House of the Dragon Is Bolder, Nastier, and Harder to Watch

In one of the hardest scenes to watch in Game of Thrones, a young girl is murdered by her own father. Late in Season 5, Stannis Baratheon (played by Stephen Dillane) burns alive his only child, Shireen (Kerry Ingram), in a misguided attempt to help his army advance. She screams for mercy over and over, while he watches in stony silence.

Long before the HBO drama’s disappointing final season, Shireen’s death tested my resolve to continue the show—but only for a moment. By that point, Game of Thrones had earned my investment. Though the series often sickened me, it had spent considerable time exploring how characters arrived at their decisions. Shocking outcomes felt consequential. Tragedies felt earned. Stannis’s choice was as disturbing as it was dramatically poignant: He’d been deeply wounded by the lack of affection he’d experienced growing up, yet he couldn’t love his own daughter enough to see her as more than a means to an end.

I bring up the unsavory business of Shireen’s death because much of the second season of House of the Dragon, which returns today and follows the incestuous, dragon-riding Targaryen family nearly 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones, reminds me of her demise and how I’d felt watching it. HBO sent critics the first four episodes—and a long list of plot details to withhold, so I’m doing my best to be vague—and the drama is even more brutal than before. Season 1 spent 10 episodes leaping forward in time to set the table for the civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons, while the eight-episode Season 2 largely devotes itself to the showdowns that ensue. The series is thus not a sprawling medieval fantasy epic; it’s a portrait of a family cruelly and gorily tearing itself apart out of pride, confusion, and obsession with power. What reasons are there to keep watching a show about people destroying their own kin, beyond my affection for Thrones’ better years? I’m still tuning in, but I’m genuinely not sure I should.

To be clear, the new chapters offer plenty of gripping material that makes the drama fuller and more cohesive: By spanning weeks rather than years, the show retains its cast and feels less jarring to take in, allowing some performances extra breathing room. Episodes visit locations across Westeros that will make hard-core fans cheer, take time to capture the smallfolk perspective on the Targaryens’ incessant campaign to win their favor, and inject more levity into what used to be endlessly grim dialogue. And, of course, there be dragons, unleashed into spectacular battles that prove House of the Dragon has the best visual-effects team of any show currently on the air.

But these improvements also make the greatest flaw more glaring. Most of the show’s characters continue to lack the kind of depth that made so many in the Thrones ensemble irresistible to watch, even when they did the nastiest things. The Targaryens have thin, uniform motivations in Season 2—that is, to survive and win. Little character development occurs, and potent emotional arcs are rare. One Targaryen who suffers a significant loss early in Season 2 is rarely seen dealing with the aftermath. Another barely grapples with their involvement in an accident. Just compare the portrayal of Daemon (Matt Smith), the uncle-husband of Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy), to another loyal supporter of a queen from Thrones. Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) wanted his relative-lover to be crowned too, but Thrones spent seasons carefully and satisfyingly examining how his crude sense of duty shifted into a desire for redemption. House’s second season doesn’t seem interested in how conflict changes Daemon; it only shows that the drama of war weighs on him. Smith’s performance—a twitch of an eyebrow here, a curl of a lip there—does much of the heavy lifting to make the character feel less stagnant.

It doesn’t help that, rather than deepening a character’s point of view or advancing subtle power plays, much of the new season’s dialogue amounts to bland observations and insults. “She holds love for our enemy. That makes her a fool,” one character says of someone trying to sway a relative away from violence. “It’s hard, with fathers,” another says while discussing, well, fathers. “The king is my grandson, and my grandson is a fool,” Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), grandfather and Hand to King Aegon II, remarks after Aegon defies him. As much as I’m enjoying Tom Glynn-Carney’s performance as the petulant Aegon, he’s also saddled with weak, obvious statements. “Fuck dignity. I want revenge,” he declares at one point. Such one-liners can’t compare to the memorable quips of a Tyrion Lannister or an Olenna Tyrell, and make even the usually entertaining Small Council meetings among passive-aggressive royal advisers feel perfunctory.

With two members of the Targaryen family vying for the throne—Queen Rhaenyra and King Aegon II, her half-brother—there are twice as many meetings, and therefore twice as many sequences of characters recapping and analyzing what viewers just saw. Not much changes from one meeting to the next: The women—Rhaenyra and Alicent (Olivia Cooke), who is Aegon’s mother—attempt to quell the men’s calls for bloodshed and brutality, only to be ignored. When plot twists occur, the stoicism of Small Council meetings extinguishes potential dramatic sparks, preventing the show from further exploring, say, a victim’s grief and a perpetrator’s guilt.  

In some ways, the circuitousness of House helps emphasize the show’s point: that some of our worst impulses—the urge for violence, the refusal to give up on a cause—are so wildly enticing, there’s no repressing them. The more the characters talked about starting a war, the more I wanted them to simply do so, and the more horrific it became when battle did break out. But the flatness of the main characters remains a detriment to the show’s progress. House seems afraid to cast anyone as its hero, defining the parallels between Rhaenyra’s and Aegon’s flawed campaigns instead of exploring how they might differ and transform under pressure.

As it turns out, Shireen knew all along the pitfalls of focusing on who wins a war rather than the emotional consequences of being in one. In a scene before she is led to her death, Stannis visits her as she’s reading about the Dance of the Dragons. “If you had to choose between Rhaenyra and Aegon, who would you have chosen?” he asks. Neither, she responds. “It’s all the choosing sides,” she explains, “that made everything so horrible.” House of the Dragon is not horrible, by any means; it’s a visually sumptuous and well-performed drama, packed with gut-wrenching twists. But in devoting much of its scenes and dialogue to doling out plot points, it’s also quite often hard to watch. What could have been a rich study of a family’s self-inflicted tragedy has become a grueling march toward fire and blood.