But I think the joy, if that can be the word in slaughter,

it's just that it's so life is simpler here.

I mean, I don't want him to sound like some sort of bloodthirsty tyrant,

but I think there is a, there I say, it's a certain joy

in being able to just be elemental.

Welcome back to West of Westeros, Entertainment Weekly's Game of Thrones podcast.

I'm Nick Romano, a senior writer here at EW, and I'm joined by two special guest hosts this week.

EW staff writer, Christian Hollab, and Pace Magazine TV editor and critic, Alison Kean. You guys, I'm so thrilled that you both are here. Thank you so much for being here. I'm excited. Thank you so much. I'm ready to dive in. This is a crazy episode. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. I've been really enjoying the show so far.

So I'm glad to take the chance to crash your guys' pod and talk about it a little bit.

We love crashing pods over here.

Yeah, I mean, there's so much to unpack in episode three, which we're going to get into in a moment.

But we first have some pretty big news that we need to talk about.

It was revealed on Wednesday that Miguel Sopachnik, who we know from his work on Game of Thrones,

is stepping down as co-showrunner and director of House of the Dragon after feeling the fatigue of working on Game of Thrones for all these years.

And now Ryan Condal, who co-created House of the Dragon with George

R.R. Martin, will be the sole showrunner on season two, while Alan Taylor, another director and

executive producer from Thrones, is stepping in to executive produce and direct episodes of

season two. That's a lot of words, a lot of information. Alison, I'm going to start with you to kick us off. What was your first reaction after hearing about that development?

Well, I thought there was going to be all kinds of drama, right? Because the first thing I saw was just Twitter headlines of like, Miguel Sopachnik has left House of the Dragon. I was like, oh my gosh, we've only had, you know, at this point two episodes of air. This is going to just be some sort of whole thing. I read the Hollywood Report of Peace and I was like, no, just sounds like he's,

you know, he's done a lot of good work for a long time and he's pretty tired. It was interesting,

too, to read about his hesitation, really, to even come on in that much of a showrunner and executive producer role to begin with. And so I think, you know, it seems like they've wrapped season one.

And so thinking about moving forward, he wants to take a break, I get it.

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