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Premiere Recap: The “House of the Dragon”, A Bad-Heir Day
In the year of our anxieties 20,22, a new “Game of Thrones” show has arrived to rescue us from the long winter of “Thrones-less.” Are we ready to follow it? “House of the Dragon,” HBO’s prequel series based upon George R. R. Martin’s “Fire and Blood”, tells the story of House Targaryen’s life in an era before our friends arrived.
It is a hundred and seventy two years before the death of the Mad Kings, as the opening titles reveal, and the birth of Daenerys Targaryen. As I refer to it, life in year 172 B.D.T. looks similar: dusty-colored palaces and cities, chandeliers that look like bonfires, eerily tainted ruling families, occasional orgy.
The show’s ratio between violence and debauchery is a little too frequent, perhaps. There’s always a succession problem. When a HBO series is driven primarily by a succession crises, you can just watch the infighting. We’ve got hours and hours of high-powered treachery that we can enjoy or endure.
“Dragon,” meanwhile, provides many of the “Thrones’ pleasures. The show does not open with a grim ice monster sequence like “Thrones”, but with the announcement in a grand hall of Prince Viserys (Paddy Considine), as the next king. Nine years into Viserys’s reign the action jumps ahead. After a familiar credit sequence (no maps, only an amulet and the soothing pounding drums in typical Ramin Djawadi fashion), we are taken soaring over King’s Landing’s Red Keep.
Rhaenyra Targaryen, the king’s teenage daughter (Milly Alcock), has just borrowed Syrax, a dragon-like car from her family. She dismounts with a charming, nonchalant attitude. She tells an old knight, “Try to not look so relieved,” and she twirls her blonde hair.
