house of the dragon (season 1)

If nothing else, House of the Dragon seems to have answered the question of whether there’s still an existing appetite for Game of Thrones - something that seemed far from certain following its loudly denounced final season. Set nearly 200 years before the events of HBO’s flagship fantasy series, this prequel saga should appeal to viewers who felt overwhelmed by the sheer sprawl of characters and houses, banners and sigils featured in the original by offering a more focused and bite-sized take on life in the Seven Kingdoms. Think of it as a Westeros starter kit, of sorts.   

Largely restricted to King’s Landing and Dragonstone, and revolving almost entirely around the Targaryen clan - at a time when their grip on the Iron Throne was still absolute - the show follows King Viserys (Paddy Considine), a generally capable but somewhat middle-of-the-road ruler whom the realm elected to back over his arguably more suitable (though infinitely more female) cousin Rhaenys (Eve Best) years earlier. That prickle of feminist outrage isn’t an incidental detail (you could almost read it as a Hillary allegory, though Viserys is more Tim Kaine than Trump). After his wife dies in childbirth, Viserys makes the fateful decision to disavow his unpredictable and hot-headed younger brother Daemon (Matt Smith) in favor of anointing his teenage daughter Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) as his heir… a decision he stubbornly stands behind, even after he marries Rhaenyra’s childhood best friend Alicent Hightower (Emily Carey), who bears him multiple sons.

You don’t need a Westerosi compass to see where this is going. House of the Dragon amounts to - what else - another game of thrones, and it’s a little frustrating that it takes an entire season to reach what feels like the story’s actual starting point. The writers execute not one, but two major time jumps (Alcock and Carey bow out after five episodes, with Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke taking over as their adult versions), and the effect is undeniably jarring. Alcock, mostly limited to Australian television up to this point, is a real find; the show is worse off without her willfully luminous spark. But then she’s one of the few cast members who feels properly maximized - Cooke, for example, is a talented actress who’s forced to play almost every scene as if she’s gotten a whiff of curdled milk. As her father Otto, the King’s Machiavellian Hand (is there any other kind?), the dynamic Rhys Ifans has rarely seemed this penned in (Daemon, meanwhile, is a pretty standard George R.R. Martin creation, but the role at least affords Smith the opportunity to indulge in charismatic cruelty).

So sour was the taste left by the Game of Thrones finale, that many went so far as to dismiss the entire series as a sunk cost. This, of course, was foolishness, and there were many invaluable lessons from that show that House of the Dragon would have been wise to recognize. Martin’s novels offered a simple moral dichotomy - Starks = good / Lannisters = bad - that allowed readers an easy-to-grasp point of entry into a fantasy world whose central conflicts would slowly turn grayer and more complex - an approach adopted by creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss. But the prequel’s emotional stakes are much harder to pin down. The fact that the entire conflict effectively teeters on the fragile childhood bond that still lingers between Rhaenyra and Alicent is rich with potential… and will hopefully blossom next season (whenever that is). But as things stand, there isn’t much impetus to choose sides - one might favor Team Rhaenyra by default, simply because her kids prove slightly less obnoxious than Alicent’s brood.
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House of the Dragon does rival its predecessor in terms of production value… and any sequence involving dragons in flight packs an undeniable charge (the promise of dragon-on-dragon battles is also one area in which the series has a clear leg up on what Game of Thrones already offered). But it’s hard to believe the show navigated the entire development process without someone pointing out how desperately it could use a character with a touch of wit - a Tyrion or, at the very least, a Littlefinger to cut against the grim grain of these humorless Targaryen dispositions. These characters are, frankly, a collective drag much of the time. It almost makes one inclined to wander up North, and see what the Starks are up to.