Below be spoilers.
As House of the Dragon’s third season marches dutifully into its final two episodes, I have found myself asking the same question about the show every Sunday, usually when there are still 20-30 minutes before the end credits roll.
Is this show boring?
I hate to be that guy, and I get that HOTD, like all prequels, is at its core a lore dump. But Azor-fucking-Christ, these council meeting scenes have got to stop. It’s not even that much fun anymore to see the members get clowned, because this is too often smothered by scenes when Rhaenyra paces, Alicent schemes, Aemond broods, and Ormund sneers and sniffs, all of them seeming to drift on and on. But just as I’m about to grab my phone and look up the distance between King’s Landing and Rosby, someone important gets stabbed, roasted, or shot with an arrow, and I am left to table the question to the following episode. When the next one rolls around, I find myself waiting yet again through a runtime mostly hogged by the competing royals’ recycled conversations. My patience for a Targaryen dithering and/or brooding in a stuffy or frigid castle has thinned like the bowls of Flea Bottom gruel that mark this era of want, but HBO’s versions of George R.R. Martin’s World of Ice and Fire are still the best fantasy shows on television, so I hang around. If Ulf the White can stomach such disappointing fare, so can I. And anyway, there’s always a moment waiting in the back half of each installment that usually drops my jaw. The talky scenes that plow these plots don’t always do this show a lot of favors, but what else can the show be?
HOTD is a prequel, after all. The writers can futz with the side-players here and there — I just learned that the archer who zipped Criston Cole in Episode 6 is named Alysanne “Black Aly” Blackwood, and she might be absorbing the narrative function of someone else mentioned in Fire & Blood, the in-universe historical novel on which this show is based — but the song must remain essentially the same. If you’re tired of yet another trip to the dreary, dragonfire-slagged towers of Harrenhal, that’s too bad, because it’s central to Westerosi history, and if you’re not careful, Alys Rivers will appear out of the shadows to tell you all about it, if you have time, which you do, because it’s Harrenhal, where life seems to be frozen at about 4:38 p.m. on a Monday in November. Either that, or she’ll summon a cloud of bats.
But even if you are thrilled to know about all the mystic history that lurks in and around the realm’s most notorious fortress (and I am), all stories in the Song of Ice and Fire must end with Jon Snow. And thus, this show is four seasons of exposition and, I suppose, a look into the lives of the people who pushed along the prophecy of the Prince That Was Promised.
That take is probably not great, as it makes HOTD sound like it’s Ken Burns’ Dance of the Dragons or a fantasy version of Culloden. This show is most definitely neither of those, but what it does do is provide some informative context for a couple quotes in the other two HBO shows set in this universe. In Episode 9 of Game of Thrones’ fourth season, Lady Olenna Tyrell reminisces about how she almost married a Targaryen: “Marrying a Targaryen was all the rage back then, but the moment I saw my intended, with his twitchy little ferret’s face and ludicrous silver hair, I knew he wouldn’t do.”
Then there’s a scene in Episode 3 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, when Raymun Fossaway, buddy of the series’ titular knight, has this to say about the Targaryen dynasty: “They’re incestuous aliens, Duncan, blood magickers and tyrants who’ve burned our lands, enslaved our people, dragged us into their wars without a mote of respect for our history or our customs! Every pale-haired brat they’ve saddled us with has been madder than the last! Gods know how! The only honorable thing a Targaryen can do for this realm is to finish on his wife’s tits.”
Turns out that nobody in the future really likes the Targaryens a whole lot! And given what we see in this show, you can kind of see why. But then that makes me wonder if I’m watching this show for a different reason, because I don’t really like too many of these people either. The desperate caginess and tragic oversight of Alicent’s escape plans are interesting, and over time, I think she has become the character most compelling to me. Her survival instincts and love for her one good child are pretty consistent motivations, and I also appreciate her many blind spots — not counting on Mysaria to be aware of her every move, sloppy evidence removal with the pot of abortion tea — though those are at odds with her relative competence in the small council meetings. But whenever a dragon dies — always a pitiable experience — I’m reminded that she could have stopped all this, and I hate her all over again.
Then there’s Ser Criston Cole. Are we supposed to feel sorry for this guy and his tragic backstory and ruinous choices? Because Criston Cole is a humorless prick. Watching his deathwish soliloquy cut short was incredibly satisfying, and I am glad he’s gone.
Rhaenyra, for all her frustration at her council denying her serious respect and consideration, is not that great a ruler, and that’s also pretty irritating. And so on.
The characters I root for are the ones more or less dragged along by the obligations to the aforementioned pale-haired brats, like the ever-competent and pragmatic Ser Gwayne and the grizzled, grinning, graybearded Lord of Barrowtown, Roddy the Ruin. What does that say about a show when the supporting cast is cooler than the principals?
If you’re not careful, enthusiasm for the colorful background characters creates its own problem, as anyone who despises a show like the The Book of Boba Fett will understand, but in a world as big as Martin’s, with the endless possibilities that await the extras surviving near the edge of a scene’s frame, might not an original show set in this milieu rekindle enthusiasm for the franchise? I will keep watching HOTD, don’t get me wrong. But it’s now a duty. The main riffs in this section of the Song of Ice and Fire are starting to feel played out.
It doesn’t have to be that way. For all its medieval gross-out gags, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was a breath of fresh air compared to HOTD’s stale, Red Keep walk-and-talks (and stand-in-a-stuffy-room-and-talks). One trope that each of these shows does well is road-trip-buddy-adventure — I still can’t pick my favorite Game of Thrones pairing even after all these years, and the Larys-and-Aegon-on-the-lam scenes are often bright spots in episodes that are otherwise slogs. Would it kill HBO to give the Seven Kingdoms treatment to some original characters in a place we know very little about? There’s literally a concordance called A World of Ice and Fire. Pick a new place from there!
Or stay in Westeros, as long as all the talking leads somewhere different. Hold my interest, please, because when it comes to the history of Martin’s world, it’s way faster to just look it up on my phone.
