Diplomacy versus violence. Dignity versus unbridled passion. Duty versus the selfish desire for revenge.
Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be about dragons?
HBO sent critics four of the eight episodes of the second season of “House of the Dragon,” its “Game of Thrones” spinoff. For three and three-quarters of those four hours, we are in one of this highly rated fantasy franchise’s less interesting regions: the land of the medieval civics lesson. Small Councils meet. Allies are recruited. Rivals for the throne strut and fret. When battles do start to break out, they take place offscreen.
The two shows (based on the novels of George R.R. Martin) have traditionally used palace intrigue leavened with sex to fill the gaps between expensive scenes of mass violence and close-up dragon action. But nearly half a season is a long time to wait for the flames to fly.
“Thrones,” which ended in 2019 after eight blockbuster seasons, compensated with the epic scale and sadistic frisson of its treachery and debauchery. It also had one great performance, by Peter Dinklage as the noble dwarf Tyrion Lannister, and big characters stylishly played by actors like Lena Headey, Charles Dance and Jonathan Pryce. And its dragons were truly terrifying beasts.
“Dragon,” for all the money HBO has reportedly spent on it, is a more buttoned down and drab affair, a condition that carries into the second season. Besides Eve Best as the dragon-riding matriarch, Princess Rhaenys, and Ewan Mitchell as the fearsome Aemond, no one in the cast rises far enough above the show’s general level of dogged professionalism to make a significant impression. And when they do appear, its dragons look and sound more domesticated.
The new season begins with the truculent alpha Targaryens, Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney), plotting in their respective castles. Rhaenyra, the rightful heir to the Iron Throne — it’s just easier to use the jargon — is in exile with her uncle-husband, Daemon (Matt Smith). Her half brother Aegon sits on the throne and governs like a petulant child, to the consternation of his mother, Alicent (Olivia Cooke), who was Rhaenyra’s best friend until she married Rhaenyra’s father, the previous king.
(“Dragon” is a family saga with tangled, tortuously incestuous relationships, and it doesn’t go to much trouble to sort out who’s who for the less-than-obsessed viewer. For an extra fee, you can watch it on Prime Video and use Amazon’s helpful onscreen character and actor guides.)
The questions are political — who will end up with the crown, and how much blood will be shed in finding out — but the stakes are personal. The women are inclined to favor negotiation and compromise while the men are ready to unleash the dragons, but bonds between mothers and sons, dead and alive, complicate matters.
The heightened, blood-spattered domestic drama is intelligently framed, and some of it is moving. Glynn-Carney manages to draw a smidgen of sympathy for Aegon, who is in over his head to a tragic degree, and Smith communicates the mixed feelings of Daemon, whose sense that he, too, has been cheated of the crown tests his loyalty to his wife-niece.
But the story doesn’t take on a real life. It’s neither interesting enough to pull us consistently into the flow nor weird enough to rattle our chains. The production is solid but static — it has the board-game feel that marks the franchise. The fetish for geography and architecture is there, but without the earlier show’s visual grandeur. And the audience’s emotions are still manipulated through melodramatic choreographies of events rather than genuine, organic surprise.
The consequences of these tendencies can be seen in plotting that is sometimes perilously thin. To provide some action and suspense in the early episodes, there is an alternating series of secret incursions, all of which succeed only because of a complete and hilarious lack of security at both castles. At one point, the preparations for war are kept in a holding pattern by having Daemon experience a series of dream visions so perfunctory that you don’t understand why they’re having such an effect on him.
Many millions of viewers and fans will disagree with nearly everything I’ve written here, of course. (And “House of the Dragon” has already been renewed for a third season.) All I can offer in my defense is that across more than a decade on the “Thrones”-“Dragon” beat, I have remained consistent. “Bursts of action are separated by wide expanses of conversation” (“Thrones” Season 3); “Narrative pokiness is redeemed, as usual, by the machine-tooled professionalism of the production” (“Thrones” Season 4); “Seriousness of purpose doesn’t translate into engaging drama” (“Dragon” Season 1). It turns out I had already written the review.
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