War, dragons and childbirth: What House of the Dragon got right and wrong in season one

Now that the ‘Game of Thrones’ prequel’s sentimental, old dad is out of the picture – there’s evil fun to be had, writes Amanda Whiting. In season two, she asks, can everything happen at twice the pace and with half the number of small council meetings?

Emma D’Arcy’s Rhaenrya in the ‘House of the Dragon’ finale (Sky)

The king is dead! At long last, the king is dead. In House of the Dragon, HBO’s slow-building Game of Thrones prequel, Viserys finally succumbs to the leprotic illness that cost him fingers and toes, half of his face and who knows what more over the course of his reign. Is all of Westeros worse off without him? Absolutely. He may have been a broken, sentimental man, but at least he was a man. It’s a qualification that – when reinforced with a rumbling of dragons – is enough to rest a fictional continent’s whole peace on. But for the sake of House of the Dragon’s dramatic potential, the diminished king’s death couldn’t have arrived soon enough.

In the dying moments of Sunday night’s finale, the series shoves its steely heroine Rhaenyra to her breaking point, thereby ending a season of TV that mostly served as prologue. With her claim to the throne usurped by her sloppy half-brother Aegon (a puppet of Rhaenyra’s conniving stepmom-slash-ex-bestie Alicent), she had sent her sons on a mission to shore up support. Her youngest, “four-and-ten-year-old” Luke, never makes it home. His weedy dragon Arrax is no match for that of his evil cyclops cousin Aemond – Vhagar is the LeBron of dragons. It doesn’t matter that it was all an accident; that Aemond lost control of Vhagar; that he only intended to scare Luke and not to kill him. It’s likely, with Aemond’s vicious pride, that no one will ever know the truth.

Rhaenyra doesn’t utter a word when she hears the news. She doesn’t need to. Emma D’Arcy has played her, week to week, with an increasingly fierce and flinty-eyed self-certainty. She turns away from the fireplace and stares into the camera, a mother’s anguish amplified by a queen’s capacity for destruction. Let her rip, baby.

In fact, let everything happen at twice the pace and with half the number of small council meetings. House of the Dragon’s first season has, despite jarring time-jumps, felt frustratingly slow. The series pads out George RR Martin’s novel Fire & Blood with rich and voluminous backstory, giving us the gift of Paddy Considine’s Viserys. If the series were more faithful to Martin’s account, that character never would have made it past an episode or two. Nor should he have. This is a show about men and women with reckless ambition, dubious ethics, and murderous dragons. Finally, without somewhat-dear and very-old Dad around to make sure everyone eats dinner together at the table, they can put all that evil to its most thrilling use.

In a way, nothing that happened until this moment really mattered. Alicent’s little machinations; the Velaryons’ nasty objections to their brunette relations; Daemon’s violent excesses. Even if Viserys’s family weren’t constantly inflicting small wounds on each other, war between them was inevitable from the moment he named Rhaenyra as his heir.

Now we can stop hearing the same vague and hypothetical whispers about what will happen to each house when the time for alliances is upon us. We’re already watching war tear families apart, like the (absurdly named) twins Arryk and Erryk Cargyll, knights of Viserys’s kingsguard divided by competing senses of duty.

We can stop doing back-of-the-napkin dragon maths – Greens have four, Blacks have 11; Blacks have more eggs and riders; Greens have Vhagar – and get more dragon warfare. What’s the point of a $20m an episode budget, if we mostly watch these CGI masterpieces incinerate their riders (RIP Laena) and chill in their dungeon lairs listening to Matt Smith’s serenade?

Matt Smith as Prince Daemon Targaryen and Harry Collett as Prince Jacaerys Velaryon (Sky)

And please, I think we can stop using wretched childbirth as a metaphor for women’s toughness now. Let them prove their mettle as the kings who came before them did: by sacrificing the innocent people of Westeros to their pride and powerlust.

I’m also very keen on seeing more of Rhaenyra’s enormous war map – which we glimpsed as a table lit from below by the same fire the Targaryens wield.

In this first season, House of the Dragon was claustrophobic. There were too many evil people cooped up in King’s Landing with not enough evil to do. Finally, the families are done beating the drums of war and they are ready to fight.

‘House of the Dragon’ is available to stream on NOW and HBO Max