What happens to Sheepstealer in House of the Dragon? Ryan Condal compares him to a stray dragged into doggy daycare

Season 3 gave her the dragon. Then it made her pay for it, repeatedly, on camera.

The claiming, and the immediate disaster

Sheepstealer, the mud-colored wild dragon who spent his youth eating livestock, accepts Rhaena in the Season 3 premiere. Triumph! Except she immediately flies him into the Battle of the Gullet, which is like adopting a shelter dog on Monday and entering him in a dog show on Tuesday.

Chaos ensues. When Jace realizes the rider is Rhaena, he orders Vermax to pull back to avoid killing her, which drops Vermax within range of the enemy ships. Vermax gets hooked, dragged under, and drowned. Jace unhooks himself, swims for the surface, and is shot by crossbowmen. Two deaths, one panicked dragon, one cousin who now has an unforgivable line on her résumé.

Showrunner Ryan Condal's read on the whole thing is the best quote of the season. "This is basically Rhaena found a mutt eating out of the garbage in an alley and then grabbed him and brought him to doggy daycare," he said in HBO's inside-the-episode video, "and everybody is surprised that everything goes totally to hell."

Condal's point is that Sheepstealer isn't evil. He's a frightened animal who has never seen ships, fire, or other dragons, and he reacts the way a stray would. The stray in this case is the size of a cathedral.

The hiding, and the getting found

After the Gullet, Rhaena and Sheepstealer go into hiding in the Vale, and Daemon covers for her when he finds them, because Daemon's relationship with his daughters is one long apology tour.

Then Rhaenyra finds out. Episode 7, "The Dragon in Winter," is the one everyone's still arguing about: Rhaenyra and Addam of Hull track Daemon and Rhaena down, and Syrax, Caraxes, and Seasmoke corner Sheepstealer three-on-one. Caraxes gets his jaws into Sheepstealer's neck. Rhaenyra orders Daemon to have Caraxes finish him.

He doesn't. Sheepstealer, badly wounded, limps off into the mountains. Rhaena is taken back to King's Landing as Rhaenyra's prisoner, and Daemon's restraint is one of the season's quietest, biggest moments.

Where things stand after the finale

Here's what the Season 3 finale, which aired August 9, does and does not resolve:

• Rhaena is still locked up in the Red Keep. Baela calls Rhaenyra out for it and gets "grounded."
• Sheepstealer is not shown again. No body, no sighting, nothing.
• Syrax appeared to take damage in the fight, which matters for Rhaenyra's dragon math going into the final season.
• Team Black started the finale with six dragons and ended with, generously, one healthy one and a lot of asterisks.

So the honest answer to "what happens to Sheepstealer" is: he survives Episode 7, and then the show simply declines to tell you more until Season 4.

What the book does (and why it doesn't help)

In Fire & Blood, Sheepstealer's rider isn't Rhaena at all. It's Nettles, a dragonseed the show cut and folded into Rhaena's arc. Book Nettles and Sheepstealer fly off into the Mountains of the Moon after Rhaenyra orders her killed, and George R.R. Martin never records the dragon's death. There are rumors of a "fire witch" among the mountain clans. That's it.

Which means the show can do whatever it wants. Sheepstealer could heal and come back for Rhaena. He could go feral. He could show up in the finale of the entire series and eat someone important. Martin left the door open; Condal has already walked through several of them.

Phoebe Campbell has said she modeled her bond with the dragon rig partly on her own dog, Tina. Somewhere a very good girl is getting a lot of treats for this.

Season 4 is the last one. If the show wants a full-circle moment for the dragonless Targaryen who finally got a dragon and then lost him in a ravine, this is the place. I'll be watching with the lights off and a blanket, like a coward.