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SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of “House of the Dragon,” now streaming on HBO Max.

HBO’s “House of the Dragon” ended its third season Sunday with a bang, then a whimper.

Following a slew of casualties (including James Norton’s Ormund Hightower) during a massive battle between the Blacks and the Greens at Tumbleton, Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban) jumps to her death off screen in King’s Landing.

While players on both sides of the battle for the Iron Throne are to blame for the carnage, Season 3 of the “Game of Thrones” prequel has put forward the quickly unraveling Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) as the one most responsible for the fire and blood. And “House of the Dragon” co-creator and showrunner Ryan Condal is prepared for Rhaenyra’s heel turn to be compared to that of her descendant Daenerys Targaryen (played by Emilia Clarke) in 2019’s “Game of Thrones” series finale.

“I think that’s wonderful if people draw parallels between this and the original series,” Condal said during a press conference Friday. “For sure, there’s going to be mirroring and echoes and reflections across the two series, and people will see things that are either intentional or subliminal. And I will just say that I think this is a one of those existential themes that goes across this entire universe, which is the draw of the Iron Throne — what it does to a person in its thrall, or the people that are trying to get to it.”

Condal notes the “big difference” here is that “Daenerys only got to the Iron Throne at the very end, after she had destroyed the city,” while “Rhaenyra goes through this experience of having the throne, trying to hold it and being, in a way, turned and changed by it — altered by the experience.”

“They’re very different things, but I think the parallels do call to the greater themes of the ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ universe, which is pride and power, and how power corrupts, and how far it corrupts. And it can change good people into corrupted people,” Condal says. “It can take corrupted people and make them real villains, and other people, like Viserys, it can simply just destroy.”

It seems the Iron Throne is doing a mixture of both to Rhaenyra by the end of the third season of “House of the Dragon.” She’s been pricked and bloodied by it, and is now making the choice to turn violent herself, becoming responsible (directly or inadvertently) for more than one death in the finale.

“I really wanted to make sure that that journey was a legible one,” D’Arcy says. “I think, broadly, if we’re to be more practiced at protecting democracy, which seems increasingly fragile at times, we have to be smarter about understanding the behaviors of dictatorial leaders. I think Ryan and I both, this was an opportunity to attempt to try and make a certain type of behavior at least understood by an audience. And from an acting perspective, it felt much more playable to think about empathy and the sort of empathetic machine and how that gets damaged and affected by events, than it did to sort of solely think about her relationship with authoritarianism or something.”

Rhaenyra orders Daemon (Matt Smith) to take Tumbleton, and kill every Hightower he can while leaving its people as unharmed as possible. Daemon brings troops and his dragon Caraxes, but holds out on laying siege for as long as possible, especially as Ormund has stationed children on the battlements and in front of the gates to the city. Eventually, Daemon uses Caraxes to burn down the entrance so that the Blacks can storm the town in search of Ormund and his Rhaenyra’s latest rival, Daeron (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth). The plan is to take those Hightowers out before turning to the matter of a revived Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) and his dragon Sunfyre.

By the end, many of Rhaenyra’s supporters, including Northmen Roddy the Ruin (Tommy Flanagan), have been killed by a traitorous Ulf (Tom Bennett) and his dragon Silverwing — but so has Ormund, who went up in flames when Ulf double-crossed him, too.

Daemon, Corlys (Steve Toussaint) and Hugh (Kieran Bew) make it out alive, and the last we see of Ulf, he is being chased by Daemon on Caraxes and Hugh on Vermithor. Back in the burnt Tumbleton, Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox) is barely left standing, while the fate of Daeron and his dragon Tessarion are unknown.

“All season long, we’re setting up this classic medieval siege, which is really where we wanted to get to, and the fun of that, the concept of that battle was that Ormund had basically done all he could to blunt the threat of Rhaenyra’s greatest power — which is that she has, or had, six dragons, under her command at that point,” Condal says. “So how do I take the dragons off the board and make this an even fight, man-to-man? And he sees his army as better trained and better suited than the rivermen that are coming to attack. He knows the ground, he’s inside the city, they have to come over the walls, sacrifice a bunch of their men. It was a very, very, very complex thing to fold all together, but we wanted to do a classic Medieval siege. That was the elevator pitch for the finale.”

