This is the Reader’s Digest condensed version. Still, House of the Dragon will never have GoT’s scope, and it’s best to recognize that early on. And starting at a dynasty’s peak means that it can only turn to ashes in their mouths - just what devoted fans love to see. The news Lord Corlys drops about anarchy brewing down on The Stepstones (islands off Sunspear), and the introduction of strangers like Ser Criston Cole, a joust-master of Dornish descent, promise a universe broad enough to braid in disparate but connected storylines. So far the series feels expansive enough not to get bogged down in a Succession-like teeter-totter, where the balance of power swings back and forth to the point of nausea. The two biggest distinctions for this series are its hyper-focus on one family, titular dragon-folk the Targaryens and its setting in a Westerosi golden age, a time with its own Colosseum-like stadium for tourneys and Renaissance-esque fashions. There’s a pile of sliced-off testicles, a severed head, and one moment where a couple in the act of copulation have to freeze, underneath a spotlight, and hold the position while a main character gives a speech about a dead baby. This first episode is well-acted, violent, revolting, CGI’d to the hilt, and more than a little horny - a typical Game of Thrones stew. House of the Dragon is unabashedly for Game of Thrones fans. Over 172 years earlier, when House of the Dragon is set, it’s being used for its original purpose. The spot of dusty ground she lands on is a site from season eight put to a new (old) use - this is the dragon pit where the remaining lords met to hash out their plan for Bran the Broken to take the throne.
When Princess Rhaenyra lands her golden-scaled dragon Syrax and slides off his back, for a brief moment she’s an uncanny doppelgänger of Daenerys - until she spins around. The angles on King’s Landing are all different - until we soar over the balconied cloister where Cersei painted her map of the Westeros she thought she would rule.
This series premiere wants to provide glimpses of the Westeros universe we remember and spin the perspective just enough to make House of the Dragon distinct. Google searches on characters or plot points will return spoilers. This is Westerosi history, as told in the last third of Martin’s Fire & Blood, one of those tales of knights and maidens fair that Shireen Baratheon huddled over in her sad little princess cell, an entirely finished story. House of the Dragon has no such protections in place. Martin told the New York Times that his ending for books six and seven - The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, respectively - will substantially differ from Dave Benioff and D.B. Game of Thrones is famously unfinished: Theories and speculation flourished across ye internet throughout the show’s run because beyond seasons four and five, its future was (is) as murky as the swamps of the Neck.
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