House of the Dragon co-creator clarifies Daenerys Easter egg: 'I like to think of it as one possible future'

Ryan Condal, the showrunner and co-creator of House of the Dragon, wants to set the record straight about a certain Easter egg that popped up in episode 3.

During the events of “The Burning Mill,” which aired on HBO last week, Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) sends her younger children away from Dragonstone for their own protection after an assassination attempt, tasking her stepdaughter, Lady Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell), with their care. As a thank-you, the queen gives the dragon-less Targaryen four dragon eggs with the promise she can claim the first drake to hatch as her own. 

Three of those eggs looked like the same ones that found themselves in the possession of Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and hatched into Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion during the events of Game of Thrones.

Geeta Patel, who directed this particular HOTD episode, told Mashable in an interview, “Those are Daenerys' eggs. All of us who work on this show are big Game of Thrones fans, so it was very exciting to shoot that scene.”

However, Condal now clarifies to Entertainment Weekly that those eggs are not definitively Dany's. “I think the fun of the history as it was written is that there’s room for interpretation,” he says. “I like to think of it as one possible future.” 

Patel’s quotes quickly made the rounds among the Game of Thrones fandom because they would provide a different origin to the eggs than the one author George R.R. Martin left readers with in his books. In particular, Fire and Blood, his history of the Targaryen empire, seems to track the eggs’ journey to Essos long before the events of the Dance of the Dragons, the Targaryen civil war chronicled on House of the Dragon. From there, they were ferried to Braavos and then disappeared from the historical ledger. 

Martin, however, intentionally wrote Fire and Blood with one narrator pulling information from multiple, often conflicting sources. It’s the ambiguity of what actually happened that’s open to interpretation, as Condal alludes to, and plays into the fun of House of the Dragon. 

Condal also spoke with EW about the events of episode 4, “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” and in particular what happened during the Battle of Rook’s Rest. “This is the first nuclear conflict,” he said. “At the end of this, the world has effectively seen mushroom clouds on the horizon, and they know that we've now moved into a different era of the war. The whole strategy of the war changes after this because everything is so different. This is the thing that Viserys was terrified of. This is the thing that Rhaenys, sitting at her council table, was terrified of.”

Read more about the Battle of Rook’s Rest from the key cast and crew.