‘Home of the Dragon’ Is Bolder, Nastier—And Tougher to Watch

In one in all the toughest scenes to observe in Recreation of Thrones, a younger lady is murdered by her personal father. Late in Season 5, Stannis Baratheon (performed by Stephen Dillane) burns alive his solely baby, Shireen (Kerry Ingram), in a misguided try to assist his military advance. She screams for mercy again and again, whereas he watches in stony silence.

Lengthy earlier than the HBO drama’s disappointing closing season, Shireen’s demise examined my resolve to proceed the present—however just for a second. By that time, Recreation of Thrones had earned my funding. Although the sequence typically sickened me, it had spent appreciable time exploring how characters arrived at their choices. Stunning outcomes felt consequential. Tragedies felt earned. Stannis’s selection was as disturbing because it was dramatically poignant: He’d been deeply wounded by the dearth of affection he’d skilled rising up, but he couldn’t love his personal daughter sufficient to see her as greater than a way to an finish.

I carry up the unsavory enterprise of Shireen’s demise as a result of a lot of the second season of Home of the Dragon, which returns at the moment and follows the incestuous, dragon-riding Targaryen household almost 200 years earlier than the occasions of Recreation of Thrones, jogs my memory of her demise and the way I’d felt watching it. HBO despatched critics the primary 4 episodes—and an extended listing of plot particulars to withhold, so I’m doing my finest to be obscure—and the drama is much more brutal than earlier than. Season 1 spent 10 episodes leaping ahead in time to set the desk for the civil struggle often called the Dance of the Dragons, whereas the eight-episode Season 2 largely devotes itself to the showdowns that ensue. The sequence is thus not a sprawling medieval fantasy epic; it’s a portrait of a household cruelly and gorily tearing itself aside out of pleasure, confusion, and obsession with energy. What causes are there to maintain watching a present about individuals destroying their very own kin, past my affection for Thrones’ higher years? I’m nonetheless tuning in, however I’m genuinely unsure I ought to.

To be clear, the brand new chapters provide loads of gripping materials that makes the drama fuller and extra cohesive: By spanning weeks slightly than years, the present retains its forged and feels much less jarring to absorb, permitting some performances additional respiratory room. Episodes go to places throughout Westeros that may make hard-core followers cheer, take time to seize the smallfolk perspective on the Targaryens’ incessant marketing campaign to win their favor, and inject extra levity into what was once endlessly grim dialogue. And, after all, there be dragons, unleashed into spectacular battles that show Home of the Dragon has the very best visual-effects workforce of any present presently on the air.

However these enhancements additionally make the best flaw extra obvious. Many of the present’s characters proceed to lack the form of depth that made so many within the Thrones ensemble irresistible to observe, even after they did the nastiest issues. The Targaryens have skinny, uniform motivations in Season 2—that’s, to outlive and win. Little character growth happens, and potent emotional arcs are uncommon. One Targaryen who suffers a big loss early in Season 2 is never seen coping with the aftermath. One other barely grapples with their involvement in an accident. Simply examine the portrayal of Daemon (Matt Smith), the uncle-husband of Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy), to a different loyal supporter of a queen from Thrones. Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) needed his relative-lover to be topped too, however Thrones spent seasons fastidiously and satisfyingly inspecting how his crude sense of obligation shifted right into a need for redemption. Home’s second season doesn’t appear inquisitive about how battle modifications Daemon; it solely exhibits that the drama of struggle weighs on him. Smith’s efficiency—a twitch of an eyebrow right here, a curl of a lip there—does a lot of the heavy lifting to make the character really feel much less stagnant.

It doesn’t assist that, slightly than deepening a personality’s viewpoint or advancing refined energy performs, a lot of the brand new season’s dialogue quantities to ordinary observations and insults. “She holds love for our enemy. That makes her a idiot,” one character says of somebody making an attempt to sway a relative away from violence. “It’s laborious, with fathers,” one other says whereas discussing, properly, fathers. “The king is my grandson, and my grandson is a idiot,” Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), grandfather and Hand to King Aegon II, remarks after Aegon defies him. As a lot as I’m having fun with Tom Glynn-Carney’s efficiency because the petulant Aegon, he’s additionally saddled with weak, apparent statements. “Fuck dignity. I would like revenge,” he declares at one level. Such one-liners can’t examine to the memorable quips of a Tyrion Lannister or an Olenna Tyrell, and make even the normally entertaining Small Council conferences amongst passive-aggressive royal advisers really feel perfunctory.

With two members of the Targaryen household vying for the throne—Queen Rhaenyra and King Aegon II, her half-brother—there are twice as many conferences, and subsequently twice as many sequences of characters recapping and analyzing what viewers simply noticed. Not a lot modifications from one assembly to the subsequent: The ladies—Rhaenyra and Alicent (Olivia Cooke), who’s Aegon’s mom—try to quell the lads’s requires bloodshed and brutality, solely to be ignored. When plot twists happen, the stoicism of Small Council conferences extinguishes potential dramatic sparks, stopping the present from additional exploring, say, a sufferer’s grief and a perpetrator’s guilt.

In some methods, the circuitousness of Home helps emphasize the present’s level: that a few of our worst impulses—the urge for violence, the refusal to surrender on a trigger—are so wildly attractive, there’s no repressing them. The extra the characters talked about beginning a struggle, the extra I needed them to easily accomplish that, and the extra horrific it grew to become when battle did get away. However the flatness of the principle characters stays a detriment to the present’s progress. Home appears afraid to forged anybody as its hero, defining the parallels between Rhaenyra’s and Aegon’s flawed campaigns as a substitute of exploring how they may differ and remodel beneath stress.

Because it seems, Shireen knew all alongside the pitfalls of specializing in who wins a struggle slightly than the emotional penalties of being in a single. In a scene earlier than she is led to her demise, Stannis visits her as she’s studying concerning the Dance of the Dragons. “In the event you had to decide on between Rhaenyra and Aegon, who would you’ve chosen?” he asks. Neither, she responds. “It’s all of the selecting sides,” she explains, “that made every thing so horrible.” Home of the Dragon will not be horrible, by any means; it’s a visually luxurious and well-performed drama, filled with gut-wrenching twists. However in devoting a lot of its scenes and dialogue to doling out plot factors, it’s additionally very often laborious to observe. What may have been a wealthy examine of a household’s self-inflicted tragedy has turn into a grueling march towards hearth and blood.