The ritual of self-punishment is upon us yet again.
By this, I don’t mean the men’s World Cup. The World Cup has been just fine so far. Soccer’s inherent beauty transcends its disappointments and dramas. At the end of the day, it’s men with nice legs, running in shorts. You don’t have to ask more of it if you don’t want to.
No, I’m obviously talking about the return of HBO’s House of the Dragon for its third season.
As I’ve written before, I am not a fan of Westeros per se. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms struck me as different – a more potent television narrative, not only brutal but magical, a story that gets you invested in its characters.
The absolute nadir of the George R.R. Martin books’ various adaptations will hopefully always remain season 8 of Game of Thrones. Martin couldn’t finish the series (and has stubbornly still not finished it, and probably will never finish it) and the writers were flying blind and everyone was tired.
That’s a low bar, and I think House of the Dragon, set a long time before the events in Game of Thrones, will always manage to clear it. There is nothing too open-ended about the timeline that House of the Dragon is on.
My problem is that I am tired of these people. I can’t even be tired the way Erik Kain is tired when he points out that the showrunners could be filming this season very differently.
Instead, I am tired of this very “prestige HBO” idea that two groups of mostly despicable aristocrats are inherently valuable enough for me to watch as they scour each other with dragonfire, hack each other, behead each other, betray each other, and otherwise justify the lavish television budget.
The way I’m starting to feel about House of the Dragon is the way I started to feel about Succession – the good writing is buried in endless gray and clever nihilism.
The plot can surprise you. Even upset you. And yet it cannot move you.
I am hoping that House of the Dragon might have some tricks up its sleeve this season, but two episodes in, I’m just going through the motions. Oh, this guy’s dead? Cool. Oh, and then these people too? Awesome.
And go ahead and kill the ones who are labeled as “no one important” in the background of a scene that’s meant to showcase some despicable characters – obviously, it makes sense for the plot, it’s just that the despicable characters in question are only slightly worse than all of the others.
There is a way to movingly – or at least interestingly – tell stories with lots of death. In fact, George R.R. Martin himself is no stranger to that outside television. HBO just really gets in its own way here when it makes expensive dragon dramas that continuously sacrifice emotional investment for style.
The plot can surprise you. Even upset you. And yet it cannot move you.
The old friendship between Rhaenyra and Alicent, which started the messy war portrayed in this season to begin with, is still compellingly illustrated. Yes, these women were girls together. Yes, the bad blood between them is very much real. And yes, both have tried, in their own way, to mend things – and in mending them more blood has been spilled.
It’s the rest of these people I can’t bring myself to even focus on, and that just drags me down. It’s not like Rhaenyra and Alicent get a lot of screen time together any more.
One exception is obviously Daemon Targaryen, Rhaenyra’s uncle-husband, because Matt Smith has such tremendous fun with him as an actor, and because he’s a watchable deadly dude who manages to not be an insane caricature (a perennial problem on these series).
The rest of these people? They strike me as sacrificial meat for the dragons, for the most part. I guess I’ll watch them get sacrificed, I’ve stuck with these stories long enough. I just won’t pretend to be happy about it.