House of the Dragon’s Season 2 Finale Revealed Otto Hightower’s Whereabouts

House of the Dragon’s second season has officially ended, and the concluding consensus seems to be that it was a bit of a mixed bag overall. While many of the individual parts were typically excellent, as a whole, it lacked a clear direction and spent too much time spinning its wheels. The season finale was surprisingly anticlimactic, mostly consisting of setup for the show’s third season and leaving a lot of loose ends still to be tied up.

One of the most baffling loose ends involved one of the first season’s key players, Hand of the King Otto Hightower. That character was missing in action for weeks on end this year, only to reappear in Sunday’s finale, biding his time in a prison cell. Since Otto’s absence hadn’t really been felt this season, and especially since we don’t have any clear information on his captors, his return felt more puzzling than shocking. But today, we’re revisiting the clues House of the Dragon Season 2 gave us and theorizing what happened to Otto Hightower.

What Clues Did House of the Dragon Season 2 Give Us?

At the start of House of the Dragon’s second season, Otto Hightower remains Hand of the King, serving Aegon II and the rest of Team Green with total loyalty. But even he’s smart enough to recognize when the young Aegon’s actions are out of line, and he notably chastises him after he publicly executes all ratcatchers in King’s Landing (one of them being Cheese, the assassin who killed his young son).

Aegon doesn’t take kindly to this pushback, so he promptly dismisses Otto from his position, replacing him with Ser Criston Cole. Shortly after, he decides to leave King’s Landing and return to Oldtown, the Hightowers’ seat, knowing that recruiting Alicent’s youngest son, Daeron, could bode well for Team Green. Alicent instead advises him to go to Highgarden to secure their alliance with House Tyrell. This is the last we see of Otto until the finale, and we don’t even know if he decides to journey to Oldtown or Highgarden.

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Over the next few weeks, Otto gets brief mentions here and there. In the season’s sixth episode, Alicent speaks with her brother Gwayne, revealing that the ravens she’s sent to their father have gone unanswered. This makes it clear that something bad has likely happened to Otto, and these fears are exacerbated later in the episode when Prince Aemond sends Larys Strong to track down the former Hand of the King and reinstate him to his old position.

But the biggest clue may be one that almost no one realized immediately. In Season 2’s penultimate episode, “The Red Sowing,” Aemond tries to secure loyalty with the Triarchy in order to fight off Team Black’s blockade of the city. As he takes note of his allies, Lord Jasper Wylde reports that Ser Ormund Hightower is dealing with the threat of armies allied with House Beesbury. Crucially, a member of House Beesbury appeared in House of the Dragon’s first season, which might give us the answer about Otto’s whereabouts.

Did House Beesbury Abduct Otto Hightower?

To put it mildly, House Beesbury has very good reason to want revenge against Team Green and, by extension, the Hightowers. At the start of the series, when King Viserys was still on the Iron Throne, Lord Lyman Beesbury served on the Small Council as Master of Coin. He was so loyal to his king, in fact, that after he died, he was the only member of the Small Council to protest the decision to install Aegon II as king over Rhaenyra. Ser Criston Cole subsequently responded to his protest by smashing his head against the table until he was dead.

This, coupled with their brief mention near the end of Season 2, makes House Beesbury by far the likeliest culprit behind Otto’s abduction. It also seems possible that they could play a part in Season 3 as a key ally to Rhaenyra, motivated by revenge against Aegon’s loyalists. In the book Fire and Blood, they do exactly that, leaving the Reach heavily divided (House Tyrell notably stays neutral) and eventually resulting in the Battle of the Honeywine, in which House Beesbury plays a crucial part. That said, the kidnapping doesn’t even happen in the books; after Criston Cole is appointed Hand of the King, Otto is sent to recruit the Triarchy (rather than Tyland Lannister). And eventually, after Rhaenyra takes King’s Landing, he’s unceremoniously beheaded for being a traitor.

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But in the unlikely chance that House Beesbury isn’t responsible for Otto’s abduction, who else could it be? The other obvious culprit is Master of Whisperers Larys Strong, who remains loyal to Aegon II even after Aemond starts ruling in his stead. Since the brothers’ rivalry is yet another wrinkle in a fractured Targaryen dynasty, it’s highly plausible that Larys secretly imprisoned Otto even after Aemond ordered him to bring him back. For a character like Larys, who seems to be the show’s biggest schemer (and an equivalent to Game of Thrones’ Littlefinger), it’s perfectly in character for him to eliminate his most significant threat to holding power alongside the king.

A Frustrating Cliffhanger in House of the Dragon

Season 2’s disappointing finale gave us no firm answers one way or the other. It’s impossible to tell where Otto’s jail cell is located, and we never see his captors. Considering we’ve gotten so little concrete information about how or why he was kidnapped, his return didn’t have nearly the impact the showrunners thought it would.

There are certainly a lot of plausible explanations one could come to, but House of the Dragon needed to give us more reason to care about Otto’s absence, show us how that would raise the stakes, and opt for clarity about the possible culprits instead of confusion. The result was a frustrating cliffhanger that told us little and only raised further questions about a mystery we didn’t even know was a mystery. House of the Dragon’s first two seasons are streaming on Max.