Caligula_K3

She's a wizard... And a thumping good one too, I'd say, once she's been trained up a little. (But yeah, probably editing).

Count me in among those who have no problems at all with Alicent's motivations. She feels she's been lied to and manipulated by her bff whom she tried to help, after that friend spent about three years ignoring her (well, the show did muck up that part a bit with the time gap). She realizes now that her father is probably right and that her bff can't be trusted. And beyond that, there's her resentment of her marriage with Viserys and Rhaenyra's comparative freedom. I have no problem understanding why she's now on the warpath. Cristen Cole's motivations... Well, that's another question. Anyway, I give this one a 6.5. I can't remember which thread it was in, but I agree with the poster who said that if they were going to do all this pre-dance stuff, it needed to be a full season, not five episodes. That would have given them space to better develop the characters and connect the Downton Abbey season 1 stuff with the seemingly random acts of violence.

A dull one, though! Only one death? About House of Dragons vs. Game of Thrones and artistic intent - I think this is unfair to Game of Thrones. It's true that in the first two seasons of Game of Thrones (especially the second), episodes often felt just like a collection of scenes smashed together. From season 3 onwards, though, D&D became much better at making decisions about what storylines to include in each episode so that they'd have thematic, plot, or character resonance. Although season 5 gets a lot of flak, some of it deserved (hello Dorne), to me it remains a better season of TV than Season 2 for that reason. House of the Dragons is shot in an artistic way and is more blatant about its themes ("NO WOMAN HAS EVER SAT THE IRON THRONE" - we get it, show, thanks). But I also don't think it's exploring much new ground. Game of Thrones certainly created lots of discussion about women's agency and power through characters like Cersei, Dany, Brienne, and Sansa - it just didn't need to announce it was doing it every time it did. I don't think House of Dragon's lack of subtlety is one of its virtues (see also: rat symbolism). Especially since it only has one plotline to focus on, vs. Game of Thrones' 10-15 at any given moment.

That ending was... very, very silly. Are there no murder laws in early Targaryen Westeros? Can highborn people really just murder each other at tourneys, marriage proposals, and marriage betrothal feasts? It was also shot so weirdly. The focus is Rhaenyra and Daemon, the crowd closes so there's ambiguity about what's happening there, and then... suddenly it's Cole beating up Joffrey? And a bunch of other people are fighting too? Really strange choices. Five episodes in, I feel like I have no handle on Daemon. He comes into an episode, commits some random acts of violence, and otherwise either sulks or preens. It doesn't feel like there's much coherent there, unless he's just meant to be the Joker. Faults aside, I liked a lot of the rest of the episode. Alicent came into her own (damn, that actress is good- I'm sad we're losing her), there was some nice development of other characters like the Velaryons, and a eerie sense of rising dread during the wedding. I'm more invested now than I was earlier in the season. But somehow the show isn't all adding up to a greater whole for me.

I think this is a long-term problem facing this show. All the squabbles of ASoIaF/Game of Thrones are played against the backdrop of a much more important conflict that the reader knows about but the majority of characters don't. You also know there's a major contender off to the side (Dany) who will disrupt everything. This actually gets you more invested in the political conflicts, because it's important for the reader/viewer that the Seven Kingdoms get their shit together to confront the real threats. At the same time, Martin gets you invested by giving you a starting faction to root for (the Starks) and a faction to root against (the Lannisters). Maybe by the time A Clash of Kings/Season 2 rolls around, there are some viewers/readers who prefer Stannis or Dany or Robb or Renly as the ultimate contender, but nobody out there wants Joffrey to end up on top (or, later on, the Greyjoys). Things then get more complex as you realize that some of the villains have more complex motives (Jaime) and some of those on the sympathetic side aren't so heroic, but you have that central investment to keep you grounded. In House of the Dragons, though, you're being asked to care about a succession crisis without any real stakes other than the succession crisis, and no immediate characters to root completely for or against. This is one reason a lot of my friends and family seem to be struggling with the show: aside from the feminist angle for Rhaenyra, there's not a reason to get invested in one side or the other, unless you happen to really like Alicent's character or Daemon's or Rhaenyra's. This is why I'm so glad this last episode focused more on character development, and why I think it's really, really important the show start fleshing out all these different characters - if the show doesn't, many viewers won't ultimately care about who gets the Targaryen throne.

Oh yes, I didn't mean to imply that he's a bad actor just because I don't like how he's handled this character! I've enjoyed his performances before. So it's either a question of his choices in playing the role or, as you say, the direction. Hopefully he'll get more range in the coming episodes. Random question: who was the man advising Rhaenya in the marriage proposal scene at the episode's beginning?

