It feels appropriate that House of the Dragon premieres a week after another prequel, Better Call Saul, drew down the curtains on its own similar conversation. Like any good spinoff, House of the Dragon feels like a piece of work that is in direct conversation with what came before, engaging in analysis and introspection of both the work itself and the response to it. Watching “The Heirs of the Dragon,” it is clear that everybody involved has thought long and hard about Game of Thrones. So, “The Heirs of the Dragon” steers straight into the storm. There is, to put it simply, no way around it.
Then again, given that the character was so popular that parents were giving their newborns names like “ Daenerys” and “ Khaleesi,” it makes sense to foreground that reckoning. At Vox, Alex Abad-Santos argued that the portrayal of Daenerys as a brutal conqueror was “ the greatest fraud Game of Thrones has ever perpetrated.” At Forbes, Paul Tassi called it “ a total betrayal.” At The Verge, Julia Alexander contended that “ almost everyone responding to the show was angry.”Īs such, it is a bold move for House of the Dragon to open so directly engaging with the legacy of Daenerys Targaryen, particularly since it is a prequel set more than a century prior to her birth. Club, Alex McLevy argued that it brought home the way that Game of Thrones would “ twist the traditional narrative of swords and sorcery” into something subversive and horrifying.įor other critics, many of whom had positioned themselves as “ Team Daenerys” heading into the endgame, “The Bells” was seen as a brutal betrayal of Daenerys as a character. Collins boldly ranked it the best episode that Game of Thrones ever produced, who also described it as “ the most daring episode of Game of Thrones ever” in his Rolling Stone review. “The Bells” is one of the most polarizing episodes of Game of Thrones. This parallel is reinforced in how director Miguel Sapochnik (who also directed “The Bells”) edits the sequence, cutting between shots of Rhaenyra in the sky and the view of the dragon from the streets below, as it swoops in low enough to unnerve the citizenry that have presumably spent hundreds of years in the shadow of such creatures. Rhaenyra is riding her dragon over King’s Landing, recalling Daenerys’ attack on the city in “The Bells,” towards the end of Game of Thrones. In some ways, this feels like a brazen statement of purpose from the show, an assurance to the audience that House of the Dragon is operating on a larger budget than the earlier seasons of Game of Thrones. The audience joins a younger version of Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) as she glides and swoops through the sky on the back of her dragon, Syrax.
In case the point has yet to sink in, the title card is followed with another invocation of Daenerys Targaryen. She is the inevitable end of all of this, a culmination. In case the audience doesn’t get the subtext, the title card that immediately follows underscores the point, dating the story to “172 years before the death of the Mad King, Aerys, and the birth of his daughter, Princess Daenerys Targaryen.” However, much of that text fades away, leaving the audience with all that they need to know: “172 years before … Daenerys Targaryen.” Daenerys Targaryen is presented as a fixed point.
“Rhaenys, a woman, would not inherit the Iron Throne,” Rhaenyra narrates, in a scene that is clearly meant to establish the original sin of House of the Dragon, the formative trauma that spurs the ensuing drama forward in the same way the opening White Walker attack did Game of Thrones. In the opening scenes, Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) recalls how her aunt, Rhaenys (Eve Best), was passed over for the Iron Throne by the Lords of Westeros, based on nothing more than her gender. This discussion and review contains spoilers for House of the Dragon episode 1, “The Heirs of the Dragon,” the HBO premiere.ĭaenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) casts a long shadow over House of the Dragon, and it is evident from the opening moments of “The Heirs of the Dragon.”