House of the Dragon continued to deviate from George RR Martin’s source material in its latest episode – but the director has “controversially” insisted the changes were necessary.

Martin has distanced himself from the hit HBO Game of Thrones prequel, which began in 2022, detailing his issues with showrunner Ryan Condal over several amendments.

These changes have kept coming in the show’s third season, with its latest instalment featuring a first look at Dreamfyre, a dragon who, in Martin’s book Fire & Blood, is bonded to Helaena Targaryen (Phia Sabana).

Generally speaking, the TV show presents a far less formidable version of Helaena than the novel – one who refuses to fly a dragon, believing she would be corrupted if she did so.

The latest episode featured a vision of the future, absent from the books, which depicts the usually insular Helaena confidently astride Dreamfyre, ordering her to breathe fire upon a small army marching her way.

Elsewhere, the kidnapping of Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) by Ormund Hightower (James Norton) is another huge deviation – not to mention his rift with former ally Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy).

Addressing these revisions, director Nina Lopez-Corrado said they help enhance what’s to come in the season three finale.

“We do deviate just a little bit in episode seven from what’s originally in the books and, personally, from a character standpoint, what Ryan [Condal, showrunner] and the writers did in terms of that really helped evolve the character storylines from what were in the books,” she told Entertainment Weekly*. *

”I know that’s a very controversial thing to say for diehards, but I think some of the storylines that you’re gonna see in [episode] seven that’ll carry on into eight were really executed strongly by the writers and also by the actors.”

The forthcoming eighth episode will serve as the season three finale, teeing up the action for a fourth and final season of the spin-off series. The last episode is set to feature the Battle of Tumbleton, one of the book’s most deadly conflicts.

Posting on his blog in August 2024, Martin said that there were “larger and more toxic” changes being made to the series in both season three and four.

The Game of Thrones author, who has a co-creator and executive producer credit on the show, said he had a “pretty wretched year” and wasn’t looking forward to writing “about everything that’s gone wrong with House of the Dragon”.

Condal has addressed the “disappointing” criticism, explaining that the source material was not a straightforward narrative and required a looser interpretation.

“It was disappointing,” Condal told Entertainment Weekly of Martin’s comments. “I will simply say I’ve been a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire for almost 25 years now, and working on the show has been truly one of the great privileges of, not only my career as a writer, but my life as a fan of science-fiction and fantasy.

“George himself is a monument, a literary icon in addition to a personal hero of mine, and was heavily influential on me coming up as a writer.”

“It’s this incomplete history and it requires a lot of joining of the dots and a lot of invention as you go along the way,” Condal said.

“I will simply say, I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did. Over years and years. And we really enjoyed a mutually fruitful, I thought, really strong collaboration for a long time.

“But at some point, as we got deeper down the road, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way. And I think as a showrunner, I have to keep my practical producer hat on and my creative writer, lover-of-the-material hat on at the same time.”

“At the end of the day, I just have to keep marching not only the writing process forward, but also the practical parts of the process forward for the sake of the crew, the cast, and for HBO, because that’s my job,” he continued.

“So I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday. But that’s what I have to say about it.”