I like it better if Rhaenyra is sleeping with Cole just because he's the first man she sees after being rejected by Daemon, as a couple posters have suggested. But if that's the case, I'm confused why it's presented as this long, drawn out, romantic sex scene with emotional music. As for Rhaenyra and the suitors, I enjoyed the scene. It showed she has a cruel edge to her, which I think makes her a more interesting character than if she's our completely heroic protagonist (ditto with: "who cares what the smallfolk think?"). It was also probably the funniest scene on the show so far with how it escalated from 0 to stabbing in like five seconds while Rhaenyra casually walks out.

I thought that was the best episode so far. There was a time skip,but for once I didn't feel like we'd missed two episodes somewhere along the way. It was slow, but it actually had character scenes and development instead of just repetitive politicking/random irrelevant crab people. I feel like I have a much better sense of Rhaenyra, Allicent, and Daemon after this episode. There was also real tension in some scenes, especially the first Viserys vs. Hightower scene, Alicent vs. Rhaenyra, and then the Viserys vs. Daemon scene in the throne room. Oh,and someone had fun! I thought fun was banned in Viserys' reign unless you're a background extra, based on the first three episodes. I liked the tour through the streets of King's Landing, and Rhaenyra showing a playful side. I even really liked having Viserys drunkenly joking around with Daemon early on. It's not funny dialogue, but it's a start! Criticisms: the sex scenes went on for way, way, way too damn long. The orgy room was also just weird. I find Otto Hightower's actor to be incredibly lifeless. Just the same stoic expression and soft tone of voice,no matter the dialogue. I'm not saying he needs to ham it up a la Aiden Gillen, but it's too bad, because he could be at least a fun villain. The scene where he loses the handship at least demands something more. Some of the stuff that didn't work in this episode is because of the weakness of the last two. That never-ending sex scene seemed meant to convince us that Rhaenyra/Cole is a big deal, but I don't care, because the show hasn't put in the work to set it up (minus that weird boar scene last week). I also wish we got more development for the Valeryon family last week, so the marriage would seem like a bigger deal. But hopefully this episode is the start of a strong run for the show. Glad to be enjoying House of the Dragon for the first time since the pilot!

I haven't disliked the dialogue, but I haven't loved it either, and there are few lines that have been really striking or stuck in my head. Aside from it being nearly always serious or expository, I think you're right that it's often way too formal. There's a place for that, but not every line or character need the Martin medievalisms: the "must needses" and the "mine own" and the "seven-and-ten."

I didn't realize that the Lannister twins are played by the same guy as Ser Hugh! That's fun. I thought he did a good job this episode, especially as Jason. Looking forward to seeing more of those characters.

The difference being, imo, that the first season/book of Game of Thrones only appears as complete set up in retrospect. Martin and the show writers do a great job of getting you to care about the conflicts and characters of the first book/season, and you're tricked into viewing these conflicts as being the main plot in their own right. Once Ned Stark's head is off and Drogo has been neutralized and you start realizing that this series isn't going the way that you thought, you're already invested in the characters and want to see where they're going next. Tyrion is going to be Hand! Dany has dragons! Jon's going north of the wall! In jumping ahead from major plot beat to major plot beat, and skipping over years at a time, the set-up in House of Dragons has felt (to me and mostly everyone I know watching) much less organic. In this way, it's like Game of Thrones seasons 7-8, but even faster and with characters we don't know yet! The show hasn't taken the time to let you know the majority of the characters, aside from what their immediate political goals are. Now, we're still early days, but this is something that does worry me if each episode jumps ahead in time. Will we be invested in the characters before civil war comes? Will we understand who they are and what motivates them, aside from their political goals? Will we care who wins or loses? With Viserys and Rhaenyra and maybe Daemon, the answer will be yes (but, of course, Viserys will be dead, and I say this as someone who hasn't read this part of Fire and Blood). With everyone else, if they keep to their current approach, not so much.

I was a little disheartened to read a post in this thread saying that this season will cover about twenty years before all is said and done. I knew there would be a big time jump (because some of the actresses will be replaced), but does this mean there's going to be a time-jump every episode? Is the show this season constantly going to have to supply mountains of exposition each episode to re-establish the political situation, as it's developed since we last saw the characters? If yes, I worry that this is a fundamentally flawed season of TV. And I wonder why they didn't either start later in the timeline or make some serious adaptation choices to shorten the timeline.

But there is potential character development. And I think if this show is going to succeed, it ultimately needs to feel... well, more like a novel and less like a history book jumping around from significant event to significant event. And it will need more pugs.

Yeah, the battle (motivationless crab-people aside) was pretty silly. Maybe I just missed something, but why couldn't the Daemon/Sea Snake alliance block the cave entrances and starve everyone in them? And why did all the crab-people leave the cave just to get one guy if their #1 strategy was to not leave the cave? One really important and excellent part of this episode: there was a pug. This is the most screentime a pug has received in a major sci-fi/fantasy release since David Lynch's Dune. I demand more pug!

