House of the Dragon (season one), a review
It’s like if The Crown was written by eight year olds.
This is a spoiler forward review. Please be aware there will be discussions of rape as it pertains to the show.
In her last scene of the season, Olivia Cooke as Alicent Hightower stands against the venerable Rhaenys Targaryen on her dragon, tears in her eyes as she accepts a fiery death. In this one moment, she fruitlessly seeks to protect her eldest child, and her king. She’s finally succeeded as a mother, while failing as a friend. The final words she speaks are to her knight, to protect her only daughter. As they are shown mercy, it is not relief on her face, but terror. War cannot be prevented now.
It's an incredibly stupid scene and symptomatic of the problems House of the Dragon has presented over the course of this first season.
Bringing ourselves to the beginning, let’s discuss Fire and Blood, and George R.R. Martin’s outline for the Dance of the Dragons. In short, it is a war between two factions, attempting to assert their legal rights to the Iron Throne. You have the Greens, led by Otto and Alicent Hightower, who seek to follow male preference primogeniture and place Alicent’s son Aegon on the throne. Their rivals are the Blacks, who seek to crown the King’s eldest daughter, Rhaenyra, on the throne, as her father had decreed. I wrote a whole article about a historical parallel.
At the core, the Dance of the Dragons is a conflict between the ambitions of two women. Rhaenyra goes against centuries of tradition, believing the will of the King to be greater than the precedent that placed him on the throne. While in her youth she is “the realm’s delight”, being pretty and popular do not make her an easy sell. There’s a streak of ruthlessness to the hopeful Queen, as she feeds men who speak against her and the paternity of her children to dragons.
Her rival is her stepmother, and in many ways Fire and Blood does not describe a likeable woman in Alicent Hightower. She is a fairy-tale archetype, but even taking away the rumours of affairs and cruelty, she’s ambitious. Older than her stepdaughter, they’re never friends, although not necessarily enemies. That comes later. It is she who the story heaps much of the blame – and agency – onto. She speaks plainly of the rumours of adultery between Rhaenyra and Ser Strong. It is her faction that crowns Aegon and marries him to his sister. This is not a helpless victim, but a plotter in her own right.
You can almost see where the showrunners would get nervous here. Alicent v Rhaenyra, handled incorrectly, would reek of Cersei v Sansa, or Cersei v Daenerys. The older woman with ambition, the younger rival who stands to be all she could not, with a twisted maternal edge to the dynamic. A comparison would only distract the audience.
It isn’t an impossible challenge, but instead of facing the issue head on, decisions were made to change the story from a foundational level. Shift ages and time around, cut out development to get to the “good stuff”. Instead of the rising tensions of a stepparent relationship that sours over time, we instead get a spurned friendship narrative. With sapphic undertones for extra tension.
This change in itself is not an issue. I’d argue it laid the groundwork for the few moments of the season that well and truly worked for me, at least on a performance level. Cooke and Emma d’Arcy are both talented performers who work with this to establish a tautness in every scene they’re in. Every smile is forced, every breath is shallow. When the Princess presents her baby to the King and Queen, they play both a happy family and a pair of women who struggle to be in each other’s presence.
We see roughly 20-25 years of plot happen over the course of this season. When we start, both girls are roughly 14 and unmarried, at the end, both are grown women in their thirties. They’re widows, with full families and grown eldest children. Alicent has at least two royal grandchildren, who seem to be at least toddlers. Rhaenyra has lost two children already. A full war has been fought over the course of the first few episodes and both Velaryon children are presumed dead. Mysaria has apparently gone from a prostitute to the head of a spy network and child’s rights activist, and not aged - a pervasive problem in a show that really needs to decide when they care about aging. This is just too much time for one season to handle. So much of the show relies of the viewer just accepting a minimum of three status quo changes an episode, many without foundation. We have three major cast changes to deal with.
The pacing is frantic.
Episode One sets up arcs a plenty, most of which are neatly tied up or forgotten by Episode Six, because we now have to set up a heap of new ones for the show proper, not yet filmed or likely written. The final episode concerns characters who are about a decade a away from existing in the first episode, in a location only briefly mentioned in the previous episode, in a conflict that’s barely been a tertiary plot in this overly dense monstrosity of a show.
Take Aemond for an example. On one hand, the show suggests that a lifetime of bullying and an inferiority to his brother has turned him into an obsessive warrior. There’s an unexplained but narratively useful obsession with Daemon Targaryen, and the loss of an eye cements him as scary and intense. But I want to return to one word in particular here:
Suggests.
We see exactly one incident of playful cruelty between Aemond, Aegon and their nephews, which acts more as a set up for his eventually claiming of Vhagar. A line from Alicent about his brother’s bullying cements the set up, but the correlation between where he is before and after the time jump still doesn’t quite work. There’s a disconnect in performance, not helped that the writing just does not adequately tie child Aemond to adult Aemond. Pre-eye maiming he’s a normal kid with shitty friends, after eye-maiming he’s 35 and obsessed with anime.
The fact his final moment of the season is one more in a series of wacky misunderstandings and accidents only make this all the worse.