Back in King’s Landing, Rhaenyra is making moves she thinks will keep her firmly on the Iron Throne as long as Daemon and his team pull through. She kicks Mysaria out of the Red Keep, and has a captive, pregnant Helaena forcefed to keep her alive. Rhaenyra dons some Joan of Arc-esque armor, and has Alyn (Abubakar Salim) escort her and her young son and new heir Joffrey (Oscar Eskinazi) to the sept, where she demands to be annointed as the queen in front of all her people. When the High Septon refuses this request yet again, in favor of supporting Aegon’s return, she orders his execution.

Then Rhaenyra takes to the streets, and tells the people of King’s Landing the prophecy her father, Viserys, entrusted to her: Aegon the Conqueror’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” vision of the Targaryens and their dragons being the only ones who can defeat the whitewalkers in the future. She tells the crowd (which Mysaria is hiding in) that she is the “prince that was promised,” and they look on in shock, confusion and fear.

It’s a big moment for fans who will recall the importance of this prophecy to the original “Game of Thrones” series, and how “House of the Dragon” has incorporated it into its own mythology in a break from its source material, George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood.”

“It’s not in the book, and it’s not in the history, but there is a bunch of talk about how Rhaenyra became very despotic, and became a tyrant at the end, and was very unpopular with the people,” Condal says. “So we saw it as, this could just be something that happened, and there was disagreement over exactly, what it was, so it didn’t make the historical record. My glib toss-off from the historians is, ‘Oh, well, Targaryens say crazy shit all the time.’ But so much of their existence is this self-aggrandizement. And for the stonemasons standing there in the crowd just looking up at this, it could just sound like somebody trying to make something of themselves, because they have no idea of all the quote-unquote real history that went into Rhaenyra making that speech.”

Condal says the scene was written into the “House of the Dragon” storyline because the writers wanted “a real seismic change, a sea change in Rhaenyra’s relationship to her people” leading into the final season.

“She’s seen to the death of their religious leaders, she’s standing outside of the church of the faith of most of the people standing there, as a member of a totally different faith, this old Valyrian faith of dragons and fire gods and blood magic,” Condal says. “And [she’s] pronouncing herself this chosen one, the leader that is going to take them through the fire and out of the darkness.”

When Rhaenyra returns to the Red Keep, she receives the terrible news that Helaena has jumped to her death. (Read Variety‘s interview with Phia Saban here.) In Helaena’s room, Rhaenyra finds a tapestry Helaena had just finished sewing that predicts a dark and fiery end for Rhaenyra in the future. Now, she’s left to wonder how the people — including Helaena’s traveling mother, Alicent (Olivia Cooke), her childhood best friend — will react when they learn of Helaena’s death. And who they will blame.

The “House of the Dragon” team has already broken the “superstructure” story for the final season, and Condal has handed in a draft of the first episode to HBO, but there’s no timeline for when Season 4 will air just yet. Condal says he has been on a break throughout the airing of Season 3.

“No, I’ve actually taken time off,” Condal says. “I needed to step away from all of this. But we have an incredible season coming. As crazy and big as Season 3 was, I think Season 4 is going to be even bigger.”

Condal adds: “It’s a great privilege to be able to tell a story, and to be able to control and write the ending, and to control when and where that happens. This is not a given in making television, certainly. So, we’re very excited to get back in, and we have new characters, and new dragons and new locations all to come, that I think are gonna make it a very worthy, final season.”

For more of Variety’s “House of the Dragon” finale coverage, read this interview with Phia Saban, who plays Helaena Targaryen and this interview with James Norton, who plays Ormund Hightower. This interview has been edited and condensed.

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of “House of the Dragon,” now streaming on HBO Max.

HBO’s “House of the Dragon” lost its moral center with the death of Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban) in Sunday’s Season 3 finale.

The pregnant Helaena takes her own life by jumping from her window in the Red Keep when left alone in her room. It’s a death many fans saw coming following a season of Helaena’s ominous visions and deep depression over being secluded from her young daughter, Jaehaera, in King’s Landing. Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) discovers Helaena’s suicide just before the episode ends.

