House of the Dragon, an HBO prequel series to Game of Thrones

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101

This isn’t my genre of choice and I only saw eps here and there of GoT, but I enjoyed it for the most part.
Maybe not being a fan is a plus, as I’m not comparing it to the book(s) or GoT.
In my opinion there isn’t a bad performance among the cast. I think Matt Smith plays menacing very well (see Last Night in Soho) but that blonde wig . . . ditto Paddy Considine; fantastic actor but I’m having trouble taking him seriously. I get that the platinum hair is Targaryen trademark and I very rarely get hung up on costuming / makeup so I don’t know why it’s distracting me in this case. I think Milly Adcock does a great job as Rhaenyra but I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out who she reminds me of. The answer: Linda Hunt as Billy in The Year of Living Dangerously.
On the other hand, Steve Toussaint looks badass, both his platinum dreads and his withering scowl.

As to the gore, I recall hearing about the outrageous violence in GoT and I’d heard this series is a little lower profile on that score. Um, if the jousting scenes are considered mild, I’m going to be turning my head a lot.

102

I thought I heard a choking sound too. Mrs Geek and I were both wondering if something was wrong with the baby.

This was pretty tame by GoT standards. The sex was somewhat tame, too, at least by GoT standards (the term “sexposition” was coined specifically because of GoT). There was just enough sex and violence to remind you that you were watching a GoT show but that’s about it.

I thought the first half of the show was a bit boring. I think they could have done a better job making it interesting while introducing the characters. There were also parts that were too dark on my laptop sitting on my dining room table at 6 pm. I read that this episode was directed by the same idiot responsible for the battle of Winterfell being too dark to see in GoT so I guess that explains it.

Overall though the show caught my interest. Mrs Geek and I both had our reservations about the show but after seeing it we both definitely want to continue watching.

103

Unfortunate, but also unfortunately no big surprise:

104

That ‘idiot’ is Miguel Sapochnik, the current (co) showrunner and director of two of the hightest rated GoT episodes, The Battle of the Bastards and The Winds of Winter. I’m not sure what went wrong with the The Long Night episode (too dark) but it should have been fixed in post-production.

105

I thought they mentioned the son of the King’s Sister (The Queen who never was) as a possible heir. So there could be multiple claimants for the throne.

106

He’s a good director and it was a artistic decision that went too far. I should say, though, a full Blu-ray copy looks much better. I saw it the night it aired using the HBO app and while I saw no pixelation, it was darker, unwatchable more or less.

On Blu-ray, which I got from my library eventually, it looked much better. I heard something about a 4K copy coming out and people with 4K TV’s saying it looked even better.

However, they did mess up. It’s actually a really good episode except for the darkness…and the resolution of the Ice King guy which was massively anti-climactic.

107

Been there, done that: Keystone Army - TV Tropes

108

I think she’s the current king’s first cousin and the previous king’s eldest daughter, but yes she does have a son who could make a claim to the throne. It does raise the question can a woman transmit a right to her male heirs that she doesn’t have herself? Come to think of it; what exactly did the Great Council rule? Does she not have any claim to the Iron Throne at all because of her sex or does she merely have an inferior claim?

109

I don’t think they said definitively that her claim was weaker according to some rule of succession. They just picked the one they preferred.

110

You are correct, they are cousins; I misremembered. She was the oldest grandchild of the former king; he was the oldest male grandchild.

It’s interesting that the King Viserys inherited the throne because no woman has ever sat on the iron throne, but he wants to pass it to his daughter. How does he think this will end?

As for whether a woman can transmit a right to male heirs that she does not possess, we’ll have to see if Salic Law is a thing in Westeros.

111

They didn’t explicitly say in the show (though inferred Rhaenys’ sex was a barrier), but in the books:

After Jaehaerys I’s eldest son and heir (Aemon) died, Jaehaerys chose his younger son (Baelon) as his heir over the eldest daughter to his eldest son (Rhaenys), specifically due to sex. To prevent a war between those loyal to Baelon’s son, Viserys, and those loyal to Rhaenys’ son, Laenor, a Great Council was called.

