How the House of the Dragon season 2 finale pulled off that major Game of Thrones moment

Warning: This article contains spoilers from the House of the Dragon season 2 finale.

It took an entire season, but rogue king consort Daemon's (Matt Smith) extended trip (pun absolutely intended) at Harrenhal finally paid off in a big way in the House of the Dragon season 2 finale.

Not only did Queen Helaena (Phia Saban) appear to Daemon in his latest vision — which now confirms that she is a dragon dreamer, a very rare Targaryen with mystical, prophetic powers — to remind him of his place in this war and deflate his ego, motivating him to finally put an end to his temper tantrum power grab and return to his wife/niece/queen Rhaenyra's (Emma D'Arcy) side. He also saw the same prophecy that Aegon the Conqueror experienced ... including the arrival of his future descendant and Game of Thrones favorite, the one and only Daenerys Targaryen.

The vision (and the camera) only showed Daenerys from the back (Thrones alum Emilia Clarke's face is never seen, so it's hard to call this a true cameo), but it's the exact scene from the Thrones season 1 finale when she emerged from the fire with three hatched dragons. Daemon's vision also included seeing White Walkers marching in the North among other major Thrones moments, as well as important foreshadowing for what's potentially to come in House of the Dragon.

Below, season 2 finale director Geeta Vasant Patel explains to Entertainment Weekly how she — and the show — pulled off that major Thrones moment, and so much more.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Seeing Daenerys in Daemon's vision is such an exciting moment for the show as the most overt Game of Thrones connection yet. What was your reaction when you learned that was coming in your episode?

GEETA VASANT PATEL: I was excited because it's a moment where Daemon understands the future of what's to come, and that House of the Dragon connects to Game of Thrones. It was thrilling for me, as someone who's also a fan of the world of Game of Thrones, so it was very exciting to be able to connect the two time spaces.

Did you shoot any new footage for that vision montage?

Yes. All of that was footage that I shot. The way that the vision, as we call it, started I got the script, and [co-creator] Ryan [Condal] sat down with me and went through the beats that needed to be in that vision. Then he communicated what that vision should be... and what that vision was supposed to convey to Daemon, and that it was a moment that would convince Daemon to look outside of himself and help him realize that he's part of a bigger picture and, for the first time, perhaps convince Daemon to do what's for the better good of the world rather than what's good for himself and his ego.

That vision was important in that it actually had to make an argument without words. And the other thing that Ryan really wanted for that vision was he wanted it to be fragmented. He didn't want it to be linear, so I took the marching orders, sat down with a storyboard artist, and started trying to create this amorphous, fragmented, and yet powerful vision that would tell Daemon what he needed to do next. I found it to be an incredible challenge. I was so thrilled to be trusted with it. I knew that it was going to be difficult, and once I put the storyboards together, I showed it to Ryan, and we are both just super excited about it.

Since you shot new footage, was some of it CG or a stand-in, or was Emilia asked to make a cameo? How exactly did you pull that off?

I don't know about some of those things, because they were above my pay grade. The big thing that was exciting about the vision is that we had this gigantic soundstage, and the stage had different pieces of the vision set up on it, so it was like you had these mini shoots happening. We had the White Walkers, we had Daemon walking through the dead corpses that was supposed to signify the end of dragons, we had the Daenerys section where you have the dragons coming back, we had the eggs, we had the weirwood tree, so it was just amazing to walk onto that set. I thought production did such a great job of organizing how we were going to shoot everything very quickly.

This was one of those moments where you really feel the beauty of cinema. I put together these storyboards, then the storyboards goes to all the departments, so you've got costumes, you've got casting, you've got Jim Clay, our production designer, basically creating everything off of these storyboards. For example, I was saying, "These roots to the tree, let's make them look like umbilical cords, as if this is your history, this is where you came from, Daemon." Jim Clay brought it to life, and then they went to visual effects where they brought the roots to life so that they were palpating like an umbilical cord. All the different areas of filmmaking came together for that vision, and it truly was a vision. Lastly, of course, Catherine Goldschmidt, our brilliant cinematographer, made it all come together through light and shape.

This was one of the most rewarding and challenging moments of my career in television. When I got this vision on the script, it was pretty much bullet points of these visuals, and then it was a collaboration between Ryan and me and Sara Hess, our writer of the episode and executive producer, so it was just awesome to be able to take things one step further and sort of write the transitions of all these moments. I've never been able to do something like that with my job in television, and I'm quite honored that I had the opportunity. I loved every minute of it.

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The finale ends with another big montage, setting the table for what's to come in season 3. There's a lot packed in there — it's almost like you had two entire, additional episodes crammed into the finale with both the vision montage and the ending montage. What was it like filming all those ending scenes?

