Game of Thrones is now more than five years in our rearview mirrors, and its successor series House of the Dragon is now HBO’s flagship series in the streaming wars. While still a strong draw for viwers, House of the Dragon has been unable to reach the heights of its predecessor’s ratings, and in its second season it failed to even reach the viewership records it set in its first. The second season still received good reviews from critics, especially its much lauded fourth episode, “The Red Dragon and the Gold.” But the average per episode IMDb rating for season 2 was still down to 7.8 from 8.7 in season 1.
There is a common perception that House of the Dragon is on the ropes. Several theories have been put forward for this: the series lacks the incredible supporting cast that categorized its predecessor, it lacks Game of Thrones' humor; there was too long between the first and the second season… and all of these have merit. However, I think something else is going on.
I think the problem with House of the Dragon is that it doesn’t quite seem like we are in the same Westeros as Game of Thrones. A common criticism of House of the Dragon season 1 is that the plot was confined to goings-on in the Red Keep or on the nearby islands of Dragonstone and Driftmark, and that the characters rarely traveled around Westeros. Two of the strongest early episodes of the series — the premiere episode "The Heirs of the Dragon” and “King of the Narrow Sea” — rejected this paradigm, with characters like Rhaenyra and Daemon venturing out into the streets of King's Landing even if they didn’t leave the capital. However, almost the entire back half of the season takes place in the Red Keep, within the castle of High Tide on Driftmark, or on Dragonstone (which I’m sure is partially due to the budget they invested in building those sets). Locales that had been new and exciting in the first half of the season, like Driftmark, had by the second half of the series’ first season become confining and claustrophobic.
Season 2 initially deals with this problem by sending Daemon Targaryen and Ser Criston Cole off to war. Criston goes from new castle to new castle, forcing lords to surrender and beheading any who refuse to kneel to King Aegon II Targaryen, forcing their frightened former soldiers into his army. This is the brutal and gritty Westeros where anyone could suddenly die, anything could happen, and the true law of the land is not the laws of gods and men, but power.
Things went far less well was in Daemon’s much lampooned plotline. After an initially thrilling sequence where he takes the castle of Harrenhall, he then spends much of his time waiting around in for things to happen, as well as hallucinating. Despite the producers’ best efforts, the entire plotline here felt like it was in a different show — and a different world — than what was happening with Ser Criston. A wonderful budget-saving innovation of Game of Thrones was to feature a lot of scenes where people planned military maneuvers in tents or next to a few trees in the woods. In contrast, House of the Dragon shelled out a lot of money to build a massive Harrenhall set (which does look fantastic, it has to be said). After paying so much for one location, they probably felt obliged to use it… leading to Daemon being stuck inside for five episodes in a row. The crew deserves praise for making the Harrenhal and Dragonstone library sets, but the show shouldn't confine itself to those locations. (If anyone is wondering about the scene where Alicent goes and floats in pond for a while, that was reportedly because actress Olivia Cook was desperate to film anywhere outside the Red Keep.) I was willing to forgive season 1 for remaining centered around King’s Landing, as that’s where the main characters were growing up, but now a full-blown war has started, and its time the characters started to spread out.
The characters of House of the Dragon
House of the Dragon season 2 also suffers from the characters not feeling like they're in the same headspace as the characters of Game of Thrones. Westeros is supposed to be a place where deranged tyrants like Cersei or Joffrey end up on top, social climbers like Littlefinger and Walder Frey scheme their way to power, and moral fools like Ned Stark or Jon Arryn disdain the game they are playing and lose their place (and their heads). Some of the strongest moments in House of the Dragon recall this: when Criston Cole is forcing men to follow him or be executed, when a drunken and grieving Aegon is ordering the deaths of every ratcatcher in the city, when Rhaenyra Targaryen feeds a bunch of her bastard cousins to the dragons...that is when this show is firing on all cylinders.
But at other times, the script forces the characters to restrict themselves. Rhaenyra ended the first season enraged over the death of her son Luke. Then she spent most of season 2 dithering on Dragonstone because she thinks she has to be Queen or the world will someday come to an icy end… but she doesn’t want to harm anybody to get there. In season 1 of Game of Thrones, Robb Stark calls his banners and starts a war because his father was arrested, all of the Northern lords go along with it, and the scene is exhilarating! Rhaenyra’s young pre-teen son is eaten and Rhaenyra decides to wait and have roughly five corporate board meetings over what to do…and she resists every call to action.
Similarly, at multiple points throughout the season, Rhaenyra’s husband Daemon threatens various Riverlords with a fiery death at the hands of his dragon… and they just laugh/sniff at his demands and walk away… and Daemon does nothing. This doesn’t feel real, these lords should be terrified of Daemon! He is the violent and chaotic descendant of the people who melted the castle that they are standing in! Later, after Alicent gets fired from her day job on the Green Council, she is willing to condemn two of her four children (we’ve still only met three) to death so that she can go travel the world with her daughter. There’s a version of that decision that is extremely selfish and makes great drama, but it comes off more as, ‘well, I know my sons are bad people, but I’m a good person… so fine you can kill them?’ Somehow this scene came off simultaneously dramatic and extremely silly. Alicent’s decision to sell out her sons could be extremely Westerosi… but her reasons were not.
If we ignore the reason for these decisions being simply bad screenwriting, I will posit that the reason behind them is the showrunners thinking we will root for characters that we would root for in our real lives: people who choose morality and the common good over personal ambitions. The problem is, we don’t, because it’s simply not as interesting, and it’s not the Westeros we have come to know and love. House of the Dragon is afraid to indulge in the brutal and amoral (and infinitely more entertaining) world that its predecessor established, and that’s a shame.
House of the Dragon season 3 reportedly starts filming in March. As anyone who's read George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood knows, in the next part of the story things get very real, very fast, all over Westeros. I only hope the showrunners understand that the show is at its best when it is actually set there.
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