HOUSE OF THE DRAGON. Insatiability [Season 2 Review]

Do you know that feeling when you are hungry, but instead of the main course, you keep getting appetizers, and you just can’t get satisfied with those single bites? That’s exactly what House of the Dragon is like. It’s appetizing, promises a feast, but leaves the consumer hanging.

We should be satisfied because, after all, the creators of House of the Dragon did their homework. After all the hate that poured out following the eighth season of Game of Thrones, where one of the pointed-out problems was the excessively fast pace and sloppy handling of key plotlines, the spin-off offers a diametrically different approach to storytelling. Instead of being fast and haphazard, the creators, including Ryan Condal, this time serve us a slow journey focusing on just a few plotlines centered around one key issue—the game of thrones continues, with two sides both equally convinced of their right to succession.

So, if Game of Thrones made a virtue of the word “more,” House of the Dragon decisively bets on “less.” And it often works. In the current form of Westeros, it’s surprisingly easy to find your way. There are fewer characters, the story is less complex, and the episodes serve to alternately peek into one side of the conflict and then the other, listening to their arguments and getting to know the emotions accompanying the characters. There is plenty of time, so we can even afford leisurely walks around the castle, often for therapeutic purposes, examining our dreams. In these dialogues and scenes that seemingly mean little but continually press the brake pedal, there is enough tension to conclude after each episode that something indeed happened on screen, albeit in nuances.

The creators, albeit clumsily, try to compensate for the cold boredom emanating from the production. Occasionally, usually in the last few minutes of an episode, we reach climactic moments, most often involving the show’s strongest asset—dragons. The scenes with them are, to put it simply, very well executed from a staging perspective, providing a sense of long-awaited satisfaction. The dragons and their dance, which we so crave, are also harbingers of all the tragedies experienced by the characters, which further captures our attention in those specific moments.

However, as I mentioned, House of the Dragon utilizes this potential far too rarely. It has no other alternative centers of warmth to focus our curiosity. Rigidly sticking to discussions about the same issue with the same faces cannot guarantee quality over a long period, specifically over eight episodes. It’s a bit like dealing with a much better-staged, big-budget, but nonetheless one-dimensional theater. The steadiness of this spectacle is sometimes downright overwhelming.

House of the Dragon looks appetizing but is surprisingly conservative and restrained. If Game of Thrones was like an exclusive, experienced courtesan, House of the Dragon is still a virgin, reluctant to let its partner in, waiting for that one perfect moment for intimacy. We are that partner, slowly withering from love, losing hope that it will ever find an outlet. Returning to the culinary comparison but staying within the realm of temptation, House of the Dragon does not satisfy the appetite. It constantly builds tension only to throw a cliffhanger at us in the last episode. It’s easy to feel deceived, but… the promise of a future feast is still so attractive that we will probably endure this winter once again.