Season 1 of HBO’s ‘HotD’ was a roaring success, but it was probably a prelude to a superior second act. Let us list the potential improvements.
As the first Game of Thrones spinoff, House of the Dragon faced a tricky set of challenges in its first season. It had to woo audiences back to Westeros after the disappointing conclusion to Thrones. It had to introduce a new cast of characters, nearly 200 years before the events of the original series, and set up their backstories over the decades leading up to the Targaryen civil war. And it had to adapt a relatively dry fake history book that wouldn’t map neatly to the screen.
But Dragon’s first season was a roaring success, for both critics (with a 93 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes) and general audiences, as many millions of fans returned to, and stayed in, George R.R. Martin’s world. Viewers flocked to the story of the Targaryens at the peak of their powers, before it all came tumbling down—even though Season 1 served as essentially a stage-setting prologue for the Dance of the Dragons, which will begin in earnest when Season 2 premieres this month.
This new step in the war, and in the broader narrative of the Dance, provides the prequel show with a tremendous opportunity. Now, with the throat-clearing preamble out of the way, Dragon should better resemble Thrones at its best. Here are five reasons why—which double as five reasons to be excited about Season 2 this summer.
1. More Battles
This show is about a civil war, after all. But because Season 1 of House of the Dragon merely laid the foundation for the war to come, it didn’t offer any of the bombastic battles with which Thrones excelled in its heyday, thanks to the show’s massive budget and technical skill.
The first 10 episodes of Dragon showed their share of smaller-scale skirmishes, such as the season-ending dragon duel and the children’s fight that cost Aemond his eye. But the largest action set piece was the underwhelming Stepstones diversion, in which Daemon fends off a bunch of pirate archers with stormtrooper aim and kills his main foe in a cave off-screen. RIP to the Crabfeeder—who at least looked cool, even if he never spoke a single line of dialogue—but that was no Battle of the Blackwater or attack on Hardhome.
level spectacles. Even Aemond’s first flight aboard Vhagar—the most thrilling action sequence of Season 1, at least until the finale’s Aemond-aboard-Vhagar scene—was a nonviolent affair.
It’s unclear just how many large-scale battles Season 2 of Dragon will contain—the second season has only eight episodes instead of 10, and the series might be saving some of the source text’s greatest conflicts for Season 3—but there will be at least one, and probably more. Add in more than a dozen dragons that could partake in the fighting, and it’s even possible that the prequel show could up the ante on just how spectacular a battle scene can look on TV.
2. More Places
Martin’s greatest achievement in writing A Song of Ice and Fire may be his world-building, as he developed a detailed corpus of fictional history and geography. For the latter aspect of his epic project, Martin envisioned the sort of diverse planet, full of divergent biomes and climates, that isn’t often found in mass fantasy/sci-fi entertainment. (See, by contrast, the all-desert planets of Star Wars and Dune.)
But Dragon’s first season didn’t explore much of this variety, as the vast majority of its scenes took place in King’s Landing or on the nearby islands of Dragonstone and Driftmark. On rare occasions, characters visited Harrenhal and Storm’s End, which are two of the major castles closest to the capital city, and the kingswood, which is right next door. Characters talk about farther-flung places such as Casterly Rock, Oldtown, and the Dornish Marches, but those places aren’t pictured.
Consider the continent of Westeros. Thrones took viewers from the very top of this map all the way to its bottom, and to most places in between. But with the exception of one short, oddly paced scene at Runestone in the Vale (where Daemon murders his first wife, Rhea Royce), the entirety of Dragon’s Season 1 proceedings in Westeros fits inside this small red box.
Zoom out to the entire Thrones map, which also includes the continent of Essos and various characters’ adventures in Braavos, old Valyria, Slaver’s Bay, and more, and the House of the Dragon footprint looks even smaller. In Season 1, the camera crossed the Narrow Sea to visit the Stepstones and the Free City of Pentos, but the action didn’t extend any farther north or east.
The events of Thrones spanned all of the space on the map below, from the Land of Always Winter in the upper left to Qarth in the bottom right. But Dragon, again, stuck to the small red box.
