The hectic inaugural season of House of the Dragon covered roughly 20 years as the long-standing peace under King Viserys came to an end. In the season’s final two episodes, the series found its footing, establishing the parallel claims to the throne between the Black faction that follows Viserys’s appointed heir, daughter Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy), and the Green faction under Rhaenyra’s former best friend, Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), who follow Alicent and Viserys’s young, impetuous son Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney).
All the table setting and time jumping that dominated the better part of the first season have, perhaps inevitably, set the stage for a much stronger second season for House of the Dragon. It’s also, especially for a Game of Thrones property, surprisingly restrained. The first four episodes made available to press cover only a few weeks, and the entire opening episode, “A Son for a Son,” is keenly focused on the aftermath of Rhaenyra’s youngest son, Lucerys, being murdered by Prince Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) and his dragon.
You won’t find a harsher pronouncement of despair than when Rhaenyra, after days spent searching for her son’s waterlogged remains, returns to court to simply, steadfastly proclaim, “I want Aemond Targaryen.” There must be blood spilled, but as Alicent puts it to her father, and the hand of the king, Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), “That doesn’t mean it must be wanton.”
In season two, there’s as much care and focus given to the characters behind the brewing war between the Black and Green factions as there is to the barbarism committed by the most depraved among them, and the CGI delivers on the title’s promise of fiery retribution when the dragons on each side of this war are unleashed. “A Son for a Son” ends with the most horrific act to be committed in the series to date, and the creators have the restraint to keep it off-camera, allowing the sound of the act and its reflection in the eyes of an onlooker to sell that horror.
This quieter, slower, but just as bloody season allows the show’s characters to develop so that their inevitable deaths carry more weight. Glynn-Carney prevents Aegon II from being too similar to Joffrey, rendering the character with, yes, despotic tendencies, but also a compassion born of wanting to be well-liked (as when he tries to satisfy his common petitioners).
The show’s pacing also makes it easier to pinpoint the guilt that drives Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) to lash out at loyal Ser Arryk Garyll (Luke Tittensor). Only now, with Daemon (Matt Smith), Rhaenyra’s uncle and secret husband, no longer running between battles but holding court over multiple episodes at “cursed” Harrenhal, do we get a true look at his inner demons.
One of the season’s finest moments comes when Otto Hightower’s understandably loses his temper and calls Aegon, his grandson, a jackass. The less that these characters seem like monsters, the harder it is to relish in the blood shed by them and their families, and the more that audiences must heed the show’s underlying warning against hyper-partisan violence.
Also of note is a masterful use of ellipses in the third episode, which opens with what appears to be a glimpse at a long-standing land-ownership feud between two neighboring families, the Brackens and the Blackwoods. Their sworn allegiances to separate houses—one the Green, the other the Black—raise the stakes, and in one sharp jump cut, the words they traditionally throw back and forth are forever severed, the green fields and creek now black with bodies and blood.
This is the wanton slaughter that Alicent fears, but when the show wields it, it’s with the intent to demonstrate how horrible it is. The threat of dragons—the fantasy medieval equivalent of nuclear weapons—is especially effective in this regard, and the court intrigue is heightened by the attempts from the more rational members of the two factions to avoid using the beasts.
At one point in episode two, a luridly impatient Aegon II tells his small council of advisers that he wishes “to spread blood, not ink.” Almost as if in rebellion, House of the Dragon wisely does both, splashing the screen with vivid, graphic, and often intensely intimate battle sequences, but in a way that consistently, vividly, and often poignantly advances the plot.
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