The Pitch: When last we left the Targaryan clan nearly 150 years before Game of Thrones, a war was brewing over succession of the throne in the wake of King Viserys I’s death. In his dying words, Viserys leads his wife, Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), to mistakenly believe that succession should fall not to his beloved daughter Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy), but his young son Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney).
Stinging from this and the impulsive murder of her son Lucerys by the craven Prince Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) by dragon-chomp, Rhaenyra and her uncle/husband Daemon (Matt Smith) prepare for war. While the tensions initially hum at a low simmer, a reckless plot by Daemon to assassinate Aemond leads to an even more tragic consolation killing, hurdling both sides of the family ever closer to immolation.
Dragon Things Out: Where Season 1’s title sequence depicted a diorama of Old Valyria, Season 2 shakes things up with a rapidly woven tapestry of the Targaryen family history. (The show still holds, however stubbornly, to Ramin Djawadi’s thumping main title theme from its parent show.) But in both iterations, blood soaks the media upon which this family’s story is being told, which feels a fitting vibe for the show overall — as last season teased, internal conflict threatened to turn the clan against each other, which now bears fruit in this new batch of episodes.
Since its inception, House of the Dragon has been content to be a slower, more contemplative take on Game of Thrones, doubling down on regal intrigue and a bit less on the dragons and the wider world of Westeros. But while that’s led to some more intimate explorations of this world and the Targaryen family in specific, it also has the effect of making the show feel sluggish, and that’s certainly true in Season 2.
In the first four episodes provided to critics, not all that much happens of note: Granted, its first episode, a slow burn that then zags to a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-ian pair of fools tasked with sneaking into King’s Landing, is a masterful work of tension, as the buffoons run into one wrinkle after another in their quest and ultimately take the most tragic consolation prize.
However, that inciting incident takes far too long to brew, instead sticking us with more endless conversations around council tables, impotent flailing in bedrooms and throne rooms, and occasional zigzags to introduce us to minor characters (like Abubakar Salim’s virtuous sailor Alyn) whose potential we haven’t seen yet.
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