“It’s a tragedy. That’s definitely the arc of Helaena’s story,” Saban tells Variety. “But I think, as she says earlier, ‘This is my body, and this is my baby — and both of those things have been forsaken as long as I’ve lived.’ And she doesn’t want to live the way she’s living anymore, and she feels that she wants to protect the children that she does have. She’s just trying her best.”

Before she died, Helaena left behind the final piece of a tapestry she’s been embroidering throughout all of “House of the Dragon” Season 3 for Rhaenyra to find. After the image of Rhaenyra jumping to her own death and landing on spikes, Rhaenyra sees a depiction of her on the Iron Throne with blood streaming down from the crown on her head and surrounded by dragon flames.

During a press conference, D’Arcy called Helaena the “moral heart of the show” and predicted how her death will affect Rhaenyra heading into “House of the Dragon”’s fourth and final season.

“She’s maybe the only character who has a proximity to power, but remains kind of uncontaminated,” D’Arcy says. “And so, I think her death, condemns Rhaenyra to the path she’s chosen. There’s no way back after that. There’s certainly no route back to a more moderate form of leadership. And, I mean, I don’t know where we go from here, but I imagine it’s likely to be impassable in her relationship with Alicent, which I think also means Helaena’s death condemns Rhaenyra to be alone in her pursuit for power.”

While creator Ryan Condal has deviated on “House of the Dragon” from the source material in author George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” Helaena’s arc has had some of the most significant changes, including the exclusion of her youngest child, Maelor. In Martin’s version, Helaena dies by suicide after Maelor — who survived the “Blood & Cheese” incident in Season 2 — is brutally murdered while she’s locked up in the tower. And she is not pregnant at the time of her death.

Saban says these book plot points didn’t affect her performance of the character on “House of the Dragon.”

“I think you can only play the story that you’re telling,” Saban says. “So really it’s the character that I built, and the story that Ryan and Sarah [Hess] and all the writers were creating, that was really all that felt relevant. But I know that there are differences in the stories, and I think that some of those differences are really cool. And I don’t think that Helena would have been maybe such a juicy part for me personally to play if there weren’t some of the differences that have been made. So you kind of just roll with the punches.”

See below for more from Variety‘s interview with Saban about the “House of the Dragon” Season 3 finale.

I don’t know how much you follow stuff online, but Helaena has been a deeply beloved character, and even more so this season. I think people just want her to be with her chickens and her babies, so I know they are going to take this very hard, and it really mirrors what happens in the book “Fire & Blood,” because the smallfolk will take Helaena’s death so hard. How do you personally feel, knowing that this is all coming? Helaena’s death is really a turning point in this series.

It’s very nice to hear that, and that people care. I guess that’s really what you can hope for. That one way or another, people sort of care whether you live or die. So that’s very nice to hear.

During the finale conversation between Helaena and Rhaenyra, Helaena tells the story of a beetle she likes, and Rhaenyra’s like, “That’s great. You could show me sometime.” And Helaena says, “You don’t care. You’re pretending. You’re ugly.” Does she now dislike Rhaenyra more than she doesn’t like Aegon? What brought her to this point with Rhaenyra, and would she have previously chosen Rhaenyra as the “better” one?

Interesting. I don’t know about the comparison. I think the context is so different for both of them. It’s very hard to compare. The feeling from Rhaenyra is that she feels extremely violated. She feels her freedom’s been violated by her and her relationship to freedom and to nature and to all of the things that feed her as a person have been taken away. So I suppose it’s more than a punishment — I feel it’s more like a home truth. You’re looking for what’s useful to you, and there are things in the world that are fascinating and beautiful, despite how they relate to like power struggles in the kingdom. And I think she just is making a point about that. That there’s more to life. And actually, I think she’s proud that that’s how she feels.

Do you think Helaena reaches her breaking point because of Mysaria’s warning to her? If she hadn’t had that interaction with Mysaria, would she have kept going as she was?

I don’t think it wouldn’t have happened if Mysaria didn’t say it, but I do think it’s just another addition to the descent. There’s a confirmation of what Helaena already feels, which is that she is never going to live a life again in which she feels alive. And that’s kind of what Helaena says to Rhaenyra. She’s like, “There’s more to life than not just not being dead. Like, the bar is on the floor. I have higher dreams and hopes and feelings for the world than that.” In a sense, maybe some might say that she takes power from what she does. That she can, rather than being killed by a vision, she can choose that for herself.