Everyone suffers in this regard. There is no gradual corruption of Aegon as the spoiled eldest son and the disappointment to his parents. Instead, he’s just…evil and sad? We see him as an arrogant teen, and then a few years later, he’s a rapist who cries when his mother is upset at him raping. No cause, just effect. On the Blacks, we have Rhaenyra the Bland, a woman who rarely makes a decision unless absolutely necessary, and Rhaenys, who oddly comes around to the Blacks side only after she believes her son has been murdered by their Queen.
Speaking of the Velaryons, we’re saddled with Laena and Laenor. In one, we get an interesting woman with a personal connection to the oldest dragon in Westeros who gets…maybe a combined twenty minutes of screen time across three different actresses. Gone is her friendship with her sister-in-law, instead she’s just stuck in Pentos and a self burning. What Laenor gets is somehow worse, the good natured husband who is essentially pushed out so his wife can marry her uncle. It’s quite frankly offensive how dismissive the show is of him.
The choice to race bend this one family was interesting in many ways, particularly in how it cements Rhaenyra’s adultery as fact, but it does raise questions over how thoughtlessly the characters have been treated. The decision of Daemon to other his daughters feels strange and pointed in this context. He’s not careless like this in the original text. But then again, the writing turns everyone into fiends and fools, or more often, just fools.
And Larys Strong is just Littlefinger with a foot fetish.
I want to break from the negative to compliment what worked well. The problem is, I actually have very little to say in that regard. The things that succeeded are in spite of the show, much like how the back half of Game of Thrones (2011-2019) had high points in spite of itself. Out of context, much of the writing is strong enough to evoke emotion. I enjoy the decision to have Heleana Targaryen be a Dreamer. And further, I like how they handle it, masked as neurodivergence. It adds layers to her performance and make the Cassandra aspect to her characterisation more interesting.
Several performances are quite good also. I’ve already called out the strength of Cooke and d’Arcy, but almost everyone handles themselves with dignity. I must call out Paddy Considine as King Viserys I Targaryen for some incredibly sensitive and effective work on display.
Unfortunately, you have to enjoy these moments in a vacuum. Episode Seven contains several impeccable sequences, from the riding of Vhagar to the Queen holding a knife to the Princess, but they’re all swathed in the terrible script. Episode Eight breaks the tension of this unhappy family in a montage, because writing a convincing repartee is too much work, and the show needs to wrap up all this pesky backstory. Viserys entering the throne room is incredibly moving, but it also involves another moment being stolen from Rhaenyra to make Daemon…honestly not even more interesting. The final episode is a gripping hour of the Blacks falling into line that ends with the strangest change in the show. Aemond doesn’t kill Lucerys, his dragon does.
Some have seen me say this on Twitter, but the show this program most reminds me of in recent memory is the Gossip Girl reboot. Much like how that show worked backwards potential memes and viral clips, House of the Dragon wants to evoke the feelings of the original. Both want #trendingtopics at the expense of narrative and character. A boy, bloody and eyeless and ignored after being sliced by his nephew, reads in many ways like one sister showing the other being bullied in a video on a stage as they turn on each other yet again.
Consistency lies in the show’s worst instincts. Poor communication between characters, accidental death, set ups without pay offs. Ambitions, agency and intentions swing wildly, and very few people feel real. Nobody wants to be King or Queen, and so the entire point of the series is moot. Aegon, Rhaenyra, Rhaenys, even Alicent, they all reject pleas to enter the conflict until the plot forces them to. It feels like we all could have saved the trouble and crowned Otto and Daemon, considering they’re the only people actually interested.
“Where’s duty, where is sacrifice?” is a lovely line for the trailer, but the impact hits less when we’ve barely seen what Alicent has sacrificed herself. Unlike something like “The Crown”, which can get away with implications of suffering, because it’s real-world history, this is a show about a fictional incest family that rides dragons. I don’t expect trauma porn, but I do expect a show to feel the same episode to episode, scene to scene, moment to moment.
To return to the subject of the first paragraph of this review, Alicent in particular suffers from the shoddy writing. The first half of the season with Emily Carey is consistent in its characterisation, but it’s Cooke who has to work with the worse material. She’s bitchy and superior one moment, desperate and paranoid the next. In a better show, these would make sense as mood swings. But her paranoia has no time to fester. We’re left with a montage of moments that feel disconnect from each other. Her personal ambition is the suggestion of a hanging thread cut cut off after two episodes for no reason. She ends the show as yet another pawn, unlike someone like Rhaenys, who kills civilians in order to make a showy point (feminist, apparently?). There is only so much you can hang on undertones, and the fact her final episode hinges on a misunderstanding removes whatever agency the original character had.
Nobody is served by this show. The actors get a few highlight reels, Martin gets another check to add to the pile of scrap paper I assume he’s mulching himself to create new stock paper to finish The Winds of Winter on, and we get fan edits on TikTok. I have to believe it will improve, but that’s a wish and a dream.
But it’s just not very good right now, I’m sorry.
Seriously, what were they going for with her? I love it.