House of the Dragon Season 2 Cheats its Audience

Some television shows are great, like the first four seasons of Game of Thrones. Some are terrible, like the last two seasons of Game of Thrones. Some, like seasons five and six of Thrones are somewhere in the middle. Few achieve the distinction of being frustratingly close to great, but the prequel series House of the Dragon, which wrapped its second season Sunday night, has managed to do so by cheating its audience out of what we all expected.

It was remarkable just how thoroughly Game of Thrones exited the zeitgeist when the show concluded in 2019. Fans were so disappointed with the ending that we didn’t want to talk about it any more than my grandfathers did their experiences in the Second World War. But after a two-year break, House of the Dragon (or Hot D, as author/producer George R. R. Martin likes to call it) was advertised as the great return to Westeros, without the involvement of the showrunners who botched the first series’ conclusion.

The show had many doubters before it premiered. The team behind Hot D had much to prove and little margin for error with the audience’s patience. 

They more than proved themselves. Though not without flaws, particularly its occasionally-awkward time jumps, the first season of Hot D was nearly as good as Thrones at its zenith. The cinematography and editing were excellent, the set design grand, the costumes as colorful as the characters (unlike Thrones’ drab final seasons). Career-defining performances from Matt Smith as the loose cannon Prince Daemon and Paddy Considine as the decrepit King Viserys made the show appointment viewing. The central conflict between the two queens, Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) and Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) was well-written and believable, each thinking herself in the right and seeing the other as an existential threat. All the elements combined into a delicious whole that promised an exhilarating sophomore season.

And then nothing happened. A full season covering years of backstory leading up to a civil war was followed by a full season of…more buildup to a civil war. 

“Wait,” I found myself saying aloud as the eighth and final episode concluded, “No. That can’t be it.”

But it was. An entire season of television that pointed towards a climactic battle at Harrenhal where Daemon has been stuck hallucinating and struggling to assemble an army ended, insultingly, with a montage of three or four armies marching to converge on Harrenhal. No battle to be found.

Would it really have been so hard to give us the promised battle at the very end? If they were strapped for time, maybe we didn’t need to spend so long on Ulf’s boorish comportment at the dinner table? The closing montage of the armies marching to converge on Harrenhal and Daemon suiting up for battle practically scream for an orgy of violence before the show suddenly and unceremoniously cuts to black. For God’s sake, how much more build-up do we need?

To be fair, the first battle of the war was depicted on-screen, and we got to see dragons grappling in a death spiral that crushed the infantrymen below. But that was all the way back in episode four. I had assumed that was meant as the appetizer that presaged an entree in episode eight. HBO knowingly cut trailers of marching armies and flying dragons that implied The Big One was coming. Watching through to the end with this expectation, one can’t help but feel cheated. It’s almost as though the creative team were promised ten episodes for the season, told at the last minute that they only had eight, then couldn’t figure out how to amend the script accordingly.

Not that this writing team could be trusted to handle even that assignment. While the first season had few narrative flaws, this season has been riddled with absurdities long before the disappointing finale. Both Rhaenyra and Alicent make unbelievable secret journeys to treat with one another, conversations that amount to a rehashing of what we already know. The season as a whole could be renamed Dithering on Dragonstone for all of Rhaenyra’s indecision. Alicent’s arc made more sense as she was sidelined from the Small Council, but for her to then try to seek peace when she had been the more bellicose of the two struck me as out of character. Through it all, they go to painfully futile lengths to avoid a war the audience not only knows is coming but is tuning in to see. 

The writers seemed afraid to have Rhaenyra or Alicent do anything controversial, robbing them of their agency. Where last season Rhaenyra had a long-running affair that damaged her claim to the throne and Alicent almost mutilated a child in retaliation for taking her son’s eye, this season has them hemming and hawing while the men take all the initiative. The aversion to allowing the leading ladies to do terrible things for what they think is the greater good ironically turned these complicated characters into meek feminine stereotypes. To make matters worse, the well-rounded female characters were what made this show superior to Amazon’s dreadful Rings of Power schlock with which it competes for loyal viewers. And that is to say nothing of the fact that pronoun politics are apparently in vogue in medieval Essos now.

HBO has cheated its audience. Those of us who gave this show a chance and have been pleading with our friends to watch it find ourselves undermined. To this day, even some of my old school chums with whom I used to watch Game of Thrones refuse to bother. How can I recommend they catch up at this point?

I write all of this as one who prefers the politics to the set piece battles. I love the character drama. I love the pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue, meant to sound more rustic than the modern English in Thrones hundreds of years later. The acting and film form remain top-notch. There were even some breakout performances from the likes of Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Aemond (Ewan Mitchell). But even I, who tunes in for these elements, want to see dragons mauling each other as promised. The point is not to fetishize violence – it is to use violence to give the drama stakes. Otherwise, each episode is reduced to little more than a series of dialogue scenes shot at reverse angles between two people standing in a cavernous chamber à là the Star Wars prequels.

In spite of it all, I will tune in to the next season, out in about two years. If HBO finds the audience for this show much diminished by then, it will have its own employees to blame.