This is a spoiler-free review of Season 2, Episodes 1 and 2 of House of the Dragon. Season 2 premieres on HBO and Max at 9pm ET on Sunday, June 16. Reviews of new episodes will post Sunday nights through August 4.
When House of the Dragon premiered in 2022, co-showrunner Ryan Condal promised a pace akin to the barnstorming middle seasons of Game of Thrones. More recently Condal (who’s now flying solo after longtime GoT hand Miguel Sapochnik stepped back) has said that season 2 will have a burning fuse running through it, setting off small charges before – presumably – a major, final blaze. The first two episodes of the new season are certainly a slow burn, and might have done with a bit more fuel on the fire in between their climactic moments.
We return to Westeros for an opening salvo that’s focused on personal grief and the looming prospect of hostilities between Targaryen factions. Neither mourning “black” queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) or guilt-ridden “green” queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke) is making optimal decisions following the killing of Rhaenyra’s son, Lucerys, by Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) in the first season finale. But they at least remember a time when they were friends, and while they’re both unrelenting in their battle for the Iron Throne, they’re consistently the cooler heads.
Around them, though, schemers and scoundrels jostle for power and revenge. Matt Smith’s Daemon remains the most interesting character, capable of ruthless murder one minute and unusual tenderness the next, but he’s closely followed by his entirely devious but increasingly weary opposite, Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans). Tom Glynn-Carney’s King Aegon is given a few moments of humanity here to make up for his unrelieved venality last season, but he’s still intensely unlikeable and very much in the same mould as King Joffrey Baratheon. The grieving Velaryons, Corlys (Steve Toussaint) and Rhaenys (Eve Best), remain the coolest and most charismatic pairing here, and though their granddaughter Baela (Bethany Antonia) looks like she could attain their level of badassery in time, the three have precious little screen time between them in which to display it.
House of the Dragon therefore remains a little short on people to truly root for at this point; you’d give Aemond’s eye for another Tyrion, another Brienne. Rhaenyra is sympathetic in her anguish, but isolated by her position and angry at a world that has turned against her – so much that it’s hard to deeply invest in her. Her eldest surviving son, Jacaerys (Harry Collett), seems promising, channelling a sort of Chalamet-as-Paul-Atreides energy as he completes the mission he was dispatched on last season and mourns his brother with his family. Then again, good heartedness is not necessarily a survival trait in this world, so perhaps it’s best he not show much more depth.
It must be said that House of the Dragon still looks gorgeous. Location filming has largely shifted from Cornwall to Snowdonia and Anglesey in Wales, with a healthy dose of Spain for the warmer climates, but the shift isn’t jarring unless you know what to look for. We get a glimpse of the North at the start of the season, with a welcome dash of gritty Stark stoicism to leaven the impossibly messy lives of the Targaryen clan.
There are also new opening credits, which dispense with the blood and stone of Season 1 to bring us the embroidery of a Bayeux Tapestry-style history of the Targaryen clan and their various hangers on. The mechanism of its creation is less satisfying than the clockwork style of the original, with threads simply jumping through the base fabric, but it promises lots of spoilerific detail for anyone with patience and a pause button.
Fantasy fans, however, may be disappointed to learn that there’s not a lot of dragon action in these first two episodes, though enough of them patrol the skies and remain a topic in war planning to remind us that these weapons of mass destruction are still very much a factor. Still, the reluctance to dive into action makes the slow start to this season a little frustrating. These are long episodes (just under and just over an hour, respectively), but each one manages only a single truly surprising or dramatic moment. After the buildup of the first season, is it wrong to want some full-fledged civil war already? In the real world, war is good for absolutely nothing (say it again), but in a Westerosi context, surely it’s meant to come standard. Thrones meted out its battles judiciously, but had enough surprising murder and twisting conspiracy along the way to keep us rapt.
These episodes have plenty of on-screen blood, but it comes from a relatively small number of donors, most of whom are easy to see coming. Perhaps there’s an egalitarian impulse buried somewhere in the way that the squabbling Greens and Blacks of the Targaryen family are plotting to kill one another directly, rather than fighting out their issues via huge armies of “smallfolk” – a.k.a. ordinary people who, it is remarked, are often the ones who suffer when princes lose their tempers. Still, it’s a little underwhelming for a TV show that has been sold at least partly on the promise of mayhem and murder, and we’ve already waited so patiently.
What remains strong, however, is the cast. Cooke and D’Arcy, their characters’ long-ago friendship almost entirely buried now under concern for their respective children, never set a foot wrong. Smith is excellent, and even Glynn-Carney, in a much less nuanced role, shows range. So there are well-performed characters to keep us interested as we wait for the real fire and blood to start; dozens of them, in fact, though the often sedate writing means that the cast can never make them as vivid as one might like. And amid the unrelenting doom and gloom of the coming dynastic conflict, there’s hardly any comedy either. Granted, that would be all too easy to overdo, but a little tonal variation – again, of the variety that Tyrion’s rapier wit brought to Game of Thrones – would help lift the whole thing and set House of the Dragon’s darker moments in stark relief. Instead we’re all stuck in a two-hour morass of grief, guilt, and looming conflict.