The Short Take:
The time jump is jarring, but about a third of the way through the episode I acclimated and was back in it.
Dragon Count: 7
(Get ready for a super-sized “Dragon Watch” at the end of this review.)
Image Credit: Forbes
[SPOILER WARNING: This review birthed a cluster of spoilers.]
The Long Take:
House of the Dragon as we knew it experienced a drastic shift this week: a 10-year time jump and a casting change for key characters like Alicent and Rhaenyra. On A Cast of Kings, the ever-insightful (and funny!) Kim Renfro very considerately said to her co-host, David Chen, that she could see he had very big feelings about this time jump and would try to hold space for those feelings. While I, like her, didn’t ultimately mind the time jump too much, I too want to hold space for those who did.
I would argue that TV is going through a bit of an identity crisis right now because streaming series now dominate our screens. Without commercial breaks and programming blocks for each night of the week, along with other industry changes to determine storytelling parameters, producers and creators have realized that the traditional duration of single episodes or the pacing of an entire season no longer need apply. Disney+ has been experimenting with shorter 6-episode seasons. Netflix essentially made the final episodes of Stranger Things Season 4 feature film length. Episodes don’t even have to be a consistent length within a season. We no longer use the term pilot to describe the first episode of a new series because most series no longer have to audition and rely on initial ratings to continue. Serialized storytelling on screen is an ongoing experiment right now. Perhaps as a byproduct of this experimentation, House of the Dragon does not feel like anything we’ve experienced as a TV-watching culture. That’s, naturally, going to be polarizing.
Image Credit: The New York Times
That said, I will admit that the time jump in this episode was very disorienting at first. The episode throws us right into the action without much explanation. We see Rhaenyra giving birth but realize later that this is actually her third child. I appreciated how the decision to in medias res with a childbirth scene reinforces the theme of the show: that in Westeros the birthing room is the battlefield and that women are constantly endangered by a succession-obsessed patriarchy.
The episode very much leaves the audience to its own devices to get their bearings and figure out where we are in the timeline and the story. Rhaenyra’s life, for example, is very different from when we last saw her. She’s a mother, she’s in an illicit a relationship with Harwin Strong, she has a seat on the Small Council (complete with small ball!), and, most notably, she faces suspicion from Alicent and the court that her three brunette children are not in fact Laenor’s, but Harwin’s. As someone who often resents too much handholding and clunky exposition, I like the idea of the time jump, with new faces mixed in with some of the familiar ones. I liked actively watching and trying to figure out what was going on. I liked noticing, on my own, what had changed in ten years.
Some of the changes surprised me more than others, though. When I saw that Harwin was a part of the family, my reaction was something along the lines of, “Oh hey, it’s that guy!” It felt very sudden and random to me. Josh Wigler, however, made an excellent observation on Vanity Fair’s Still Watching this week when he pointed out that seeds for Rhaenyra and Harwin forming a relationship were very subtly planted in past episodes, as he is the one who runs into her in an alley on the night she sneaks out and carouses with Daemon. He immediately recognizes her and lets her off the hook with a wink and a nod. And last week, amidst the violent chaos that abruptly ended The Green Wedding, Harwin is the one who saves Rhaenyra from the brawl and literally carries her to safety.
Image Credit: Harper’s Bazaar
As David Chen would probably say, though, these clues were too subtle to be meaningful because we never actually got any scenes between Harwin and Rhaenyra that show how these interactions actually sparked what would later become a secret yet seemingly loving affair. We do see some tenderness between them in their parting here, but for this situation in particular, I agree with Chen that this doesn’t hit as hard because we haven’t taken the time to see how they fell in love and got into this situation in the first place.
I suspect that the series sacrifices these ten years and the developments that occurred during them so that we might sooner meet the next generation of Targaryens: Viserys and Alicent’s children, Aegon, Helaena, and Aemond; and Rhaenyra and Laenor/Harwin’s children, Jace, Luke, and Joffrey. And let’s not forget that in addition to those six, we meet Daemon and Laena’s daughters, Baela and Rhaena, over in Pentos.
Image Credit: ComicBook dot com
The amount of scenes devoted to these kids — introducing their personalities and their tribulations — makes this episode feel like we’re starting over. It feels like the start of a whole new series or a sequel to Episodes 1-5 that releases many years after the end of a series, rather than continuing on a week later as we are. We’re meeting more new characters than we are continuing on with familiar ones. That’s weird for a season of television, but being weird doesn’t automatically make it bad. I’m in favor of increasing diversity in narrative form.
Image Credit: Buzzfeed
Here’s my defense of why this time jump actually works from a storytelling perspective, even if we may feel like we’re missing out on certain storylines. You can trace a direct line from plots from the previous five episodes to those in this one; it may just be harder to notice because the ties are sometimes more thematic or relationship-based rather than neatly stitching together sequential events.
Rhaenyra has to take a long walk to bring her new baby to Alicent because Alicent is still mad at Rhaenyra for lying to her ten years ago. Their trust has been broken and, as Joanna Robinson on The Ringer-Verse astutely observed, Alicent resents Rhaenyra’s mostly successful attempts to disregard “the rules.” She hates that she’s had to play by the rules while Rhaenyra so frequently gets away with breaking them.
Ser Criston, who now works for Alicent, commiserates with her about Rhaenyra’s brazen, indecent behavior because they both feel as though she betrayed her ten years ago; Rhaenyra lied to Alicent about her chastity and was complicit in Criston breaking his King’s Guard vows. Both Alicent and Criston rally around what they would call virtue or decency to…process? mask? deflect? project? I’m not sure what exactly to call it. But they’re basically using an anti-sin platform as a way to channel their personal anger towards Rhaenyra. It’s not about Rhaenyra breaking the rules; it’s about Rhaenyra breaking them, only they can’t admit that. Their conversation in this episode is the most direct follow-up to a past event: Alicent intervening in Criston’s suicide at the end of last week’s episode.
