This review contains full spoilers for House of the Dragon Season 2.
Sometimes in the UK they say that a person is “all mouth and no trousers”: They promise a lot but never deliver. Season 2 of HBO’s House of the Dragon is often all-mouth-and-no-trousers TV. Sure, there’s a really accomplished cast, wearing costumes clearly crafted by experts and standing in gloriously realised environments. But they’re just going around in circles, week after week. There are beautifully written monologues that lead to dilly-dallying and a lack of resolution; there’s good writing but far less good storytelling. There are entire episodes worth of chat that could have been an email – or OK, a raven. It’s all entertaining in the moment, but it doesn’t feel like a full season of forward momentum. No one wants TV told at the same, sluggish pace at which George R.R. Martin has been writing lately, even if there are fabulous scenes encountered along the way.
Think about where we are at the end of the season relative to eight episodes ago. The “Black” Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) started off devastated by the death of her son Lucerys in last season’s finale, but was reluctant to start a devastating all-out war among the dragon-riding Targaryen clan in order to claim her rightful throne. It has taken her the entire season to accept the need for battle: even in the final episode, “The Queen Who Ever Wars,” she says that she hoped the new dragon riders she had recruited would act as “deterrents” to the “Green” wing of the family who have, as she sees it, usurped her throne. After eight episodes, she’ss still talking about avoiding the fight, despite all those moments in earlier episodes where she wishes she’d been trained more for battle. That kind of vacillation is one way to show she’s her weak father’s daughter, but it doesn’t make for a gripping series lead. Her estranged husband, Daemon (Matt Smith), spends the whole season moping around Harrenhal before a single final vision changes his mind (why did the old gods not lead with that one?). In that same span of time, her Master of Ships and newly appointed Hand of the Queen Corlys Velaryon (Steven Toussaint) has been rebuilding a single boat and ignoring his illegitimate sons – though at least now we’ve met them, so that’s something.
On the other side of this slowly brewing civil war, there’s been growth of a sort. Prince Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) has somehow become even more awful, what with slaying the dragon Meleys and her rider, Rhaenys (Eve Best), in the middle of the season (the tragic and heroic high point of the show so far) and almost murdering his brother King Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney). By the end of the season, he has his mother and sister scared for their lives, while his convalescent brother is advised to hurry his recovery in case Aemond sneaks in to finish him off in the night. Still, none of that is a surprise after last season, and as long as he rides the biggest dragon in Westeros he has the firepower to back up his villainous instincts. The Dowager Queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke) appears to accept, in the end, that all her plotting has failed and that all she can do is try to keep as many of her children alive as possible (and to protect as many as possible against Aemond), but there’s at least a hint in the finale that she may have ensured the flight of Aegon and the others first.
After two seasons, the so-called Dance of Dragons is still only a matter of minor skirmishes. The endless interesting characters and intricately moving parts are all just spinning in place. House of the Dragon isn’t necessarily boring, thanks to those beautifully written scenes and that casting, but when you think back on an episode it’s hard to remember much that really happened, because not much is happening.
Does that make it a bad show? That seems too harsh. Almost any scene involving Smith, Best, or Simon Russell Beale this season is worth watching; actors like Cooke and Abubakar Salim (the latter playing Corlys’ son Alyn of Hull) have charisma to burn. Even potentially one-note villains like Aemond and Ser Criston Cole (Fabian Frankel) get moments of grace and complexity this season. And there’s that wonderful bit of dragon-battling in the middle of the season, with the shouting-at-the-screen-excitement of the clash that we’d been promised all this time and the sense that now, finally, shit is about to get real. And then it just… doesn’t.
It’s not only about grading this against its mega-successful (to a point) predecessor either. Of course, House of the Dragon is its own thing. It’s drawing from a book that’s written as a historical account, and embroidering that – heavily – with character detail that’s missing or only implied in the source material, and that’s a different challenge from Game of Thrones. But at the same time we’re not coming to Westeros for in-depth analysis of how a reluctant leader decides to go to war. This is not Succession. The attraction of Martin’s world has always been the way that people make cunning plans, only for some utterly unforeseen element to come along and screw them up. Ned Stark works to uncover a plot, but he doesn’t account for Littlefinger. Robb Stark plans a war, but fails to consider the Freys. Everyone focuses on the Lannisters, but doesn’t know about Daenerys. Daenerys is so filled with rage, she loses sight of Jon. Here, the sabotage Rhaenyra faces is self-sabotage, and it makes for less thrilling twists and turns. There are fewer big battle scenes, and way fewer small confrontations along the way too, and that’s a problem for viewers’ excitement levels. It doesn’t have to be Thrones, but it does have to have a compelling story of its own.
The frustrations of the season finale are also hard to get past. Everything actually in the episode is fine; you can’t really complain that you didn’t get some dramatic heavy lifting and actually quite a bit of character payoff. But it leaves a horrible taste in the mouth because it moves all the pieces into place for something exciting to happen and then just… ends. Is it so much to ask for a quick skirmish? A little dragon fight? It’s hard to think of a more frustrating season finale to a major show like this. Yes, it’s given us time with the major characters and finally moved all the pieces in place; good work everyone. But where’s the scene that reminds us the show can be shocking, and that it’s going to deliver thrills as well as promising them?
So it’s not a bad show, then, but drawn out this way it’s less than the show should be or wants to be. You have to wonder if showrunner Ryan Condal stripped the action out of season 2 to save up a literal war chest for next time when there must be more conflict. But then why not spread the battles out across two seasons? We’re halfway through this show’s planned four-season run, but it feels like we’re barely off the starting blocks. As good as the individual scenes are – and they are good, and their dialogue is typically better than Thrones’, too – House of the Dragon will simply never get off the ground and soar if it keeps dawdling along at this pace.