Season two of the dragon-packed Thrones prequel House Of The Dragon has come to a close. Time for some thoughts on some mixed-bag TV…
Spoiler warning! The following contains some hefty spoilers for all episodes of House Of The Dragon season 2, plus the final season of Game Of Thrones.
For most of House Of The Dragon’s second season, Ryan Condal’s fantasy prequel provided a masterclass in slow-building tension.
A show in which monarchs ride around on dragons and the common folk throw toilets out of windows might not have been the most obvious pick for the show which best captures the political mood of 2024. Game Of Thrones’ long-approaching winter might have started as a metaphor for climate change, but soon turned into a more conventional big-bad (though if anyone does know a way to stop global warming by jumping out of a tree with a fancy knife, do get in touch). The series often felt more like a very compelling fantasy soap opera than a political commentary.
House Of The Dragon, though, felt different this season. Maybe it’s just the more deeply politicised age we find ourselves in – by 2016, Thrones was already becoming slightly de-fanged as the showrunners outstripped George RR Martin’s source novels – but the courtly manoeuvring and a less sensational attitude to sex and violence have been hitting far closer to home this time around. The dragons-as-nukes metaphor is the most obvious parallel, but in the House Of The Dragon’s quieter moments we got glimpses of a political class less full of moustache-twirling villains so much as complex characters completely out of their depth. Sound familiar?
Actions had consequences far beyond what anyone expected. Jaice’s shocking murder at the end of the last season led to the accidental death of Aegon’s own son at the start of this one. Aemond’s decision to parade a dragon’s head through the streets sparked the possibility of rebellion amongst the people of King’s Landing. Daemon’s decision to leave Dragonstone in a huff seemed, for a while, to be literally driving him mad. It seemed like absolutely everything was going wrong – and it made for some damn good telly.
It’s maybe the only route available for a show which asks us to sympathise with characters on both sides of the brewing civil war, and it’s one which served the first few seasons of Thrones well. For most of the first two seasons, House Of The Dragon has felt less like historical fantasy – with all its neatly tied-up plots and schemes-which-look-like-they’re-going-to-go-wrong-at-the-last-minute-but-don’t – and more like a historical text unravelling in front of our eyes. Reality, it’s consistently been at pains to remind us, isn’t story-shaped, and the good guys don’t always win in the end. There might not even be any good guys at all.
As Thrones found, though, a commitment to abandoning storybook endings becomes a problem when you need to write, er, an ending. Which brings us onto last night’s finale.
Having spent the previous seven episodes apparently building to something massive and consequential, I went into the last episode expecting a beheading or two at the very least. More specifically, with every character at some point suggesting sending large numbers of troops and/or dragons to Harrenhal, I was expecting a few armies to get into a scrap near the rainiest castle outside Wales.
Read more: House Of The Dragon season 2 episode 8 review | Not with a bang…
As it turns out, we’ll have to wait until the now-greenlit season three before Ser Simon Strong picks up a mace and rides into battle. Instead, episode eight alternated between tying up loose ends and hinting at the epic battles and derring-do on their way whenever HBO can get the cast back together. Daemon’s character arc seems to have done an about-turn at the last second, transforming the potential Harrenhal face-off from a three-way scuffle down to two. Rhaena seems all set to claim the massive dragon that’s been grazing on sheep in the Vale. Everything seems to be going rather well for the blacks who, now that the greens have essentially transformed into the one-man Aegon show, are pretty unambiguously framed as the good guys.
This seems somewhat at odds with the virtues the show was extolling as little as a month ago. When Rhaenys (RIP) delivered a haunting monologue wondering when historians would say the war had started, it looked like the show was taking a more nuanced look at the nature of history and storytelling. There would be no neat little bow to tie on the battles to come; the war would start, not with a bang, but a rumble.
Cut to the season’s final shots, with ships, soldiers and dragons lining up in neat little rows to kick off the mother of all civil wars, and it’s hard to fathom what happened. Everything the show’s been telling us so far says this should be a moment of dread – war is bad, after all, and the series of mistakes and misunderstandings which brought us here have made clear that there’s really no reason for everyone to hack each other to bits at all. It’s hard to get that impression, though, when we’re watching folks ride off to war accompanied by epic backing music.
This might just be another consequence of the season’s dip from ten episodes down to eight. HBO has previously insisted that decision, made in March last year, was “story-driven”, and nothing to do with the reported $20m it paid for each entry in season one. But like the latter seasons of Game Of Thrones, it feels like the creative team haven’t found a suitable replacement for the “episode nine is massive, episode ten does the admin” formula which served its early seasons so well now that they don’t have a full ten-episode arc to play with.
But then, this is far from the finale’s only problem. After tying up its most pressing dangers and introducing just a smattering of new, less interesting-looking ones (I’m glaring particularly hard at dragon rider Ulf), it’s difficult to see where the show goes from here. The new season will have to introduce some chaos pretty quickly to make up for the comparatively stable set-up the show’s written itself into (this feels like an especially bizarre thing to say about the onset of a civil war, but here we are).
It’s a real shame, because I was so on-board for House Of The Dragon right up until the finale’s conclusion. To make matters worse, it’s likely we’ll have to wait up to two years before we find out what happens next – a particularly long time when the latest episode has dealt a lot of my enthusiasm a hefty blow.
Oh, and for the Old Gods’ sake – can someone on the production team work out how to film people riding on dragons so it doesn’t look like a scaly bucking bronco? Harry Potter mastered broom-flight in 2005. What’s HBO’s excuse?
House Of The Dragon is available on NOW and Sky Atlantic.
