Editor’s be aware: The beneath incorporates spoilers for House of the Dragon.
The first season of House of the Dragon will come to its climactic finish tonight, and, by now, we are able to already get overview of Game of Thrones‘ first spin-off present for HBO. It’s, after all, an enormous success. It introduced again most of what made its mom sequence a success, together with household intrigue and political suspense, whereas additionally doubling down on others — for instance, as an alternative of three, there have been 17 dragons. There’s no method it may go incorrect, proper?
But other than what we got here to anticipate from this universe by way of plot, House of the Dragon additionally saved the normal narrative mildew that made Game of Thrones such a success: ten-episode seasons. From seasons 1 to six, that present obtained us used to this specific method of telling tales, and House of the Dragon‘s ninth episode, “The Green Council,” adopted that sample completely and delivered a stunning second to be additional developed in tonight’s season finale.
Still, House of the Dragon solely suits the 10-episode season mildew by sacrificing chunk of chronological time. Its first season spans a whopping 16 years and makes extensive use of time jumps to cowl all that. It’s a moderately extreme use of time jumps, to be sincere. While the present has managed to maintain us on the sting of our seat week after week, attempting to suit such a big time interval in so few episodes comes with a price, and the present misplaced a lot of the attraction it may have had with more room in between.
Why Are There So Many Time Jumps?
Recently, George R.R. Martin himself addressed the time soar problem, mentioning the present cable and streaming panorama as one of many components that pressured the manufacturing group to go for this device. “There are solely so many minutes in an episode, and solely so many episodes in a season,” he says, which is a legitimate argument… But not sufficient to totally justify the frenzy with which some plot traces had been dealt. There had been quite a lot of traces that Game of Thrones had the time to totally develop, together with just a few narrative cores that did not actually go anyplace, whereas its spin-off did the alternative, attempting to chunk far more than it will possibly chew in simply an episode.
Comparing House of the Dragon to Game of Thrones is inevitable in some (or most) facets, but it surely’s not likely truthful with a present that has simply begun. Unfortunately, the reminiscence of the final seasons of Martin’s first medieval fantasy present continues to be contemporary on most viewers’ minds, and HBO was absolutely conscious of that.
When its first season debuted, House of the Dragon hadn’t but been renewed. For most of us, this might’ve been a no brainer from the beginning, however what if it went incorrect? The time jumps would then function a solution to compress the story and go straight to the meat of the present, thus avoiding any attainable backlash whereas nonetheless giving us some fiery motion. While it could have appeared like technique on the time, now that the primary season is sort of over and the second is already confirmed, the viewers had been left with a rushed story, many recasts to accommodate the time jumps, and barely any time to truly benefit from the performances the actors labored so arduous to convey.
Martin additionally talked about that the present would require 4 seasons of 13 episodes to totally do the Dance of Dragons justice, and that sheds some gentle on how the present business panorama operates. For a present to be seen as a hit, it must generate quite a lot of buzz in a brief time period, so House of the Dragon wanted to impress straight away. The time jumps, then, make specific how the studio really approached the present as of venture. If the present was well-received, then good, every part might appear to be a hit. If not, nicely, not less than we obtained some dragons, proper?
What the Time Jumps Sacrifice in Terms of Story
House of the Dragon relies on Martin’s e book, Fire & Blood, which analyzes the historical past of the Targaryen dynasty in Westeros. Adapting a novel right into a tv sequence is a large enough problem, however Fire & Blood is not precisely a novel. Creative as he’s, Martin wrote a e book below the premise of an unreliable narrator (Archmaester Gyldayn, a famed historian of House Targaryen), with out bothering to create a story or delving an excessive amount of into the specifics of every occasion. It’s a fictional historical past e book, which means that its focus is principally on factual occasions.
For that to be dropped at the display screen, many gaps needed to be crammed in an effort to create one thing that deserves to be instructed, a narrative with an entire narrative and characters with well-established growth arcs. House of the Dragon positive tries arduous to provide us that, however its essential focus continues to be on the what, not likely on the how. While that is necessary to deliver us the motion that we’re all right here for, it nonetheless leaves us wanting for extra, and never in a great way.
What we get is the introduction of closely necessary characters to the Dance of Dragons with little or no context. Take Aegon Targaryen (Ty Tennant and Tom Glynn-Carney), for instance. Apart from temporary scenes and dialogue, the eldest son of king Viserys (Paddy Considine) and Alicent Hightower (Emily Carey and Olivia Cooke) is launched to us as primarily a nuisance for Rhaenyra’s (Milly Alcock and Emma D’Arcy) declare to the Iron Throne. We see Aegon as largely an inconsequential boy, being pushed round by his mom and grandfather Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans). Of course, that is how he’s described in Fire & Blood, however, had House of the Dragon had fewer time jumps, maybe he may have performed a extra concrete position in his household’s dynamics and the way the Greens work, with out damaging the e book’s affect. He’s being in comparison with king Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) by followers, however we hardly get any time to see why, as he was satisfied by his mom to put on the crown and turn out to be king solely miles from the Dragon Pit.
It’s clear that the fixed recasting and altering of actors for these characters is a technical problem in an effort to higher accommodate the look they’re presupposed to have at a sure age, but it surely may even have labored as a metaphor for character development with out it feeling synthetic. The method it was finished, although, they’re precisely the identical as they had been with totally different actors — making these adjustments, normally, solely concerning the look, as no development was displayed. instance is Aemond Targaryen (Leo Ashton and Ewan Mitchell). We meet him because the bullied child within the household, embittered for not having a dragon of his personal. When we see him years later within the following episode, not a lot has modified for him. We collect that Aemond sees Aegon because the official inheritor to the Iron Throne, and that he resents his brother’s perspective in the direction of that, due to a really temporary line, when that would have served a greater objective to discover how the Greens should not as in line as one might have thought.
Even extra goal occasions may have been higher explored if the plot did not have to be rushed to suit all that right into a 10-episode season. Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), for instance, unceremoniously killed Laenor Velaryon’s (Theo Nate and John Macmillan) lover at a royal marriage ceremony, and we see not one of the aftermath of that. He was a member of the King’s Guard, sworn to guard princess Rhaenyra, and, so far as we all know, there was no consequence for him. He was really promoted to sworn protector of Queen Alicent and given much more reign to homicide indiscriminately, as we see with the demise of Lord Beesbury in “The Green Council.”
Tonight’s season finale is more likely to ship probably the most crushing second of the Dance of Dragons, and that is going to occur between two characters who weren’t there because the season began, and who barely had any growth occurring on display screen. The altering of actors is meant to be a metaphor for character development, however with so many adjustments, it is arduous to maintain monitor not solely of who’s who but additionally of why they’re the best way they’re at any given second. It feels as if House of the Dragon‘s writers have not but determined in the event that they wish to inform a narrative of their very own, or merely to painting occasions from the books which can be deemed most necessary, sacrificing a pure sense of character evolution within the course of. With a second season on the best way, possibly the sequence will spend the uninterrupted time with these characters that they really deserve.