The Great Council actually passed on Rhaenys due to her sex, and voted between Viserys and Laenor and ended up picking Viserys because they felt that the male line should be paramount.

112

Thank you, that clears things up considerably.

113

It has been renewed for a second season.

114

I think it is clearly too early to meaningfully compare this to GoT. It is visually stunning and obviously uses many of the same archetypes and ideas. I thought the first episode did a reasonably good job of introducing the characters. Sure, it had its boring parts and at this stage a simpler plot, but GoT also had plenty of boring bits and the plot took time to become complex. I enjoyed the music. None of the acting was bad and some was excellent. But none of the characters had the initial charisma of Tyrion, Cersei, Varys, Baelish, etc. although there were obvious Targaryean parallels. There is promise, and I am pleased I subscribed to its Canadian distributor and look forward to future episodes.

As a contrarian opinion, I thought the last season of GoT was actually very good - with really only the exception of the very last episode, which was indeed as bad as people said - characters suddenly behaving opposite to the natures revealed over many episodes for reasons that were unsatisfying and contrived. But it was still salvageable until the very end, and I enjoyed most of the other episodes. Of course, I have not read any of the books, and am not a super fan of the genre.

115

I liked the final season, but found the turning point of badness to be in the second to last episode, not the final episode. I was with the show, with some minor reservations*, until Dany went completely nuts and did what she did. It wasn’t a twist, it was ruinous.

I still list Game of Thrones as a great show, one of the best. There are, dare I say, even moments in the finale that I like quite a bit. The final shot of the grass blade and Jon Snow heading North was actually great and a good ending scene.

*Ice King guy’s death

116

Unlike a lot of GoT fans, I didn’t have a problem with the plot of the last season. The problem I had was that they took about 4 seasons of 10 episodes each and crammed them into 1 season of 6 episodes. Season 8 wasn’t fully developed. It was more like a Cliff’s Notes of what the last several seasons of GoT should have been.

For 7 seasons they kept building the threat of the White Walkers. Then we get one battle and poof, they’re gone. Wait, what? That was it? That was the big showdown that we waited 8 seasons for? That should have been most of a season, not one episode. It should have been loss after loss, showing how unprepared everyone was for the threat that they had been warned about for years. It should have been an epic struggle for survival. And (IMHO) a few more major characters should have died.

Unlike a lot of GoT fans, I had no problem with Arya being the one to take out the Night King. If she didn’t do that, then what was her entire character arc for? Why did the show spend so much time making her into a badass if they weren’t going to do something with it? She needed to do something with her deadly skills, and with everyone expecting Jon to be the one to defeat the Night King, I think showing him getting hung up and not being able to get to where he needed to be was a good way to do it.

There needed to be at least an entire season dedicated to Dany’s descent into the Mad Queen. If we saw her slowly decaying, slowly withdrawing into herself as she loses ally after ally and friend after friend, then Varys having doubts about her would have made sense. Eventually Varys gets to the point where he loses faith, and then his turn against her makes sense. Instead, we got Varys turning traitor in basically one episode and then poof, he’s gone. Dracarys. The show was so rushed that we don’t even get any real time to se Dany’s hurt and betrayal at having one of her most trusted advisors turn against her. Dany’s descent into madness makes sense (to me at least), but not the way that they portrayed it.

With only 6 episodes I knew going into it that everything was just going to be rushed, so I just accepted that and tried to imagine what it would have been if they had taken the time to do it right. As a result, I actually did enjoy it, with one exception. Jon needed to sit on the throne at the end.

I haven’t read the books that House of the Dragon is based on, but from what I hear they aren’t as extensive and probably translate to about 3 or 4 seasons. I don’t know if they’ll try to stretch it out into a few more seasons than that, or if they’ll do other spinoff shows. I did read that George RR Martin is hoping that it becomes a franchise like Star Wars or the MCU Universe. I wouldn’t mind multiple shows of 3 or 4 seasons each, with each show focusing on a different part of the world or a different era.

117

I don’t think most of the major criticisms have to do with the plot points but rather how it was executed.