We’ve gotten a lot of Helaena’s visions this season. Which one did you enjoy performing the most? What did you think was the most powerful?

I love all of them. I can’t say that I didn’t love being on the dragon. That’s like a bucket list thing. We’re on the dragon show — I had to get in there. So I’m very grateful that was written for me. And I loved it. It was so fun.

Helaena chose to stop working on her tapestry and leave it behind where Rhaenyra will presumably find it. It looks like Rhaenyra is bleeding from the crown in that final embroidery — is that what you think that is?

I think Helaena’s embroideries blend a sort of dreamlike and literal. It’s an art form, so I don’t think she’s subscribing to necessarily always realism. But yes, it didn’t look like a great portent, did it? Wish her all the best, though!

For more of Variety’s “House of the Dragon” finale coverage, read this recap and story about the press conference with co-creator Ryan Condal and star Emma D’Arcy and this interview with James Norton, who plays Ormund Hightower. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Kiran Abbavaram‘s mythological action-fantasy for Zee Studios has revealed its title as “Indraputra,” with the pan-Indian project, directed by Srikanth Puppala, set to begin principal photography in October.

Abbavaram takes on a mythology-rooted part built around the conflict between dharma, the principle of righteous duty and moral order in Hindu philosophy, and adharma, its violation. The film is designed as a pan-India release intended to reach audiences across languages, and is positioned as the opening chapter of a broader mythological universe.

“‘Indraputra’ is very different and unconventional from anything I have done before,” Abbavaram said. “The moment I heard the story, I realized it was a film that would stimulate me further as an actor and it very well aligns with my cinematic vision. The role requires both emotional depth and physical changes, and I am excited to bring this character to life. I am thankful to Zee Studios and Srikanth garu for believing in me. I can’t wait to start this amazing journey.”

Abbavaram made his acting debut in 2019 with the romantic comedy “Raja Vaaru Rani Gaaru.” 2021’s “SR Kalyanamandapam,” which he also wrote, built his wider profile. He went on to star in “Sebastian P.C. 524” and “Sammathame” in 2022, followed by three releases in 2023 including “Vinaro Bhagyamu Vishnu Katha,” with “K-Ramp” and “Chennai Love Story” being his most recent releases.

“Indraputra” is produced by Zee Studios and Prerna Arora, and co-produced by Keerthan. The film is now in pre-production ahead of an October start, with the supporting cast, technical crew and release date to be revealed imminently.

“Indraputra” marks Puppala’s feature directorial debut. He previously worked in the direction teams of “Kudi Yedamaithe,” “Katamarayudu” and “Gopala Gopala,” and most recently served as first assistant director to Rishab Shetty on “Kantara: A Legend – Chapter 1.”

“‘Indraputra’ is a dream that has been close to my heart for a very long time,” Puppala said. “Our mythology is filled with timeless stories, and with this film, we aim to present one such epic on a scale that is both visually spectacular and emotionally relevant to the audiences across the country. Having Kiran Abbavaram lead this journey is truly exciting, as he brings sincerity, intensity, and conviction to the character. I thank Zee Studios for placing their faith in this vision, and I am really looking forward to taking ‘Indraputra’ on floors this October.”

Arora’s credits include “Toilet: Ek Prem Katha” and “Dhundh.” She has an existing relationship with Zee Studios, having previously produced “Jatadhara” for the studio.

“‘Indraputra’ is the beginning of a world we have been passionately building,” Arora said. “Inspired by the richness of Indian mythology, infused with a contemporary vision, the film marks the first chapter of a very expansive mythological universe.”

“Indraputra” joins a run of pan-India projects built around interconnected mythological worlds, following Ele Animations’ “Mahaprabhu Jagannath,” the launch title of its planned Sanatan Universe, and Hombale Films and Kleem Productions’ “Mahavatar Cinematic Universe,” an animated franchise built around the 10 avatars of Vishnu, spanning seven features from 2025’s “Mahavatar Narsimha” through 2037.