drain on the show. Clem took the bit even further, comparing Harrenhal to the Jets — any character who walks in loses their aura on contact. It's become the running joke of the season, and it clearly hasn't gotten old.
Any House of the Dragon character that goes to Harrenhal loses their aura immediately. Harrenhal is really the New York Jets of Westeros
Kennedy followed his early reaction with a full stock report once the credits rolled. On the stock-up side he singled out Ormund Hightower, Aegon, Rhaenyra and Big Jon Roxton for standout work in the finale. The stock-down list, unsurprisingly, was a Harrenhal reunion tour — Alys Rivers, Aemond and Alicent Hightower all got dinged for storylines he said sucked the air out of a season with only 8 episodes to work with.
Two characters sit at a candlelit table in Harrenhal, the setting Kennedy points to as the season's biggest drag.
There's a real show underneath the Twitter jokes, too. The finale centers on the Battle of Tumbleton and pushes Rhaenyra into a darker, more unhinged phase of her reign, which tracks with why Kennedy had her on his stock-up list despite the character's increasingly grim arc. That tonal shift is exactly the kind of thing that scrambles fan allegiances a season at a time — and Gaz and Nicky Smokes proved it live in real time, with Gaz admitting he's now an Aegon guy and comparing the flip to how he came around on Jaime Lannister and the Hound back in the original series. Nicky's reply was blunt: he can't stand Rhaenyra anymore.
@stoolsalesguy Yes!! I can’t stand Rhaenyra now!
Kelly Keegs, meanwhile, kept the discourse from getting too self-serious by zeroing in on the makeup department. Her read on one character's dragon-eyes look landing closer to sad clown territory is the kind of detail that only sticks after eight weeks of staring at these faces. Between the battle, the Harrenhal jokes and the wardrobe critiques, it's clear the finale gave Barstool's House of the Dragon crowd plenty to chew on heading into whatever comes next for the Targaryen civil war.