#3495 House of the Dragon S03E08: Open a New Window

**Ben Mandelker** (0:34)
Well, hello, and welcome to Watch What Crappens. Winter is Croppening, our House of the Dragon podcast. Thank you so much for being here, everybody. It is season finale time. If you want this on video, you can get it on video. Come to our Watch What Crappens Patreon. That's where you get ad-free listening, bonus episodes, all that good stuff. So join us over there.
Can't believe, this was a nail-biter of an episode. How did you feel? I was, I was stressing.

**Ronnie Karam** (1:07)
I was stressing.
We knew everything was gonna go wrong. I was deeply unhappy with the things that happened, but like that's just what this universe is, right? Like nothing goes according to plan. We always know it's not gonna go according to plan. We know things are gonna get messed up. I just basically tease that it's gonna get messed up, but I am sad to see Rae Rae descend into fascism. That's a real, that's a real sad turn. And we know it was gonna happen. I didn't actually, I should say coming into the season, I did not know that was gonna happen. I thought she was still gonna be great Rae Rae and that she was going to just face, you know, various setbacks and all of her plans was still never come to fruition because of all sorts of other bullshit. What I was not expecting was her to descend into fascism and I didn't realize that was the plan until I, you know, I started watching the after the show, you know, little things where they talk with the creators and they were like, this is the first sign that she's being gripped with paranoia and that everything's gonna go badly for her. And I was like, what, what, why are you doing that? No, stop it, stop it.

**Ben Mandelker** (2:16)
Well, I figured things were gonna go badly because I watched that same after the show that you did. And I mean, it's the after the HBO one.
And when they said she cut her finger on the chair, and that was, you know, we know what happened to her father. And so I was thinking, oh God, now we're gonna have to watch her rot. I don't want to watch another person rot on TV. Please don't. And especially Rae Rae, I love her.

**Ronnie Karam** (2:37)
I know, I was like, I felt like it was the first time I really understood the betrayal that people felt in Game of Thrones when Daenerys went and burned down the whole city. Because, you know, as I've said many times, you all probably can tell by the things I say sometimes, is that I did not watch Game of Thrones from the beginning, the way everyone else did. I binged the whole show leading up to the final season, like the final half of the final season. And so for me, I watched it all at once. And it was a very different experience than spending eight or nine years, you know, watching the show and then spending nine or 10 months talking about it, making, you know, getting invested in different characters and yada, yada, yada. So I think a lot of people who are on that, like, multi-year journey, by the time Daenerys, like, lost her mind and torched King's Landing, it felt like a huge betrayal. And to me, I was like, that was just another twist in the show. Whereas this time with Rae Rae, I feel the betrayal. I feel the character betrayal. And like, there have been people online who are like, yes, we love that she's in her bad bitch era. Yes, she just sold her enemies. This is how I'm going to do it. But in my mind, I'm like, no, no, I like what she's doing.
No, no, she's in her incompetent era. That's what she's in.

**Ben Mandelker** (3:56)
Girl, she can't even put on her eyeliner. She does it vertically in between her two eyes. Like, you know, one of those creepy old clown dolls or like a joker on a card. Yeah. What are you doing?

**Ronnie Karam** (4:09)
Like the lips.
Well, that's, Miseria clearly did her makeup too. She's like, okay, Linda, you do my makeup today. Linda's like, okay, do I do it like this? I'm like, fine, it'll just be my look.

**Ben Mandelker** (4:21)
She's got to sell it.
Well, they've been giving us Rae as a terrible leader the whole season, but that's kind of normal on this show because everyone just is like, oh, I want the job. Then they get the job. The job sucks, you know? And then we have to watch them kind of adjust to the job. And so it was kind of a workplace adjustment type thing. So I was with you. I don't know the end. I haven't looked at the book spoilers and all of that. So I don't know. I mean, I have little clues because people do spoil little things here and there. But I didn't know that it was gonna go this bad and that Rae Rae was gonna be fucking at fault.