With many big franchises, there is often a moment where a sequence of bad, baffling decisions push an audience too far, and they are lost, never to return. It happened in 2017 with Star Wars’s The Last Jedi, a movie that essentially cackled in the face of Star Wars devotees and told them they were idiots. The backlash was instantaneous – and the next Star Wars film, Solo, bore the brunt of an audience that had been pushed beyond outrage into indifference.
Has the same just happened with Game of Thrones? It’s 13 years since the debut of a fantasy epic so gripping that even non-fantasy fans became addicted to it (grudgingly at first: it is bracing to read the early dismissive reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere that celebrated old tropes about nerds and their weird hobbies). But then, in 2019, it killed its own hype with a final season that butchered well-loved characters – turning Jaime Lannister into a mindless love slave of Cersei and Daenerys Targaryen into a one-dimensional, dragon-riding sociopath. Viewers hated it; the cast hated it, and George RR Martin probably hated it.
With House of the Dragon (HotD) – a prequel set centuries before the events covered in Thrones – the Westeros brand appeared to have found a way to redemption. Season one was thoroughly solid and benefitted from arriving at the same time as Prime Video’s atrocious Lord of the Rings spinoff, The Rings of Power. One was fantasy done properly, the other was a blizzard of bad wigs, atrocious dialogue and plot contrivances that stood out like the fire-pits of Mount Doom on a clear day.
But now we’ve reached the end of series two, and there seems to be a serious danger that we’ve come back around to those dark final days of Thrones, where even committed watchers feel like throwing their hands in the air and giving up. And the real shame is that it could so easily have been avoided – in contrast to Game of Thrones, where the showrunners had to scramble to fill in the blanks due to Martin not yet concluding the story in book form (the work from which HotD is adapted, Fire and Blood, is already done and dusted).
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The problem wasn’t so much what the finale contained as what it left out. Week after week, HotD has hyped the imminent large-scale war between the two feuding camps of House Targaryen – the “Greens” and the “Blacks”. There had been hints of what awaited as opposing forces, each equipped with dragons, prepared for conflict. In episode four, a breathtaking three-way dragon fight featured some of the best CGI in or out of a multiplex (Marvel, take note).
Better was to come. The penultimate episode featured a stunning set-piece in which new potential dragon riders recruited by Queen Rhaenyra (leader of the black faction, played by Emma D’Arcy) ran in terror from the dragon Vermithor – which felt like an updating of the classic 1980s fantasy movie Dragonslayer. It was astonishing, and you wondered: what further thrills awaited?
Oh, sweet summer child – the answer was none at all. Worse than that, the sign-off took up the Game of Thrones tradition of betraying key characters. Cunning, borderline bonkers King Consort Daemon (a fantastically smarmy Matt Smith) was forced into a simpering turnabout as he pledged anew his fealty to Rhaenyra, having spent his entire arc plotting her overthrow (his change of heart promoted by a vision in the Weird Wood that revealed the existence of the White Walkers north of the Wall). A similar fate was suffered by Prince Aemond Targaryen – a principled though flawed heir in year one, now a lunatic with an eye-patch.
The season finished with a shot of the two sides marching to war – though there was nothing of Aemond, the mad ruler who had decided the Seven Kingdoms should burn in the event that he lost power. Then came a fade to black and a two-year wait until we find out what happens next.
To say this is a disappointment would be an understatement. At the end of a run of episodes with so many memorable moments, it is heartbreaking to witness the Game of Thrones franchise fall into the same pitfall of selling its characters down the river. In 2019, the fanbase was appalled but open to giving Thrones one more try. Second time around, they may not be as forgiving.
