2024-08-14 18:36:46
The second season of HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon has come to an end. Episode 8 was perhaps the weakest of the season and felt more like one big cliffhanger that will take about two years to resolve.
As reported by Day.Az with reference to Izvestia, it became known the day before that the confrontation between the strongest dynasty on the fictional continent of Westeros, the Targaryen dynasty, will end after the fourth season, filming of the third will begin only in 2025.
Shakespeare in Westeros
The final scene of the second season reconciles the two main characters. Former best friends, but now feuding queens Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower. The latter offers to stop the civil war and conclude a fragile peace: Alicent is ready to surrender King’s Landing to the “Black” faction supporting Rhaenyra. This decision will cost the life of her eldest son Aegon and the current ruler of the throne of the Seven Kingdoms. Aegon’s severed head is proof of the legitimacy of Rhaenyra’s claims to the Iron Throne. However, the young king fled the castle the day before in the direction of Braavos – the strangest, but at the same time the richest and most powerful free city.
This conversation in the dark is almost an inversion of the conversation between Rhaenyra and Alicent at the start of season two, and the culmination not so much of the episode as of the entire series. The conditional reconciliation only heightens the sense of inevitability in an already tragic story. Otherwise, the finale is saturated with scenes that do nothing to advance the plot. All the viewer does throughout the episode, and season two as a whole, is wait agonizingly, but never wait.
For example, there was no epic battle in the ominous castle of Harrenhal, where King Consort Daemon Targaryen, Rhaenyra’s husband, had been holed up for months, gathering an army. But he did bend the knee to his wife, who had flown in to visit him. Their vows to each other in High Valyrian were in the spirit of Shakespeare.
House of the Dragon definitely lacks dimensional characters on the level of Tyrion Lannister, but ultimately the interesting and paradoxical Otto Hightower – a hero in the best traditions of Game of Thrones – simply fell out of the show’s plot at some point. In the final episode, Hightower appears briefly, surrounded by prison walls. Remember that the Hand of the King has an unenviable fate in Westeros, but the writers did not explain the reasons for his imprisonment. Apparently, this is another set-up for the next season.
“The Season 2 finale of House of the Dragon is an episode largely defined by what doesn’t happen in its nearly 70-minute running time. There are no major battles between the Greens and the Blacks, the two factions of the Targaryen family vying for the Iron Throne. Nor are there any significant deaths — unlike last season’s finale, in which Rhaenyra lost her infant son Lucerys to the vengeful impulses of her half-brother Aemond,” writes critic Alison Herman of Variety.
For 172 years to Daenerys
Two years ago, House of the Dragon was released with a big audience advance and an unspoken goal of making everyone forget how chaotic and illogical the six episodes of the eighth season of HBO’s main brainchild were. The finale of Game of Thrones in 2019 disappointed both critics and ardent fans. The reason for the failure was obvious: the book series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, which was essentially adapted by showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, “ended” by the beginning of the sixth season of Game of Thrones. Martin is still too lazy to finish his epic, so the writers of the series adapted his drafts and added a lot to the script from their own point of view. The House of the Dragon series should still avoid this fate: the Targaryen feuds are described in Martin’s finished novel Fire and Blood.
The prequel also retained the familiar aesthetics of “Game of Thrones” from brutal bloodshed to explicit scenes, but promised to leave its predecessor in the past. The emphasis was planned to be on the intimacy of the new story. The second season, on the contrary, does not want to let go of the glory of “Game of Thrones”. This is confirmed by the sudden prophetic vision of Daemon Targaryen in the godswood of Harrenhal: a red comet, white walkers and the silhouette of a naked woman in an orange haze with three dragon cubs – in the last episode, 172 years before the famous events, the “promised princess” appeared in the person of Daenerys Stormborn.
“It’s all history. You’re just one part of it,” Daemon hears. Perhaps this is the main problem with House of the Dragon – the prequel doesn’t work as a standalone story at all and becomes a springboard for Game of Thrones. The creators let loose only on the dragons. There are indeed many of them and they are visually superior to the trio of their predecessors. Even Prince Regent Aemond is so furious at the appearance of several new tamed dragons that he goes into a rage, mounts his Vhagar and burns down the entire city.
– “Game of Thrones” was about the characters. That was the focus of this episode, but we still had a lot of big battles throughout the series, and a lot of smaller fights and skirmishes. But none of that distracted from the characters in any way. In many ways, those battles were about the characters. How did the Hound react during the Battle of Blackwater Bay? And Joffrey? Tyrion? Stannis? Each of these people made choices that deepened their characters in ways that would not have been made without the battle, – notes Forbes columnist Eric Kain.
Critics praise the new season for its polished editing, Ramin Djawadi’s music, and the acting. However, all of these virtues were noted in the first season as well. At the same time, the rating on IMDB for the last episode is 6.4. The finale of the first season was rated higher – 9.3. Despite the low ratings of film critics, the last episode gathered a record audience for the second season. The finale was watched by about 9 million viewers on the HBO channel and the Max digital platform alone. This is 14% more than on the premiere evening of the second season, which gathered 7.8 million viewers. But still less than the audience for the finale of the first season of House of the Dragon in 2022. Ardent fans are worried that a disappointing fate awaits the next spin-off, Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is scheduled to premiere in late 2025. In any case, viewers can expect two more returns to the “House of the Dragon”: showrunner Ryan Condal has already announced that the “Game of Thrones” prequel will end after the fourth season. However, before expanding this story, the creators need to do a lot of work on the mistakes. Viewers spent an entire season waiting for the big battle. Now they will have to spend a few more years on it.
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