The Thrones pilot jumps from the heavy furs of Winterfell to the soft silks of Pentos, offering immediate, obvious signposts of this world’s vastness. But Dragon’s characters dress and act the same no matter where they are on its condensed map, and as my colleague Ben Lindbergh wrote in Season 1, “The show lacks a lot of the visual variety Thrones delivered as it flitted from the Free Cities to King’s Landing to Winterfell and the Wall. The two series’ respective title sequences sum up the difference: One took us on a tour of Westeros, while the other takes us on a tour of the Targaryens.”
It’s unclear whether Dragon will ever return to Essos—and Thrones fans might be particularly happy to leave the Meereenese knot behind—and King’s Landing and Dragonstone will remain central locations for Season 2, given that they serve as the respective home bases for the green and black forces in the civil war. But at the very least, the show will travel farther afield in Westeros in Season 2. The trailers include shots as far north as the Wall—thousands of miles away from any place the show visited in Season 1.
3. More People
The varied places Thrones visited were populated by varied people, too. While Thrones largely stuck to Tyrion’s “great conversations in elegant rooms” principle and centered on noble families, it also incorporated a variety of character archetypes, backgrounds, and perspectives as it fleshed out a sprawling cast. Some of those lower-class characters helped form the show’s most compelling relationships, such as Jon with Ygritte, Tyrion with Bronn, and Arya with the Hound (and with Gendry, and with Hot Pie, and with so many of her friends).
But in setting up the stakes of the internecine clash for the Iron Throne, Dragon’s first season stuck mostly to the royals in the realm. Almost every main character is a Targaryen, by birth or marriage (or both!). And the season’s most important secondary characters are Velaryons (rich and powerful nobles), Hightowers (rich and powerful nobles), and Strongs (somewhat less rich and powerful nobles). The only lowborn characters with any meaningful screen time were Criston Cole and Mysaria—which proves the point of their importance because Criston, even as a villain, offered a different dynamic from any other character.
(Mysaria gave one speech from the perspective of the smallfolk but was absent for most of the season and notable mainly for her odd accent on the rare occasions she was around. With that accent seemingly dimmed in the Season 2 trailers, perhaps that “voice of the people” role will work better in the future.)
Dragon’s creators are conscious of the first season’s narrow focus and seek to address it in Season 2. “The first season was so much about the royal family, that one percent of the upper one percent that rules this world. All the people in the show that had POVs essentially had silver hair,” showrunner Ryan Condal told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year. “What I think was missing from Season 1—not by omission, it was simply because it was not relevant to the story—is more common folk, the smallfolk of this world, that bring a certain color and texture. A lot of the fun and the conflict and the humor that came out of the original Game of Thrones was thrusting high nobility into a room with Bronn or the Hound.”
Make no mistake: This is still primarily a story about one twisted family (with an even more twisted family tree, thanks to all the incest). But it should be a nice change of pace to see Dragon stretch its wings a bit more in Season 2—especially as war begins to ravage the realm and affect not only those fighting to rule, but those dying for the sake of the lords and ladies playing their game of thrones.
4. More Starks
One way in which “more places” and “more people” will definitely intersect in Season 2 is through more of everyone’s favorite Thrones heroes: the Starks in Winterfell. Just about any Stark screen time in Season 2 will represent more of it, as the only Stark appearance in Season 1 comes when Rickon Stark swears allegiance to Rhaenyra at the end of the premiere, after Viserys officially names her his heir.
Then the Starks disappeared for the next nine episodes, which makes sense given the geographic limitations of the show, but it was likely a disappointment nonetheless for Thrones fans. Narratively—not geographically—the North was central to the Thrones experience. Only three locations appeared in Thrones’ opening credits map in every episode: King’s Landing, Winterfell, and the Wall. (No other location appeared in even half of the opening credits.) And even in the much-derided Season 8, the endings for Jon, Sansa, and Arya were largely satisfying.
The Starks don’t play a major role in the Dance of the Dragons, which, again, is concentrated in the southern part of the continent, near King’s Landing. But one of the tasks Jacaerys Velaryon is given at the end of Season 1 is to fly to Winterfell to secure fealty from the Starks and support for Rhaenyra’s side, and the Season 2 trailers devote a lot of time to snow and familiar-looking castles up north. It wouldn’t be a surprise for Dragon to spend much more time with Cregan Stark