The crab eater, as far as I can tell, was a radical crustacean-rights advocate and also an experimental biologist. All he wanted to do was train crabs to eat people in peace. But Daemon just had to ruin everything. Yeah, I give this one a 6. I enjoyed the early stuff with Viserys and some of the Rhaenyra scenes. There was also a pug. But this show has yet to grab me, and the whole ending sequence, while entertaining and well shot, lost me.

RIP Crab-man. We hardly knew ye. Your goal of teaching the crabs of Westeros to eat human flesh was truly noble. But seriously, we hardly knew ye. What were these crab people fighting for over two years? I remember in the first episode it was suggested that this crab business was being financed by the free cities to cause trouble. But what do these people get out of hiding in caves for two years? For all the criticism that the last two seasons of Game of Thrones got for having empty spectacle, this was the emptiest of spectacle possible. There need to be stakes to these battle scenes and ideally more to this world than Targaryen dynastic politics. Overall it was better than last week, but still a step down from the premiere's promise. I enjoyed a lot of the Viserys scenes this episode. Some of the direction was striking, especially in the stag "hunting" scene. I appreciated that they were allowing for some character moments, especially for Rhaenyra. But the constant time skips are doing this series no favours. Every episode is filled to the brim with political exposition, but few of the characters are having any moments to shine, because their dialogue is all about recapping the last two years or repetitive jockeying for political position. Meanwhile, Daemon's big moment of killing the guard with the message really fell flat for me, since we haven't spent the time with him necessary to really understand what's driving him. So, writers: please, more character moments. And maybe give us an episode or two that picks up right after the last one, so we can flesh things out aside from Targaryen dynastic politics. Oh, and since you've introduced human-eating crabs: please have the courage to make them the big bad of the show.

I'd give it a 5.5. If I compare this episode to The Kingsroad, the main difference is that while both episodes are dialogue heavy, The Kingsroad uses a good portion of its dialogue to enrich the characters. Sure, there's expository and political conversations, and early Game of Thrones could struggle with delivering some of that information. But you also have a range of scenes that set up character relationships or traits: Tyrion and Jon, Jon and Arya, etc... There's a lot of warmth and wit in the episode, with different kinds of characters and different kinds of scenes. Even a scene like Jamie mocking Jon Snow for joining the Night's Watch, even though it's mainly exposition, has some oomph and life in it, and it tells you a lot about Jamie. Very few scenes in this episode did that for me: just a lot of similar exposition about similar issues by characters behaving in similar ways. And while it was obvious to everyone I was watching with that Viserys would get engaged to Alicent, the show didn't do a great job of explaining why he would make this decision, or do it in the way he did. Compare that to the conflict at the end of the Kingsroad, where everyone's motivations are understandable and tell you a lot about their characters.

I didn't think it was bad, but I also didn't think it was particularly good. I've got no problem with slower, more talky episodes that are meant to set up the plot of the season. But this episode was pretty boring. There's only so many scenes you can have of characters talking about the same dynastic politics before it gets stale. It doesn't help that just about every damn character on this show is dour and serious. This is a show filled with Jon Snows. Daemon at least had a little bit of life, and the Viserys actor is good. But this is meant to be a time of peace and plenty. Is there nobody having any fun? Or at least with a sense of humour? Can we have a Tyrion or Olenna Tyrell or Varys please?

Has there ever been a re-make of a live action show that essentially covers the same plot beats as its predecessor? BSG was remade, but it's a completely different show. A show like Hawaii 5-0 can be remade, but that's because it's a procedural. And even those shows were made decades after the original. There's no way HBO will remake Game of Thrones. And if they did and the only incentive was "we've added more characters and made things more complicated just to please some book purists," it would completely fail. I know some book fans also don't want to hear this, but Game of Thrones is already one of the most faithful TV/movie adaptations of all time, at least until D&D realized they would have to get to the ending by themselves in season 5.

