The laziest way to tag House of the Dragon (Sky Atlantic) has always been to call it the Better Call Saul for Game of Thrones. Like that show, this is a prequel; like that show, we already know how things are going to end. But now, with a full season in the rear-view, the comparison feels warranted.
Both House of the Dragon and Better Call Saul benefited from a baked-in fanbase, and as such didn’t need to spring out of the gates quite as quickly as their mother shows. Like Saul, House of the Dragon turned out to be a slower, knottier watch, more interested in character than spectacle. It required a much closer viewing. With Saul, this paid off in spades during its extraordinary final season. For now, with House of the Dragon, what lies ahead is nothing but a giant question mark.
You’ll remember that this show concerns itself with a legendary civil war that almost tore Westeros apart. But as of the end of season one, we have seen precisely none of it. If the legendary Game of Thrones episode The Dance of Dragons was the first world war, then we have just spent 10 full hours watching the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
In other words, this series has turned out to be a prequel to a prequel, one that may in time turn out to be seen as the prologue to House of the Dragon. We met the players (some of them as children) and now we know what drives them, whether it’s betrayal, greed or simply having been created by an author who loves writing psychopaths. All the ducks are in a row. And that’s where they’re going to stay for quite some time now.
Obviously we won’t know whether or not this meticulous world-building was worth it for several years. But what seems apparent now is that the season was saving the best for last. It took a while to get there, but by the end of the episode, things are finally motoring. Princess Rhaenyra now knows that her father has died (finally, after spending several episodes as essentially a gibbering skeleton) and she knows that she wasn’t made queen. Battle lines are swiftly being drawn up and the show is making it a binary choice for viewers. On one hand, a woman who was promised the crown and then had it snatched away. On the other, a band of cartoon nasties who wear eye patches and get their dragons to literally eat other dragons. That last one formed the climax of this episode, largely because Rhaenyra’s son was riding the dragon that got chomped. And yet it wasn’t even close to being the most upsetting moment of the episode.
One of the big themes of the season, intentionally or otherwise, was the violence of childbirth. In episode one, we saw a woman die while giving birth. Halfway through the season, the new actor playing Rhaenyra was introduced with a long and gruelling closeup of her enduring labour. But the worst was saved for this episode. The shock of learning that she wasn’t queen was so much for Rhaenyra that she fell into premature labour and miscarried in extremely graphic fashion. The scene was one of the most unpleasant ever committed to screen, and you could argue that it was entirely gratuitous. This is a show that moves through time so swiftly that characters can get old and die between scenes. And yet, when it comes to showing female agony during childbirth, it lingers like the worst kind of rubbernecker. It’s an unedifying tendency and one I hope the show treats with more sensitivity in the future.
Obviously I hope other things change, too. I’d like House of the Dragon to find consistency when it comes to characters ageing. Paddy Considine’s Viserys, for example, decayed like an Indiana Jones baddie opening a cursed tomb while his brother (played by Matt Smith) has revealed himself to be Westeros’s Paul Rudd. He hasn’t aged a day and now I don’t know how old he’s supposed to be. Is he 30? 45? 90? It’s hard to tell. What’s his secret? Good hydration? Incest? The glossy mags need to know. Also, and I don’t want to be picky, but it would be nice if future episodes were lit in such a way to let me see what the hell is supposed to be going on.
My sense is that season two of House of the Dragon will be much more explosive than the first, and if that’s the case then the fact that it was entirely predicated on an old man getting his names mixed up won’t matter. But we’ll have to see. House of the Dragon is over. I can’t wait for it to actually begin.
