House of the Dragon Review: A Frustrating Jumble of Incident and Spectacle

The Game of Thrones prequel struggles to apply new makeup to the old face of palace intrigue.

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House of the Dragon
Photo: Ollie Upton

The only thing that could tear down the house of the dragon was itself,” says Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen in the first of two introductions that open House of the Dragon. The princess’s words are an ominous summation of how her father, Viserys (Paddy Considine), came to be named to the Iron Throne over her aunt, Rhaenys (Eve Best). Then, a second introduction, this one a place-setting chyron—not just of the show’s current place in time, “the ninth year of King Viserys I Targaryen’s reign,” but of where it stands in conjunction to Game of Thrones, that once great series that went off the rails once it ran out of preexisting material from George R. R. Martin to adapt: “172 years before the death of the mad king, Aerys, and the birth of his daughter, Princess Daenerys Targaryen.”

This history is important from a metatextual perspective, but it paints House of the Dragon into a corner, given the threadbare nature of the plotting and, especially, the writing. Ravenous fans of Game of Thrones may be pleased at first, but it quickly becomes clear that despite drawing from several of Martin’s short stories, the source material is as slight as J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices, with studios left to either fill in the blanks or hope that fandoms won’t mind the ones that remain. As any maester might tell you, history alone doesn’t forecast disaster. House of the Dragon might still have been a good show—this, in future seasons, may in fact hatch, dragon-like, into one—but its current incarnation is a colossal bore.

Showrunner Ryan Condal is smart to center the tale around young Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) and her best friend, Alicent Hightower (Emily Carey), understanding that a prequel to Game of Thrones must be about the ruin that comes from following the sexist customs of male-led succession. Sadly, though, House of the Dragon’s commitment to that thread holds us at a frustrating remove from the emotions of its characters, especially its female ones.

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For one, the series never dwells on the impact of free-spirited, dragon-riding Rhaenyra being told by her mother, Aemma (Sian Brook), that “the childbed is our battlefield,” or of the hatred that she feels for her father after he allows Aemma to die on that “battlefield” in the hope of saving his unborn child. Instead, it squanders much screen time on splashier, more superficially exciting events that are of no real consequence, like the clashes from the big jousting tournament that Viserys has held in expected celebration of the birth of a male heir.

The case could be made that the amount of time that’s devoted to watching Aemma give birth by cesarean section is the show’s way of demonstrating the battlefield that women are made to fight upon in this world, sans allies and without a say in their fate, but it misses the mark by not showing Rhaenyra coming to that realization herself. Given that she ends up hooking up with the knight she met as her mother was cut open, was she traumatized at all by this loss?

Elsewhere, we only get the briefest glimpse into the mindset of Alicent after she’s ordered by her father, Otto (Rhys Ifans), who’s also the King’s Hand, to offer herself up as comfort to the widowed and still son-less Viserys. Surely the dramatic moment at which Alicent realizes that she’ll be her best friend’s stepmother and queen, and where Rhaenyra learns that her road to succession will be challenged by any male heirs produced by Alicent, is worth capturing in a scene. Instead, House of the Dragon jumps three years forward, as if looking again for something more visually stimulating to feast upon, like the sight of Rhaenyra’s uncle, Daemon (Matt Smith), warring with a man who crucifies soldiers on beaches that are infested with flesh-eating crabs. Spectacle over substance is so often chosen that you might think that the book being adapted was just simply called Blood rather than Fire & Blood.

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House of the Dragon certainly struggles to apply new makeup to the old face of palace intrigue. Throughout, characters shift their allegiances like clockwork across haphazardly patched-together scenes, acting on events that the audience may only have caught glimpses of in passing, if at all. Take Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), the too-loyal young knight of a low house who wins Rhaenyra’s favor and, later, position among her guards and, eventually, her bed. A true knight, he’s broken by his own weakness, though not before he tries to convince her to run off with him rather than take a husband, as politics decree.

A moral man, Criston attempts to end his own life after overreacting during a feast, turning a ball into a brawl. Not too moral, though, as he takes the opportunity to redeem himself in the queen’s service while also pettily revenging himself upon Rhaenyra by actively seeking to cut her children down. These are all pieces that might add up, over time, to paint a more complete picture of a complex man, but after the six episodes issued to press ahead of the show’s premiere, it’s difficult to not feel that House of the Dragon is but a jumble of incident given the absence of any real insight into its characters’ states of mind.

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It doesn’t help that House of the Dragon tends to cut away from a scene immediately after something of great import has occurred, leaving us to wonder how a character might have reacted in the moments immediately after. And if you think for four episodes that the series simply doesn’t care about its characters, it all but confirms that suspicion by jumping forward 10 years midway through the season, recasting the main characters in the process.

If the childhood years had built up meaningful relationships and character work, they might be worth it. Instead, they seem cobbled together from a list of the most vile and violent events in Martin’s repertoire, as if that were what was best about Game of Thrones, or as if in somehow one-upping them, House of the Dragon might stand out, characters be damned.

The series can’t stop rushing ahead even after making that 10-year leap, leaving us asking new fundamental questions about the characters. Is there now actual chemistry between an aged and visibly ill Viserys and Alicent, or is an effect of the latter now being played by Olivia Cooke? Is motherhood the reason for Rhaenyra’s (Emma D’Arcy) shift toward being more compromising with others? If the fifth episode served as a soft reset from which to really start building the strife between the princess and queen, these questions might not matter as much, but because the show has jumped around so much, we have nothing else to hold on to.

House of the Dragon must really believe its own claim that “the truth does not matter, only perception,” for it ultimately is more interested in fan service—offering up more dragons, more gore, more surprise murders, a more expensive historical re-enactment—than it is in developing scenes that ring true. Game of Thrones veterans like director Miguel Sapochnik and composer Ramin Djawadi can make this new series look and sound like more of the same, but it’s as hollow and brittle as the massive scale model of the kingdom that Viserys takes pride in building. That’s a rotten foundation for an epic fantasy, so maybe the prophecy was correct after all: the only thing that could tear down the House of the Dragon was itself.

Score: 
 Cast: Paddy Considine, Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, Emma D’Arcy, Steve Toussaint, Eve Best, Fabien Frankel, Sonoya Mizuno, Rhys Ifans, Milly Alcock, Bethany Antonia, Phoebe Campbell, Emily Carey, Harry Collett, Ryan Corr, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jefferson Hall, David Horovitch, Wil Johnson, John Macmillan, Graham McTavish, Ewan Mitchell, Theo Nate, Matthew Needham, Bill Paterson, Phia Saban, Gavin Spokes, Savannah Steyn  Network: HBO  Buy: Amazon

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

3 Comments

  1. Milly is the worst actress she’s so boring the show is boring not one person character to root for not even the dragons no bonding with the dragons the cgi and the dragons is bad it’s just a jumbled mess … I can’t believe it’s renewed it should be scrapped

  2. Why review something you hate? You clearly hate George R.R. Martin based on previous reviews and twitter posts. You dislike the premise: palace intrigue. You dislike the dragons and write them off as “spectacle”. This seems like the wrong thing to review if you hate everything about a Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones. Also, what is wrong with giving the fans a show they’d enjoy? If you offer a show the fans hate, it would be a huge financial loss. Regardless of how much critics praise certain shows as a “amazing, if it alienates fans it will fail. We’ve seen that with Rings of Power. Don’t waste your time next season.

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