House of the Dragon Is Doing Something Game of Thrones Could Never Do (2024)

In the world of Game of Thrones, anyone can die, but some deaths matter more than others. Daenerys Targaryen may have sealed her fate bysetting fire to King’s Landing, but most of the people she and her dragon reduced to ashes were nobodies, entering the frame just long enough to get lit up and scream in agony. In House of the Dragon, it’s war and not winter that is coming, but even without flipping to the end of Fire and Blood, the George R.R. Martin book on which HotD is based, you can guess that things are going to work out the same way. The powerful will feud, over matters consequential and otherwise, and their subjects will pay the price.

Midway through “A Son for a Son,” the first episode of House of the Dragon’s second season, Helaena Targaryen, the newly installed queen of Westeros, tells her husband, Aegon, that she’s feeling uneasy. Aegon, still flush with the excitement of his unexpectedly—and, although he doesn’t know it, illegitimately—acquired power, responds that there’s nothing to worry about. Sure, his half sister Rhaenyra is gathering forces to take back the throne she believes, correctly, is rightfully hers, and she’s got several dragons to back her up. But, he reassures his wife—who, in true Targaryen fashion, is also his sister—we’ve got dragons too. Helaena, however, is not satisfied. It’s not the dragons that worry me, she tells him. It’s the rats.

At that precise moment, there don’t seem to be any rats in the royal chambers, and Aegon chalks his wife’s concerns up to womanly anxiety. But she’s more prophetic than either of them know. By the end of the episode, rats will play a role in a major change in the family’s fortunes. And more broadly, it’s a cue to where the rest of the season, or at least its first half, will be focused: not just on the skies, where majestic behemoths flap their leathery wings and do mythic battle, but on the ground, where ordinary people bear the brunt of the royals’ disputes. Game of Thrones treated us to epic warfare, but House of the Dragon seems more focused on the aftermath, in one case skipping right from a conflict’s inception to its conclusion, a muddy field choked with the corpses of unfortunate saps who died for a cause few of them could even name.

That’s not to say that House of the Dragon shows much interest in commoners, at least as individuals. Despite the shortened life expectancy of a Westerosi royal, the show is also so choked with characters that it’s difficult to keep track of which is which, especially since showrunner Ryan Condal rarely bothers to give them distinct personalities. (It certainly doesn’t help that, between your Aegons and Aemonds, your Rhaenyses and Rhaenyras, the characters are named as if Martin was trying to use up his last rack of Scrabble tiles.) “A Son for a Son” introduces us to several new characters, including a blacksmith named Hugh and a sailor named Alyn, who get just enough screen time to indicate that they might be important later on. But neither the writing nor the performances give us a lot to go on, much less remember.

Not even the current lord of Winterfell, Cregan Stark, gets much of a setup, turning up in the season’s opening scene before promptly vanishing. He’s there mainly to remind us that we’re still in the same world as Game of Thrones, the one where the disputes between one family and another pale beside the existential threat north of the Wall. Given that the battle against the Night King is still generations away and we already know its outcome, it feels like a mistake to point to it just as Westeros’ first civil war is beginning to heat up—and especially as House of the Dragon is, at last, finding a way to feel like its own show and not just Game of Thrones: The Early Years. But HBO has a franchise to feed, and as the recycled title-sequence music reaffirms, that means never straying too far from the mother ship.

House of the Dragonstarted off with resources that Game of Thrones could merely dream of in its early years—at the Manhattan gala premiere for the new season, HBO head Casey Bloys reassured the members of Warner Bros. Discovery’s board in the audience that the episode would provide an answer to the question “Where does all that HBO money go?” But many of the new season’s best moments consist of little more than sharply written dialogue and a few characters in a room. The story is only going to get bigger, but it’s the small things that make it work.