Alicent chides Aegon for not taking the oncoming war of succession seriously because ten years ago her own father gave her the same speech about Rhaenyra trying to kill them to strengthen her claim to the throne. These two conversations have the same “wake up and grow up” energy to them and it’s clear that Alicent is now as panicked as Otto was because he gave that speech to her upon his dismissal from court ten years ago.
Daemon and Laena are married and living it up in Pentos because they flirted with each other on the dance floor at Rhaenyra’s wedding ten years ago.
Laenor has taken on a new paramour because ten years ago Criston smashed the face of his previous partner, Joffrey Lonmouth. He also names his third son after Joffrey for this reason.
There’s a power vacuum that leaves Rhaenyra and Alicent vying for control of the Small Council because Viserys collapsed and became completely useless (as opposed to somewhat useless) ten years ago.
I could go on with a few more, but I think you get the point. Everything happening in this episode can be explained by or traced back to scenes in the first five episodes. Because of this, I think it works even if there are narrative gaps that are casualties of the accelerated pacing.
Even so, I am very curious to hear about or figure out later down the line why Condal and Sapochnik decided to skip ahead so far and so quickly. Because right now that decision and how they handled it works, but seems largely unnecessary to me. I think that if they had even jumped five years for one episode in between last week and this week, some of the dissatisfied fans may have been more sated. I think many viewers would have been perfectly happy to slow down the pace and see Harwin and Rhaenyra’s courtship, Alicent’s dangerous alliances with Criston and Larys, Daemon’s courtship with Laena or, more importantly, how Laena became the rider for the oldest and largest dragon in Westeros, Vhagar. The Laena/Vhagar backstory was, across all podcasts I listened to this week, the most universally lamented. Every podcaster, especially if they’ve read Fire and Blood, hyped Laena as a very cool character, and I think we even get that impression solely based on what little we see of her in the series. She went from a twelve year old girl inquisitively asking Viserys about a long lost, legendary dragon in Episode 2 to a fully grown, married woman riding the very same dragon in Episode 6. That has to be a story worth seeing play out in full. I may have to check my dragon bias here, though. I’m always going to want more stories about dragons.
Dragon Watch:
This was a big week for dragon lovers like me. There were a multitude of dragons, and they actually played important roles in several scenes.
My “rule” of two has been broken! This episode brought back Caraxes and introduced not one but three new dragons. Jace trains with baby Vermax in the dragon pit. I finally got my dragon double date, as we see Daemon ride Caraxes alongside his wife, Laena, on the wrinkly yet intimidating Vhagar. And when Aemond ventures into the depths of the dragon pit unaccompanied, he has a fiery run-in with a mystery dragon that no one seems to be able to conclusively identify. Most say this is Helaena’s Dreamfyre, who is supposed to be bright blue. Others say it is Aegon’s Sunfyre, who is supposed to be the most beautiful in the realm, with a resplendent golden color. The coloration in the scene is too dark to call it one way or the other, but it’s likely one of Aemond’s sibling’s dragons since his whole issue is that he’s the only dragonless one among them.
Image Credit: Edinburgh News
Across the episode, it was fun to see dragon riders trying to bond with dragons or enjoying an already strong bond with their dragon. It was especially enlightening to see that the bond isn’t automatic; it takes effort to build the relationship. The dragon trainer explains that if Jace wants Vermax to follow only his instructions and no one else’s, he has to connect deeply with him. Some have said that the purpose of this scene is to suggest that Rhaenyra’s children are not pure Targaryens and therefore might struggle to command their dragons, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense considering Viserys and Alicent’s kids are also half-Targaryen. The trainer implies that Aegon is a gifted dragon rider already. Mayyyybe I could accept that the realm would assume that Jace would be knocking it out of the park with Vermax if Laenor were really his father, doubling up his Targaryen blood. But I feel like we’re overthinking it here. Sapochnik and Condal just wanted to give us a cool how to train your dragon moment that also allows us to get to know the next gen Targaryens.
Out of all the dragon riders we see in this episode, Laena is the coolest. I wanted to see more of her before she left us, but, at the same time, the scene in which she commands Vhagar to burn her was the most impactful in the entire episode. It’s a smart counterpoint to Aemma’s death in Episode 1 and Rhaenyra’s struggle to be both an aspiring ruler and a mother who has to contend with a body that has just given birth. (So many fluids that were all too familiar.) Instead of — like Aemma — becoming a victim of pregnancy complications and men making medical decisions for her, Laena takes back control of her own body and chooses the glorious end of life she wants.
Image Credit: Mashable
Laena’s earlier speech to Daemon about how she wanted to die a dragon rider’s death as opposed to that of a fat country lord endeared her to me immediately, even if the conspicuous comment also made me very concerned for her well-being. And the way Vhagar hesitates and looks at her mournfully before she acquiesces to her “Dracarys” broke my heart. This type of dragon/dragon rider interaction is exactly what I had hoped for when I heard House of the Dragon was in development. And this is the closest we’ve come to rekindling the spark I sometimes felt with Daenerys and Drogon in Thrones.
There’s always hope for a Laena/Vhagar spin-off series, right? Or even a season of this series that backtracks to tell us the tale? As this episode has established, any kind of temporality, any kind of narrative structure is on the streaming series table.