We’re starting to think these dragons might be a metaphor for something, as the Targaryen civil war heats up. Here’s our spoiler-free House Of The Dragon season two episode three review.
Spoiler warning! These reviews are spoiler-free for the week in question, but will discuss previous episodes in some detail (and we’ll mention the end of Game Of Thrones a bit too).
If Game Of Thrones was (almost) a show about global warming, House Of The Dragon is certainly one about nuclear weapons.
Where in Game Of Thrones the promise of a permanently changed climate (wink wink) was easily bested by a few poorly lit cavalry charges and a magic knife, these draconic metaphors for tactical warheads in House Of The Dragon might prove a bit trickier to dislodge. Both sides have a bunch of them, after all, though neither seems all that keen to use them.
“We will be more likely to encounter one if we field one of our own,” one character solemnly decrees. I’m not entirely sure if that logic holds up in quite the same way, but in case anyone at the back didn’t get the message: THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT NUKES!
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Dragons aside, there’s a nice sense of escalation in episode three. It starts in Shakespearean* style, with a brewing conflict between two minor houses in the Riverlands escalating into off-screen slaughter. It feels like a throwback to Thrones’ early days – before they had the budget for pitched battles – and helps ram home the very human cost of all this politicking.
Much to the annoyance of all those dead people we just saw, meanwhile, Rhaenyra and Rhaenys are trying to decide whether a war has actually started at all. There’s a nice sense of history being written here as we go along – these highborn types are already thinking out loud about what books and songs will be written about their unsavoury business. Meanwhile, of course, more peasants keep dying in fields, but that’s neither here nor there: give me more dragons!
Though Westeros’ scalier inhabitants have been mostly content to circle ominously in the distance this season, the threat they pose to these poor commonfolk and their flammable homesteads still feels eerily plausible. We only have to think back to the assault on Kings Landing in the final days of Thrones for an example of the havoc a single dragon can cause. Now that both the Greens and the Blacks have more reptilians than they know what to do with, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before someone’s Magic Dragon Puffs a village or two off the opening credits.
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Any qualms I had about the show’s technical nous based on its earlier episodes have been almost deliberately blown away this week. As Daemon takes an impromptu trip to rebuild Harrenhal (see Game Of Thrones for how well that presumably goes), the deep blues and heavy rains of the ruined fortress add a welcome bolt of both atmosphere and colour to proceedings. A special shout out to the costume designer that made Matt Smith’s armour, too: that stuff looks lovely.
In other news, we’re introduced to some of our first new characters of the season this week, with Simon Russell Beale’s Ser Simon Strong popping up as Castellan of Harrenhal (he seems nice), and Alicent’s brother, Ser Gwayne Hightower (he doesn’t) appearing from nowhere to throw a spanner into all this power struggle business. The metaphorical chickens unleashed on the world in the first two episodes finally seem to be coming home to roost – as Westeros moves closer and closer to midnight, this is all becoming rather a lot of fun. At least it’s less depressing than Chernobyl…
House Of The Dragon is streaming weekly on NOW and Sky Atlantic.
*Coincidentally, the Shakespearean influences don’t stop there this episode, as one character promises another: “you’ll get your pound of flesh no problem,” thus introducing the disturbing possibility that House Of The Dragon takes place in the same universe as Venice.