Things are hotting up as Westeros prepares for civil war. Here’s our House Of The Dragon season 2 episode 4 review.
Spoiler warning! These reviews are spoiler-free for the week in question, but will discuss previous episodes in some detail.
Is Westeros at war yet?
I’m still not really sure. Four episodes into the new season of House Of The Dragon, I don’t think many of the characters are either.
They certainly sound like they’re at war. Ser Criston is still marching across the Riverlands with an army and a point to prove. The multiple council meetings which kick the episode off are full of people talking about troop movements and dragons. Daemon is still sat in Harrenhal, hunting ghosts and stewing furiously. Rhaenyra and Rhaenys’ prediction last week that no-one would remember how the coming conflict kicked off is ringing true; I’ve forgotten already, and whatever the starting point was, I likely saw it within the last three weeks.
By the end of episode four though, it’s hard to argue the war hasn’t begun in anything but earnest. It’s no real spoiler to say that this is where a largely talky season kicks into a more violent gear. No more off-screen battles and political scheming for this lot – it’s time to watch people getting munched by dragons.
Taken as a whole, the series up to this point has been a bit of a slow burn, but there’s been a definite sense of escalation which reaches something of a peak here. Whether episode five can keep the momentum going or will function as more of a reset remains to be seen, but if your bum’s been getting numb waiting for a bit of swashbuckling, then you’re in luck.
Alan Taylor is back in the director’s chair for this one, and the grander scale gives him room to play in a sandbox which feels more comfortable to him. While an early meeting of Rhaenera’s council feels a little stilted (the Dragonstone segments in general seem to be suffering at the moment – all the interesting characters are off galivanting round the Seven Kingdoms, leaving a series of indistinguishable bald men to argue with Eve Best), the latter half has plenty of room for a bit more visual flair.
Caroline McCall’s costume work (taking over from Jany Temime in season one) continues to impress. I might be the only one more excited by the series’ first appearance of Kettle Helms than the fifty-foot lizards stomping them into the dirt, but a spot of new, brightly coloured heraldry does go a long way to distinguishing the look of the show from the increasingly grim and muddy latter seasons of Thrones.
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Still, after two seasons of this, I’d have thought someone would have figured out how to film people riding on dragons. The VFX in general this season have been strong enough that every time we get a shot of a character in the saddle the over-lit green-screen-ery of it all can’t help but jar. The Harry Potter films basically nailed people-riding-on-non-existent-flying-things in about 2004, and the fact that the Thrones world still hasn’t done the same for something really quite essential to the new series is pretty inexplicable.
But that’s a couple of small nitpicks in what is a frenetically enjoyable episode of TV. If you’re more a fan of battles and big lizards than sinister politicking then you’ve done well to make it this far – but this episode finally makes those long hours worthwhile. For probably the first time this season: here there be dragons.
House Of The Dragon is streaming weekly on NOW and Sky Atlantic.
