The laziest solution to tag Home of the Dragon (Sky Atlantic) has at all times been to name it the Higher Name Saul for Sport of Thrones. Like that present, it is a prequel; like that present, we already understand how issues are going to finish. However now, with a full season within the rear-view, the comparability feels warranted.
Each Home of the Dragon and Higher Name Saul benefited from a baked-in fanbase, and as such didn’t have to spring out of the gates fairly as shortly as their mom exhibits. Like Saul, Home of the Dragon turned out to be a slower, knottier watch, extra fascinated by character than spectacle. It required a a lot nearer viewing. With Saul, this paid off in spades throughout its extraordinary last season. For now, with Home of the Dragon, what lies forward is nothing however an enormous query mark.
You’ll do not forget that this present issues itself with a legendary civil battle that nearly tore Westeros aside. However as of the tip of season one, now we have seen exactly none of it. If the legendary Sport of Thrones episode The Dance of Dragons was the primary world battle, then now we have simply spent 10 full hours watching the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
In different phrases, this sequence has turned out to be a prequel to a prequel, one which will in time grow to be seen because the prologue to Home of the Dragon. We met the gamers (a few of them as kids) and now we all know what drives them, whether or not it’s betrayal, greed or just having been created by an creator who loves writing psychopaths. All of the geese are in a row. And that’s the place they’re going to remain for fairly a while now.
Clearly we gained’t know whether or not or not this meticulous world-building was value it for a number of years. However what appears obvious now’s that the season was saving the very best for final. It took some time to get there, however by the tip of the episode, issues are lastly motoring. Princess Rhaenyra now is aware of that her father has died (lastly, after spending a number of episodes as basically a gibbering skeleton) and he or she is aware of that she wasn’t made queen. Battle strains are swiftly being drawn up and the present is making it a binary alternative for viewers. On one hand, a lady who was promised the crown after which had it snatched away. On the opposite, a band of cartoon nasties who put on eye patches and get their dragons to actually eat different dragons. That final one fashioned the climax of this episode, largely as a result of Rhaenyra’s son was driving the dragon that received chomped. And but it wasn’t even near being essentially the most upsetting second of the episode.
One of many massive themes of the season, deliberately or in any other case, was the violence of childbirth. In episode one, we noticed a lady die whereas giving delivery. Midway by way of the season, the brand new actor enjoying Rhaenyra was launched with an extended and gruelling closeup of her enduring labour. However the worst was saved for this episode. The shock of studying that she wasn’t queen was a lot for Rhaenyra that she fell into untimely labour and miscarried in extraordinarily graphic trend. The scene was some of the disagreeable ever dedicated to display screen, and you would argue that it was solely gratuitous. This can be a present that strikes by way of time so swiftly that characters can get outdated and die between scenes. And but, in terms of displaying feminine agony throughout childbirth, it lingers just like the worst form of rubbernecker. It’s an unedifying tendency and one I hope the present treats with extra sensitivity sooner or later.
Clearly I hope different issues change, too. I’d like Home of the Dragon to search out consistency in terms of characters ageing. Paddy Considine’s Viserys, for instance, decayed like an Indiana Jones baddie opening a cursed tomb whereas his brother (performed by Matt Smith) has revealed himself to be Westeros’s Paul Rudd. He hasn’t aged a day and now I don’t understand how outdated he’s imagined to be. Is he 30? 45? 90? It’s laborious to inform. What’s his secret? Good hydration? Incest? The shiny mags have to know. Additionally, and I don’t need to be choosy, however it might be good if future episodes had been lit in such a solution to let me see what the hell is meant to be occurring.
My sense is that season two of Home of the Dragon shall be way more explosive than the primary, and if that’s the case then the truth that it was solely predicated on an outdated man getting his names blended up gained’t matter. However we’ll must see. Home of the Dragon is over. I can’t look forward to it to truly start.