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Louise Thomas
Editor
House of the Dragon viewers are criticising one aspect of the new season.
The HBO series’s second season continued on Sunday (14 July), catching viewers up with the show’s lead characters after the fatal events of episode five.
*Spoilers follow – you have been warned*
Fans enjoyed watching Prince Aemond’s (Ewan Mitchell) ascent to the throne, after his traitorous behaviour in last week’s instalment, and also liked seeing Rhaenyra (Emma D’arcy) and her son Jacaerys (Harry Collett) concoct a plan in the wake of Rhaenys’s (Eve Best) death.
But the same could not be said for the scenes involving Daemon (Matt Smith).
For the last few episodes, Daemon has been separated from the remainder of the main cast in Harrenhal, where he has been having hallucinations of a young Rhaenyra (played by a returning Milly Alcock) and, in a distribing scene featured in the latest episode, his mother Alyssa Targaryen (Emeline Lambert), whom he was shown to be in bed with.
But viewers are finding these scenes rather tedious. One complained: “I’m tired of Daemon and them nightmares!” while another added: “I am broadly enjoying House of the Dragon, but the monotonous Daemon scenes with their sinfully slow pacing are becoming very tiresome now. It’s like they didn’t really know what to do with him this season.”
Another urged Rhaenyra to “please please get Daemon out of there”, adding: “I can’t do this no more,” while one additional fan quipped on X/Twitter: Daemon brother do something. spending the whole season in air bnb and getting high aint gonna help anyone.”
One more person said “there better be a good explanation” for the scenes as “otherwise they’ve wasted two episodes on Daemon taking some shrooms in a run down castle”, with another writing: “I do not want to sit through another episode of Daemon wandering around Harrenhal.”
The series continues on HBO in the US on Sundays and on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK on Mondays.
