House of the Dragon: same problems, but this time with more dragons
The Game of Thrones prequel expects a lot of its viewers. Like, say, patience
Back when I was a television critic, one of the tricky things about the gig was receiving screening materials absent any other information about the show. At times you’d receive advance copies of episodes long before a show had been publicized at all and would have to try to suss out what the producers were going for. Drama? Comedy? Dramedy? Hard to say.
I still remember getting a package from HBO in the spring of 2011 that included a number of DVDs — old school! — and an explanation that it was the television adaptation of a fantasy book series called A Song of Ice and Fire. The books, the HBO materials said, were long thought to be unadaptable, so massive was their scope. But, lo, they had done it. Not being a fantasy reader, I didn’t have a clue what any of this was about. But the package also included a hand-written note from the showrunners, or at least a photocopy of a hand-written note, asking critics to please not spoil the surprise endings of the first couple of episodes in our reviews. Intriguing!
I popped the DVD into my computer in my newsroom cubicle, had to peer closely at the monitor because the opening scene, set in a forest at night, was pretty dark and — HOLY SHIT THAT DUDE JUST GOT BEHEADED.
So began my experience with Game of Thrones. I wrote a complementary review, the beginning of which remains part of the Wikipedia entry for the premiere episode:
Over the next few years, I wrote about GoT quite a bit, for the obvious reason that it was the biggest show on television. I interviewed several cast members, had a sitdown in Toronto with author George R.R. Martin, who even in 2011 got a bit stroppy when I asked when he was going to finish the sixth book, and went on a whirlwind press tour to the location of some of the Beyond the Wall scenes, in Iceland. Once I spoke with Michelle Fairley, who played Catelyn Stark, and asked if she had read the books. She said she avoided it, because she wanted to act in the moment, not knowing the full scope of the story. So ,,, you don’t know … what happens?, I asked awkwardly. No, she confirmed. “Although I’m told something big happens with a Red Wedding.” I mean, she wasn’t wrong.
By the time the series was ending its HBO run, I had moved over to sports full-time, and didn’t even see the final season as it aired because the Toronto Raptors went and spent the entire spring in the playoffs, all the way to the NBA Finals. All I knew was that the final episodes were largely reviled. (And, it turned out, with good reason.)
Which brings us to House of the Dragon, the prequel series that aired its first season during the pandemic, went away for two years, and finally came back with a second season this spring. It’s not that I was skeptical of the new show from the outset, but more like guarded. The thing that was most frustrating about the evolution of Game of Thrones was that it sucked people in with what were five or six seasons — your mileage may vary — of engrossing television before slapping together an ending that felt forced, and rushed, and in conflict with much of what had come before. Which is because it was forced and rushed. Martin never finished the damn sixth book, let alone the alleged seventh — AND STILL HASN’T — and the showrunners decided they had had enough and so they ended up wrapping up some of the narrative threads that had built for years over the course of an episode or two. It drove people nuts. I wasn’t mad, just disappointed.
House of the Dragon, based as it is on Fire & Blood, a weird historical text that Martin wrote while he was probably procrastinating on a novel, would at least give the new showrunners a bit more of a blank slate. They weren’t adapting a narrative that sprawls off in a dozen directions like A Song of Ice and Fire, but dealing with a more narrow scope: the origins of the long House Targaryen rule of Westeros, and how it came to be that all those dragon skulls were in the basement of the Red Keep in King’s Landing.
But, two seasons in, I regret to say: meh.
There has been some great stuff in each of the first two seasons, very Thrones-y moments of surprise and betrayal and, yes, bloody violence. Also dragons! So many dragons. But if Season 1 felt like a 10-episode preamble to the big conflict between the Targaryens and the, er, other Targaryens, then Season 2 felt like yet another bunch of scene-setting and narrative building with not much in the way of payoff at the end. Also there was a big ol’ dragon fight in the middle of the season, which does make one wonder if they might have blown the VFX budget right there and ended up kind of stuck. (This did happen in the early GoT days, when they ran out of money in the first season and then were careful in Season 2 to hoard it for the Battle of Blackwater in the penultimate episode.)
The finale of Season 2 of HotD even closes with a montage of all the characters prepping for a climatic fight … only to roll credits. See you in 18 months. Maybe two years. The season was apparently cut short by a couple of episodes due to last year’s Hollywood strikes, but it still remains a bafflingly strange way to close a season.
While I’m here, two more related gripes: Much of Season 2 saw Daemon, played by Matt Smith, the show’s biggest star, having run away from his wife/niece Rhaenyra, who is busy trying to be queen and also avoid war. He’s basically faffing about in Harrenhall, having nightmares and trying to raise an army, while she spends many episodes wondering what the hell he’s up to. Is he helping her? Staking his own claim to the Iron Throne? Why won’t he respond to my ravens? And then, in the last episode, she gets a troubling note from an ally about her husband/uncle and simply jumps on her dragon and pops over to Harrenhall to hash it out with him. What the hell, your Grace. You couldn’t have done that like six weeks ago?
Daemon, meanwhile, touches one of those fancy mystical trees (Godswood, I think?) and has a vision that causes him to totally rethink his plans. I’m trying to avoid a specific spoiler here, but he basically gets a whiff of the whole Winter Is Coming story that was supposed to provide the climax to Game of Thrones (the series, not the book). But the thing is, we’ve already spent many seasons building toward that ending in the previous television show and it was a giant letdown. Are we really doing this again?
There is, one supposes, a possibility that the showrunners are going to try to re-engineer the ending of Game of Thrones through the visions and dreams of the House of the Dragon characters who lived a century earlier. It would be a bold choice. But it seems like it is going to take a very long time for them to get there.