Primarily, the pacing was so rushed that there was no time to develop the characters’ motivations for their actions. So the result was that a lot of the characters seemed to be behaving out of character or nonsensically.

For example, Jamie Lannister completes a series-long character arc and by the end it seems he has fundamentally changed as a person. This redemption arc defined his character. But then you have one moment in which he declares his love for Brienne and immediately after that just takes off to return to Cersei. The same applies to Daenerys—yes, her turn could have been well done but the show didn’t give it time to develop. It just happened. Same with Bran becoming king. The way the story was told, it didn’t make sense.

The whole thing just seemed to be a series of scenes to put certain pieces in certain places on the board, without ever going through the actual moves to get there.

The rushed pacing also made logistical hash of the story. For several seasons, we have felt the weight of time it takes for characters to travel from one place to another, but now it seems like they can just teleport instantly.

Then you have screen time on subplots that seem to exist only to try to trick the viewer, such as the silly rift arc between Sansa and Arya.

Then you have entirely wasted storylines and characters. In the books, the Dorne characters and Euron Greyjoy have substance. In the show they are a waste of time and come off as buffoons.

And then you have surrender to stupid movie tropes, such as an entire fleet being able to sneak up on an army with three dragons—so long as the camera isn’t pointing in their direction, apparently they are invisible to everyone.

One could go on … and indeed many have.

118

Some people liked the new first episode and others did not. Some reviews are pretty incoherent, there is a very awkward article in the National Review trying to link Trump, Game of Thrones and current conservative bugbears.

It captures the flavour of the original and is visually stunning and, of course, will inevitably disappoint super fans. But I was thinking that pregnant women are sort of designed to stop bleeding. They did the Caesarian and then seemingly made no effort at all to save the mothers life, which would not have taken much but was detrimental to the story. Some maesters.

I hope the characters become more interesting as time goes on. The beauty of GoT was that there was enough background that you could sometimes understand peoples motivations and influences. Most main characters were not simple dichotomies - always good or heroic or moral or otherwise. There were a number of interesting storylines and these were not so dependent on a single figure, so that they continued even as main characters sometimes died.

The blood and buttocks formula of the original seemed slightly downplayed for more sensitive times. I’m good with that, personally.

The last GoT episode did not tie the plots together well or coherently maintain character consistency. But many of the episodes were good and far better than standard TV fare. But King Bran? Snow and Sansa went north, Arya west for some reason, Drogon east while the show and series went south. But not until the end; Daenerys had a few sort of valid reasons for not wanting to show leniency to Kings Landing apart from going postal. They just didn’t match her previously expressed views. But even the last season was visually stunning with many good moments and disappointed fans, who rated the last season like 6.1/10, were being pretty harsh. However, I will not discuss this further in this thread.

119

Carsarian sections were a death sentence and only done in cases where you could save the baby and lose the mom, or you could lose both (well, in the best estimation of ancient or medieval medical caretakers, which is suspect at best to begin with).

In fact, C sections were originally done on women who had already died, for religious reasons. Eventually the Romans figured out you could sometimes save the baby if you did them early enough, so in desperate situations they’d be done while the woman was still alive.

Incidentally, C Sections are called that because the latin root that Caesar’s name comes from means “to cut”, and Caesar was not born by C section (because he had younger brothers by the same mother, and as stated C sections were a death sentance at the time). It is unknown why he had that name, although it is possible an ancestor was born by C section and was named Caesar, and Caesar himself was named after the ancestor. And C sections are not named after him either - the term predates him.

And yes, I learned all this because I had the same thought you did - “if they were doing C sections in Cesar’s time, how come they killed the mother in Westeros?” And that led me to learn all that, as well as the fact that the first C section not to kill the mom happened in 1794.

So, no surprise that they didn’t even try to save her.

120

The maester said as much to Viserys, “Sometimes we have to come to the father with an impossible choice…”. Everyone in the room except Aemma knew that she was written off for dead in order to save the baby. Credit Viserys for at least being there holding her through it, most men of power in Westeros would have just left the room.