House of the Dragon sets new series record for dragon screentime with "The Red Sowing"

The penultimate episode of House of the Dragon season 2 upended the power balance of the Seven Kingdoms in a major way. After losing her eldest dragonrider Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best) and the dragon Meleys, Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D'Arcy) hatched a mad plan: to gather Targaryen bastards and give them the chance to claim one of the dragons slumbering beneath the Dragonmont volcano on Dragonstone. When the dust settled, Rhaenyra had three new dragonriders: Addam of Hull (Clinton Liberty) on the dragon Seasmoke, Hugh Hammer (Kieran Bew) on Vermithor, and Ulf the White (Tom Bennett) on Silverwing. "The Red Sowing" made good on the Game of Thrones prequel's name, giving us dragons like we've never seen before on television.

In fact, "The Red Sowing" set a new series record for the amount of screentime for dragons. Before this, the season's fourth episode, "The Red Dragon and the Gold" held the title. But "The Red Sowing" outdid even that spectacle, featuring detailed scenes of five different dragons that added up to nearly 10 minutes of dragons onscreen.

Here are the stats for the top four episodes with the most dragon screentime on the show so far:

Beyond "The Red Dragon and the Gold" and "The Red Sowing," the two other notable dragon episodes are the season 1 finale, "The Black Queen" — where Vhagar chomped the dragon Arrax and Lucerys Velaryon to bits — and "Driftmark," which is the episode where Aemond mounts Vhagar for the first time as a child. Vhagar appears in all four of the episodes with the most dragon screentime; I guess she's a good luck charm of sorts.

These are numbers we crunched ourselves, so a few notes on how we calculated them. Only time where any part of a dragon appeared on screen was counted; that includes most shots of a rider in the saddle, since they often still feature bits of the dragon in the periphery. And we're counting actual seconds the dragons are onscreen, not the length of the scenes themselves. Even if we allow for a small margin of error, "The Red Sowing" is still the clear leader in terms of dragon screentime.

And is it any surprise, really? Vermithor, Silverwing, Seasmoke, Syrax and Vhagar were incredible in this episode. Sure, House of the Dragon is a family drama about a dynasty tearing itself apart, but it's also the single most ambitious television show ever created when it comes to portraying dragons. That the penultimate episode of the season centered them as the stars of the proceedings feels just right!

House of the Dragon has far more dragon footage than Game of Thrones

It also looks like this was probably a record for the Game of Thrones franchise as a whole. House of the Dragon has been outdoing Thrones in the dragon department since day one. Even dragon-heavy episodes like "Battle of the Bastards," "The Spoils of War" and "The Iron Throne" featured far less actual dragon screentime than any of House of the Dragon's biggest dragon episodes.

Remember when Dany destroyed the blockade around the city of Meereen, the very first time all three of her dragons flew into battle? That was around 2:21 minutes of dragons, roughly a quarter of the screentime dragons got in "The Red Sowing." The Loot Train Attack from "The Spoils of War" gives dragons 2:57 minutes, while the series finale, "The Iron Throne," featured 3:26 minutes of Drogon. "Beyond the Wall," which depicted the death of Daenerys' dragon Viserion, clocks in at a respectable 4:30 minutes. There are a few other dragon-heavy episodes in Thrones like "The Long Night" and "The Bells," but most of the dragon screentime is crosscut with other battle footage, so there's less of it than you'd think. Certainly nothing that comes anywhere close to what we saw in the latest episode of House of the Dragon, both in terms of runtime and detail.

Adaptation study: House of the Dragon turned four sentences into some of the most ambitious dragon scenes ever filmed

All of this is even more impressive when you realize what House of the Dragon had to work with from the source material — or rather, what it didn't. George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood is written almost like a history textbook, recounting events from the perspective of a maester who's sifting through various accounts of the Targaryen dynasty. It's only a birds eye view of events, rather than a traditional novel like the Song of Ice and Fire books.

Few parts of the story drive that home like the description for how Hugh, Ulf, and Addam of Hull claimed their dragons. In the book, that entire passage is only four sentences; then, Martin moves on to discuss Addam's connection to Corlys Velaryon and the other dragons involved in the Sowing of the Seeds. Here's what the book says:

"Yet Seasmoke, Vermithor, and Silverwing were accustomed to men and tolerant of their presence. Having once been ridden, they were more accepting of new riders. Vermithor, the Old King's own dragon, bent his neck to a blacksmith's bastard, a towering man called Hugh the Hammer or Hard Hugh, whilst a pale-haired man-at-arms named Ulf the White (for his hair) or Ulf the Sot (for his drinking) mounted Silverwing, beloved of Good Queen Alysanne. And Seasmoke, who had once borne Laenor Velaryon, took onto his back a boy of ten-and-five known as Addam of Hull, whose origins remain a matter of dispute amongst historians to this day."

- Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin

That's it. No actual details are given for how Hugh or Ulf mount Vermithor and Silverwing, or how Addam first comes into contact with Seasmoke. So all of those stunning dragon scenes from the past few episodes involving those three dragons are all scenes the show added to flesh out those moments and make them more impactful. Personally, I think that was a pretty good choice.

Considering there are still plenty of huge dragon scenes to come in the Dance of the Dragons civil war, I'm going to bet it's only a matter of time until House of the Dragon breaks this dragon screentime record again. For now, only the season 2 finale remains. It airs this Sunday on HBO and Max.

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