That montage was quite daunting, to be honest, because I read the script and immediately recognized that there were so many beats in this montage and that it would be long. I was concerned that it would feel boring if executed incorrectly. Montages are very tricky, in my mind, because they can easily be long music videos that have nothing to say. I knew that Ryan and Sara had envisioned this montage to be thrilling, edge of your seat, and to culminate at the moment where Aegon [Tom Glynn-Carney] has escaped King's Landing. What's great about the way that they had built this montage was that there was a story beat that allowed the montage to move the suspense further — if you took the montage out of the episode, it wouldn't work because there was something vital in that montage that we needed for the story. We just need to work on the pacing and the connection of all the pieces.

Each of those pieces, of course, were shot in different locations, different countries, and a collaboration with visual effects. It's an exciting thing to be working with the troops marching. It's just something that makes your heart race, because it's iconic of Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, and George R.R. Martin's world. It's easy for me to get lost in that. Catherine Goldschmidt, the DP, worked really hard to make sure that every frame that we shot had some connective tissue that was leading us to Aegon leaving and him countering the forward progression of this war.

Because if you go back, Rhaenyra and Alicent [Olivia Cooke] had this scene together where Rhaenyra says to Alicent, "You've never given anything up. You've never sacrificed anything," and that's the theme of this season, in my mind. Ryan Condal had [previously] written something to the effect of, "You must sacrifice for duty," and so I took that in the season finale and tried to embed it into as much of our filmmaking as possible to echo and bookend the beginning of this series. In this moment, Rhaenyra challenges Alicent to do just that: Make her sacrifice. And she does. She gives up her son.

So now we think, "These two women are friends. They're going to collaborate. We're going to stop the war." And then the montage culminates with Aegon having left. Everything could possibly be spoiled, because the one thing that Alicent gave up is, of course, no longer going to be valid. Will Rhaenyra believe Alicent if Alicent tells her, "I didn't know [Aegon was leaving]?"

There was a quick shot of Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) looking like a captive in the montage, whom we hadn't seen in a while this season. What was it like adding in that shocking reveal?

It was fun. I am a fan in that moment, because first of all, I love working with Rhys. He's such a brilliant actor. I wish I had lines with him, but I also don't know where he is, so it's exciting for me too.

We also finally see a quick shot of Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell) finding and facing off against the wild dragon. What was it like directing that moment?

That was beautiful to direct, because when I first got the script, I saw all these scenes of Rhaena chasing the dragon and looking for the dragon, and I had to figure out how to make sure it was visually distinct each time we saw her. Ryan and I put our heads together and were trying to figure out how to bring it into the montage when she found the dragon, and yet we wanted to make sure that it didn't step on the foot of the Aegon leaving moment, so that was a really interesting part of structuring the Rhaena beats throughout the episode.

We shot it in Wales and in the U.K. I remember it took a long time to find a location that was exactly right. It had all this texture and different levels of light, and then, of course, the day that we were shooting there was torrential downpour, and you couldn't see anything. [Laughs] We all had really expensive waterproof clothing, and it turned out nothing was waterproof that we had bought. We were all soaked to the bone, but it was one of my favorite days of shooting in my career. There's something beautiful about everyone just letting go and being in this pouring rain. I mean, we had so many technical issues. Cameras weren't working. It was just exactly what I thought it was going to be like when I got this job three years ago. I thought we were going to be up on a mountain, so it was quite romantic to me. When Phoebe ran up that hill and saw the dragon, it was perfect. It felt exactly right.

I also found myself putting myself into Rhaena's shoes quite a bit. I'd worked so hard to work on this show. I had a really hard time getting into this profession, and I had a hard time staying in this profession. All I wanted was to work on this show — at the time, it was Game of Thrones, and I spent seven years trying to get the experience and check all the boxes to even be qualified for the show. Along the way, so many people laughed and said, "There's no way this is going to happen. You know this is not possible," and I kept going because I wanted to do it so badly, and it finally happened and it was magical for me.

So when Rhaena was running, that's exactly the story that I shared with the crew. When I was trying to explain the tone and the feeling, I said, "It's that thing everyone's telling you that you don't deserve and you can't do, and you'll never get there, it'll never happen, and you run as if your life is counting on it. You run with everything you have, and it happens."

Just one more Daenerys question, and I promise that's it: You previously said that the dragon eggs we saw in the other episode you directed this season were the same ones Daenerys gets in Game of Thrones. But then Ryan Condal later said that the eggs are not the same ones she ends up hatching. What did you think of his clarification?

I don't really know. I think it's just fun to speculate that. What if they are? What if they're not? I have no idea. That's all in Ryan's head. Only Ryan holds the keys to that.

House of the Dragon will return for season 3.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.