Be honest: it hasn’t been easy out there in the wilds of streaming. This era of competent, if only fine small-screen offerings was recently diagnosed as “mid TV”. It annoys me a bit, that sobriquet, but it’s hard to dismiss; there have been amusements in 2024 (One Day), pretty things to look at (Ripley), and at least a couple bonafide hits (Shōgun, Baby Reindeer), but I, like you, have been scrambling for the truly escapist transports of old. A Succession, a Better Call Saul, a… well… Game of Thrones.
Which is maybe why I devoured House of the Dragon Season 2 like a starving man at a wedding buffet. Mid TV, this ain’t: the four episodes made available to critics are brisk, action-studded, hugely lavish, and as effortlessly watchable as anything I’ve taken in this year. Does that last point sound like faint praise? I was pretty down on House of the Dragon’s first season when it debuted two years ago; the Thrones prequel seemed like a try-hard facsimile, violent and expensively mounted but inert. I stand by that assessment—but I’ll also say that the season picked up steam as it went (jumping ahead decades, exchanging some cast members for new ones). The finale gave us a pretty thrilling cliffhanger: an airborne dragon duel, the killing of a young prince, avowals of all-out war.
I had to refresh my recollection of all of that, and you might want to too before you start the second season. The action picks up in the immediate aftermath of Season 1, and the engine of plot is a rather serious difference of opinion about the deathbed pronouncements of the late king Viserys Targaryen (played in the first season by Paddy Considine). On one side is his daughter Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy), who believes that she’s still his rightful heir. On the other is Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), Rhaenyra’s childhood friend turned stepmother, who contends that Viserys had a change of heart and named their own son Aegon king.
If all of this feels hopelessly tangled to relay, it sets in motion a pleasingly straightforward story about power—who has it, who wants it, how many bodies will pile up before it changes hands. The small-scale pleasures are in the manoeuvrings at court and shouted arguments at councils; these too were among the amusements of Game of Thrones, which had a wickedness at its heart. The Thrones characters who sniped at each other would also resort to seemingly anything (from infanticide to incest) to improve their standing. And while I will not be spoiling anything that happens on this season of Dragon, let me say that there is a transgressive act early on that reminds you just how savage this world can be.
Perhaps I’m burying the lede. There are many, many scenes of dragons in these episodes. Enormous, gorgeously rendered CGI behemoths that stomp and take to the air and breathe fire and lay waste to anything they care to. It’s a bit astonishing to contemplate how many millions fed the aerial sequences; one in particular made me gasp. But I found what you might crudely call the money shots pleasingly controlled and choreographed. And the settings—castles, ruined chambers, fields and forests—have a hugeness of scale that makes the series feel satisfyingly grand.
The acting remains fairly impeccable. Matt Smith is perhaps a bit adrift as Daemon Targaryen in these episodes (one suspects his brutality will come to the fore later on), but D’Arcy and Cooke are standouts as rivals. And Ewan Mitchell as the one-eyed prince Aemond brings a sinister bent to the proceedings. And that is none other than Sir Simon Russell Beale as a wise if washed up castellan at the ruined Harrenhal. What fun. We’ve been feeding on scraps out here in mid TV world. Now comes a banquet.
This article was first published on British Vogue.
