Review: House of the Dragon Imagines Dragon Combat and It's Awesome

Much like in nuclear war, there’s no way to win when both sides have dragons.

While the awful finale of HBO's Game of Thrones series spoiled most of the goodwill the show had earned over its eight-year run, House of the Dragon—a prequel series set two centuries earlier—debuted with a confident, enthralling first season in 2022. The second season is slower than expected, but it nevertheless includes some scorching-hot action, mostly in the form of dragon battles.

House is derived from George R.R. Martin's overarching, multidecade history of the fictional Targaryen dynasty. That makes it a more difficult adaptation than A Song of Ice and Fire, the character-based drama series from which Thrones was derived. Even so, showrunner Ryan Condal has done an admirable job depicting an epic civil war between two rival branches of the dragon-riding royal family.

Said conflict is costly and destructive—and not just for the combatants. While Thrones periodically dwelt with the plight of civilians caught up in war, the greater involvement of dragons changes everything. Much like a modern-day confrontation between two nuclear powers, there's simply no way to win; the entire countryside burns.

Comments

[Chumby]

I enjoyed the storyline where the idiotic, dick sucking queen overthrew the as stupid, pedophilic emperor with both trying to enslave the free folks across Westeros by importing large numbers of Dothraki to ravage the citizens. Act Targaryen even made efforts to hire the Brainless Men to assassinate the head of House Stark multiple times while Varys and Theon would visit public areas to argue that those assassins killed and apprehended were Stark loyalists while in fact they were always followers of the pedophilic emperor and the stupid dick sucking queen.

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

The show started losing interest for me before Season 1 even ended. Going through multiple years in one season doesn't give you a lot of time to get invested in the characters, and it doesn't help that Emma D'Arcy's a dead-eyed, "non-binary" nutbag and can't convincingly play a hard-assed woman as a result.

Milley Alcock's got far more screen charisma and is in her mid-20s, so it's not like she can't play an adult female. They should have just kept her through all of Season 1 and into Season 2.