The rather chaotic and somewhat anticlimactic resolution of Game of Thrones (the TV series) left a bad taste in a lot of fans’ mouths, but there’s been a lot of buzz surrounding House of the Dragon, a prequel based on George RR Martin’s background notes for the setting, set about 200 years before GoT and the fall of the royal House Baratheon, and based on the the previous ruling dynasty, the monochromatic and likely inbred House Targaryen.
The point of view character seems to be the teenaged Rhaenyra Targaryen (Milly Alcock), the tomboyish, quite possibly lesbian daughter of King Viserys (Paddy Considine) and his only child so far. Given how uncertain royal succession was prior to Viserys’ elevation, he is obsessed with having a son.
His cousin Rhaenys was actually the elder child but was passed over by the noble council for the throne for being female. This means that while Viserys (unlike most people in this universe) is not a raging asshole, he hasn’t really focused on his daughter. Rhaenyra’s best friend/chaste lover is Lady Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), daughter of the King’s Hand, who in this setting is somewhere between a Prime Minister and the Lord of the Privy Seal. She is much more conventional and ladylike than Rhaenyra, which is ironic because she looks a lot like Maisie Williams (Arya Stark). Viserys’ younger brother is the suggestively named Daemon, played by Matt Smith, most famous for Doctor Who and playing Prince Phillip in The Crown. At the start of things Daemon is the head of the royal guard and city law enforcement in the capital of King’s Landing. To Rhaenyra, Daemon is the cool uncle who uses his position and attitude to thumb his nose at all authority, including his brother. Rhaenyra would rather be an armed knight riding a dragon than be married and have to spend most of her life in childbed, especially since she can see how her mother has been debilitated by multiple unsuccessful pregnancies.
As Queen Aemma approaches her latest childbirth, the King announces a grand tournament to be held in honor of the event, and is able to announce on that day that she is going into labor. Daemon shows up on the jousting field and dominates the contests wearing a suit of sculpted black armor that makes Smith look that much more like Elric of Melnibone’ than he already did. Eventually he does get beaten in chivalrous combat against a young knight-errant. However other knights in the tourney treat each other brutally, and it seems to be a bad omen for the event. Even before that point, Viserys’ maesters take him away from his balcony and tell him that Queen Aemma has suffered a breech birth and cannot deliver her son. They ask permission to do a Caesarean section, which with their lack of medical knowledge will certainly kill her from blood loss. In an intense scene, Viserys tries to console Aemma as the maesters cut into her, but it’s still in vain: The child dies a day later.
Drunk and depressed, Prince Daemon attends a brothel orgy (because this is a George RR Martin setting on HBO) and is heard toasting “the Heir for a Day.” The Hand hears of this and tells the King. Rightfully pissed, Viserys sentences his brother to leave King’s Landing and to exile himself to his fief in the Vale. Daemon’s reckless behavior also cements Viserys’ decision to make his only child, Rhaenyra, the official heir, even if she is a girl. And so in the final scene of Episode 1, while Baratheon, Stark and the other senior nobles give their vows of fealty to King Viserys and Princess Rhaenyra, Daemon is shown taking his mistress to the pens where they take his favorite dragon and fly out of Kings’ Landing.
This sets the stage for tragedy, since Viserys, with no son or wife, is effectively already doomed as a monarch, and Rhaenyra will have to confront someone she had seen as a role model.
The series reintroduces audience to all the old elements of GoT, including the medieval violence and medieval misogyny, but Game of Thrones showed the final breakdown of an already dysfunctional society, whereas House of the Dragon seems to be more the beginning of the end- a relatively stable kingdom before House Targaryen decided, “Hey, our bloodline is the leetest of the leet, so let’s make a family tree that doesn’t fork.” It is also produced by GoT showrunner Miguel Sapochnik with no input from the team Benoit and Weiss, who took the original Martin concept to TV and made it huge but didn’t stick the landing after having to come up with their own material in the wake of Martin’s writer’s block. The show certainly has potential, especially with Matt Smith playing a sort of Luciferian character, a prince who isn’t necessarily a bad guy but seems destined to become one.
House of the Dragon has certainly resurrected interest in a property that many fans had soured on, with HBO announcing just days after the pilot episode that they’ve already ordered Season 2. And that’s got to be good news to the new corporate structure, Warner Brothers Discovery, which has taken numerous self-inflicted wounds for the sake of bean-counting. Or as HBO’s John Oliver put it, “HBO Max: It’s not TV. It’s a series of tax write-offs to appease Wall Street .”