The king is dead. Long live…the queen? That’s certainly the hope for Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) as she leads House of the Dragon into the endgame of its first season, with veteran director Greg Yaitanes flying right at her side behind the scenes.

Yaitanes—an award-winning director who, not unlike Aemond Targaryen claiming Vhagar, secured a directing Emmy for House in 2008 against the likes of the Breaking Bad and Mad Men pilots—is the man behind the lens for “The Black Queen,” the House of the Dragon season finale that takes its name from Rhaenyra’s fearsome title. With a litany of television credits under his belt, including household names like Lost, Yaitanes’s description of the finale sets the bar very high. As he tells Vanity Fair, “If I have five things that I, in 30 years [of directing] am most proud of, this is absolutely on that list.”

Heading into the finale, the stakes in Westeros are as high as they’ve been all season long. With the recent death of Paddy Considine’s Viserys Targaryen, House Hightower’s slow-simmering ambitions for the Iron Throne are now fully boiled. In season one’s penultimate episode, “The Green Council,” Queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke) and her allies made their first move, installing Viserys’s son Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) as the new king of the realm. For her part, the late king’s daughter and true heir, Rhaenyra, was completely absent from the hour, unaware of her father’s death, let alone the theft of the throne. Expect that information to land early in the finale, and to land hard, according to Yaitanes.

“You have to imagine, who haven’t you answered for in episode nine?” he says about what viewers should expect from the final episode of the season. “And what would they be experiencing with the news that is going to inevitably reach them?”

Those who have read George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood have some insight into how Rhaenyra’s family will react to the news, especially after watching HBO’s finale trailer, which hints at one of the book’s hardest-hitting deaths. For his part, Yaitanes was among the first people to learn what the episode would entail, having powered through the full first season’s scripts in a single weekend. Where some would walk away intimidated by the emotional toll of the episode, Yaitanes felt exhilarated. “I really connected with it,” he says, though his lips are sealed on the specific elements that stood out to him most.

Just as the finale boasts twists that will change House of the Dragon forever, much of Yaitanes’s own journey through Westeros has played out unexpectedly. For one thing, he says he was originally going to direct the seventh episode, “Driftmark,” before scheduling left him directing episode two, “The Rogue Prince.” (Yaitanes says he was always meant to direct the third episode, “Second of His Name,” due to his experience helming action-heavy sequences on shows such as the Cinemax dramas Banshee and Quarry.) For another, Yaitanes says he almost directed episodes of the original Game of Thrones; once again, scheduling issues got in the way. Still, heading into the prequel series, Yaitanes wanted to immerse himself in as much Thrones content as possible, leading him to rewatch the entire series, his third time through Westeros.

“I know that it took it on the chin a little bit, but I really appreciated that last season,” he says of his takeaways from the rewatch. “When you really watch it straight through, everything is earned, and it’s right there, and it’s been telling you everything all along. And the fact that I could sit in those episodes, which were kind of mini-movies at that point, I ended up really having love for it…not just for the whole experience of the journey, but really that last season.”

Fan criticism of the final season notwithstanding, Yaitanes cites the work of Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as one of the primary reasons why House of the Dragon has achieved so much acclaim though season one.

“It literally felt like I was building on the shoulders of giants,” he says. “In a way, this was Game of Thrones season nine. We had the infrastructure, we had the knowledge [from Benioff and Weiss’s work]. Even though the world needed to be created [again], I cannot undersell how much it helps you when you’re not building from scratch—you know what the Red Keep looks like. You can spend that last bit of energy making it a little unfamiliar because it’s changed over 200 years.”

While Benioff and Weiss were not involved in making House of the Dragon, one key figure from the Game of Thrones era was very much in place for the prequel: Miguel Sapochnik, the Emmy-winning director of Thrones episode “Battle of the Bastards,” among many others. Sapochnik served as co-showrunner on Dragon’s first season, and was one of the chief forces responsible for bringing Yaitanes into the realm. Interestingly, the roles were reversed long ago, when Yaitanes brought Sapochnik from the world of features into the world of television by way of a very different (if similarly named) television series, Fox’s House.

“The Maester version of House on Game of Thrones would be brilliant,” Yaitanes laughs, imagining Hugh Laurie’s surly doctor at the head of the Targaryen family. “I’d watch that SNL sketch.”

Sapochnik will not be returning as showrunner for House of the Dragon season two, but Yaitanes says his longtime colleague’s impact will very much remain intact as the show moves forward: “He is a true artist…I can see his fingerprints all over the work of this season. And I completely understand when you feel you have nothing else to prove, you want to move on to the next creative endeavor.” Meanwhile, Yaitanes hopes his own time in the Game of Thrones universe is just getting started, even with two years of his life already devoted to the prequel’s first season, and who knows how many for the currently developing second season.

“I’ve been directing for 30 years,” he says. “When you’re coming into those years, you want to choose whatever those last 10 projects of your career are going to be and where you’re going to want to put your time, and more importantly, where you want to trade time with your family. And this is an endeavor. The payback for being gone [from them] for as long as I was is my kids are able to drive up and down Sunset [Boulevard] and see House of the Dragon [billboards] everywhere. Getting those cool-dad points are pretty valuable!”

Alas, cool-dad points are not always enough to secure the Iron Throne, as the late Viserys’s favorite daughter, Rhaenyra, may find out in the House of the Dragon season finale, airing October 23 on HBO and HBO Max.