After this week’s installment of House of the Dragon, I found my thoughts drifting – not uncommon during this third season of HotD, if we’re keeping it real here.
In fact, I started running some calculations to the tune of: we’re now six episodes into this season, and I’d estimate that we had one end-to-end legitimately good episode – “Rhaenyra Triumphant,” which finally focuses tightly on one character and builds a compelling narrative around it. If we’re being generous, we can aggregate one kind of decent, watchable-ish episode total from the other five, cobbling together some “okay, that stretch was actually fine” scenes as we go.
Overall, House of the Dragon is continuing a long running trend, and in fact it’s getting worse.
Which is to say it’s a mostly dreary, sloggy show that’s additionally often hard to follow.
Not a great combo.
It didn’t start off this way.
While the critique of Season 1 – that it feels more prequel than the start of a new (uh… prequel) series – isn’t quite wrong, I found it to be both engaging and entertaining. And looking back from the vantage point of Season 3, it was also relatively easy to follow, which is a bonus when it comes to television shows, says I.
The cast was also exceptional, particularly Milly Alcock as a young Rhaenyra Targaryen and Paddy Considine as her aging father, King Viserys I. There are many challenges with the series as a whole, but replacing Alcock with Emma D’Arcy as the older version of Rhaenyra is way up there. While D’Arcy is a fine actress in her own right, the casting switch out helps to further weaken our tie to the characters and stuff going on as the series becomes increasingly messy and, frankly, boring.
By Season 2, it became unclear what the various factions were, which “riders” were associated with which dragons, and even the names of characters became frustrating to keep track of, especially with all of the repetition of names like Aegon across both House of the Dragon and the original Game of Thrones series.
And while we were trying to figure out what was going on, the scenes we got were often fairly uninteresting – people striding around rooms in gloomy castles (Harrenhal the most depressing of all) or wandering around the Riverlands – without much of a hook and, worse, no spark of life in either the characters or writing to clasp onto.
I’ll be honest: there are entire plotlines where I have almost no idea what’s going on. The dragon and the young woman kind of in hiding in The Valem, for example. I find my mind drifting to much more exciting times involving Tyrion and Littlefinger (and the Moon Door) during such sequences.
Even the few bright-ish spots going on within the world of House of the Dragon these days – the misadventures of Aegon and Larys, for example – are mostly grim and not all that enthralling versus countless pairings on its Game of Thrones forebear.
If your counterargument is, “Well, we can’t have dragons breathing fire and massive battles in every scene and episode, can we?” that’s actually not what I’m drawn to when it comes to the world of GoT and Westeros.
Indeed, Game of Thrones thrived from its brilliant characters and writing, its political machinations, and the wonderfully grounded nature of its fantasy world (until its final season or two, but let’s set that aside for the moment, shall we?). But most of all, I tuned in week after week to see what Tyrion and Jon Snow and Daenerys and Arya were up to.
Now, let’s put Game of Thrones aside and pose House of the Dragon against the “other” GoT prequel series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. This is where HotD’s liabilities get cast in even sharper relief, I’m afraid.
As I wrote earlier this year, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is already a pantheon half-hour drama:
The third fantasy TV series set in the world of Westeros and beyond conjured by novelist George R.R. Martin, my every expectation for what this show could be and achieve has been easily surpassed after watching its first four episodes.
In a very real way, AKOTSK made the right choices that HotD has mostly gotten wrong: it’s often funny (even hilarious!) while focusing tightly on deeply compelling characters and a story that we easily and lustily bite into over its whip-tight first season.
House of the Dragon has clearly drifted into being the dreary, mostly forgettable Game of Thrones prequel. I will endeavor to continue watching this show out of fealty to the franchise as a whole, but to be honest I’m not really looking forward to it at this point.