The second season of House of the Dragon just ended, in much the same way as the first. Both spent their last episodes indulging in leisurely table-setting for events to come and both ended on a note of: “Look, that was a bit of a slog, but things will kick off soon, promise.”
However, everyone already knows what’s going to happen. If you’ve seen Game of Thrones, you know how things will be in 200 years. If you’ve read Fire and Blood – or if you’ve consulted Wikipedia – you’ll know all the steps to get there. In other words, the entire House of the Dragon audience is waiting for the moment when all the dragons start kicking the crap out of one another. It’s coming, but so slowly that it’s getting harder and harder to justify the wait.
Especially when we know how well it can do all the dragon stuff. Halfway through this season, we got The Red Dragon and the Gold, which gave us more dragon-on-dragon action than we’d seen in anything adapted from one of George RR Martin’s books. It was spectacular and gripping. And, unlike the final few episodes of Game of Thrones – where the action was ramped up at the cost of coherence – it felt satisfactory. We knew who everyone was and could feel all the justifications and consequences of everything that happened. It was great. It was, in short, the show we’d all tuned in to watch back in 2022.
Game of Thrones never gave us the good stuff in the season finale. Penultimate episodes were usually where the action happened, and endings tended to be more muted. But last week’s penultimate episode of House of the Dragon wasn’t action-packed, either. Blame it on last year’s strikes, or on extreme stubbornness on the part of the showrunner, but season two fizzled when it could have blazed. Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk put it best when she compared House of the Dragon’s season two ending to “that awful sensation when you really need to sneeze but for some reason you just … don’t”.
This reluctance to provide audience satisfaction seems to be a trend. The Boys moved much more slowly this year, as it lined all the characters up for what promises to be a blockbuster final season. The Bear achieved the impossible by making an entire series of television without a shred of narrative propulsion. But it feels so much worse with House of the Dragon, because it’s a prequel. We know what’s coming, so it feels torturous not to be given it.
House of the Dragon knows this, so it spent some of this week’s episode showing us the future. At one point, Daemon put his hand on a blood-soaked tree and was greeted with visions of Game of Thrones, in the form of White Walkers and baby dragons and the back of a woman who looked like, but was legally distinct from, Emilia Clarke. Again, the promise seemed to be that the good stuff is coming. In reality, however, it served as a reminder that the stakes were so much higher in Game of Thrones, which just makes House of the Dragon’s pottering more intolerable.
There is a way out of this mess. House of the Dragon finds itself in the same predicament as Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad prequel. Like House of the Dragon, people entered into Better Call Saul eager to see the good stuff: the moment when the flawed yet idealistic Jimmy McGill blossomed into the all-out funhouse baddie of Saul Goodman. And, like House of the Dragon, the show was defined by a deep reluctance to get us there quickly. In total, 63 episodes of Better Call Saul were made. Goodman didn’t appear conclusively until the end of episode 59.
But Better Call Saul had a neat trick up its sleeve. By making us wait, and forcing us to care about McGill, the long-promised payoff – here comes Saul! – started to feel like a threat. We liked McGill. We didn’t want him to change. The show weaponised the inevitable against us so much that, when the change happened, it hurt.
This is what House of the Dragon needs to do. We all know the Dance of Dragons is coming. A vast spectacle of fire and violence will occur, with battle after battle. Thousands will die, including most central characters. House of the Dragon needs to make these characters so engaging that we’d prefer to keep them alive than face the action we’ve awaited. On the basis of this week’s finale, it’s a trick the show will struggle to crack.