I'm coming at this show from the perspective of someone who's read the ASoiAF books and Dunk and Egg stories many times, but who's never read much of Fire and Blood because I'm not a fan of GRRM's Targaryen histories, and don't care much for the Targaryens in general. I'd give the first episode a solid 7/10. Visually it was stunning - the dragons and sets were very cool. In terms of design, I'm a little disappointed by the costumes, which look very "stereotypical medieval fantasy," whereas Game of Thrones had a more unique style. I got a little invested in the plot and some of the characters, especially King Viserys and his daughter. The childbirth scene was grueling and horrific in all the right ways. The tourney was fun and well shot, but also a little ridiculous in the extent of its violence. The city watch scene was weird. It's hard for me to objectively compare this to the first episode of Game of Thrones, since I went into that knowing who all the characters were, and it's hard for me to compare this to reading Game of Thrones for the first time, since that was almost twenty years ago now (...damn). But I agree with some of the criticisms I read in the reviews, or at least am worried about some of them. ASoIaF and GoT were always grim series, but they had a sense of fun and humour that's almost completely absent here - the show absolutely needs a character like Tyrion or Varys to liven things up. A lot of the characters seem pretty one note (though of course future episodes will develop them): still, so far the impression is a lot of very serious Tagaryens and Targaryen adjacents. And I do worry about what a tight focus this series seems to have on Targaryens and Kings Landing politics. The politics is a big part of the reason I love the book series, but it's only one flavour among many. But again, a decent start to the show, and it's reassuring that there's a sense of quality in the presentation and acting that's missing from shows like Wheel of Time or The Last Kingdom. Hopefully the plot and characters will draw me in and I'll enjoy future episodes more.

In general, the show did a really nice job taking flat or one dimensional characters from the books and turning them into interesting and well rounded ones. Ashford is definitely the biggest improvement, and I loved Drummer in the show much more than any of the characters she was based on in the books, but even someone like Errinwright had much more depth in the show than books.

What I meant is that he doesn't want his legacy tied to the actual ASoIaF series, and that's what he struggles to work on. He is deeply in love with his Westeros world and random worldbuilding, and has no problems with writing fake histories or producing TV shows. But that's not the same thing as wrapping up the complex web of characters and plotlines of the actual series. Edit: it's also why I think GRRM would have been of little help in wrapping up Game of Thrones. He's been stuck on Act 2 of this story for over twenty years and has taken over ten years to write one installment. That doesn't suggest to me he would have been able to take Game of Thrones from season 6 to 8 in three years.

What makes me disappointed, aside from the tone, is that George has fully bought into the idea that a coffee table book and an animated show about Yi Ti and a Who's Who of Westeros book are just as important as The Winds of Winter. Once you've bought into that, and once you start viewing yourself as more Kevin Feige than author, why ever seriously work on Winds again? Writing Winds and ASoIaF is hard. Working on new shows is fun. It's not like this is completely coming out of left field. It's been obvious for a while now that GRRM resents that his legacy is so tied to the ASoIaF books, and that he gets much more enjoyment out of editing Wild Cards and writing fake histories and working in TV. And to a certain extent I don't even blame him. He's in his 70s, past retirement age, he wrote himself into a corner with AFFC and ADWD, and he's obtained a level of success he could never have dreamed of. But I'd respect him a lot more if he admitted he's lost interest and passed on the ending of his books to someone else (though, tbh, it would be a brutal and horrifying job for whoever accepted it). But now we're in this middle ground where he admits he doesn't care and gets angry at fans for caring. What a mess.

Oh my god. This man has completely lost the plot. So much for finishing Winds before starting Fire and Blood part 2, or his promises to stay focused on Winds vs. other projects. I've felt for a long time that while the series itself might never get finished, since it would realistically take 8-9 books total, Winds was guaranteed to be published at some point. Now I'm not so sure. I wish I could go back in time and tell my 16 year old self that if I read A Feast for Crows, I'd be waiting 17 years+ - more than double my life at that point - for its cliffhangers to be resolved. And I wish GRRM would just hire a ghostwriter and be done with it.

I'm enjoying this season a lot. The MVP is without a doubt Drummer. She's a wonderful and interesting character, and Cara Gee's performance has been next level this season. Marco's actor could really stand to tone it down, and he's become a pretty boring villain, all in all. But I'm liking the rest of the characters and performances. The cut down to six episodes has some downsides - not every character and plotline can get their due, unfortunately - but it's also made the show much tighter, with a pace closer to season 3, imo the best season. Season 5's pace really dragged it down at the end, especially once we had multiple episodes that were nothing but Naomi trying to survive on a ship and everyone trying to rescue her. So, overall, it's a very strong season. In the long term, though, I think the showrunners either must know something we all don't or are hubristic for not planning to wrap this whole story up in six seasons. I am really skeptical that some other studio is going to pick up this show and let them finish it. Few drama shows make it to six seasons to begin with. At that point, actors are itching to get out or receive hefty raises that increase the expense of the show. So it's weird to me that they weren't planning to get through all nine books in six to seven seasons to begin with. But especially since it seems that this wasn't a sudden cancellation, and that they knew Amazon would only probably be giving them three more seasons, I really don't understand why they didn't plan for that. Or why they're spending a big part of this season's run time on Laconia and the Strange Dogs storyline, when there will almost certainly be no payoff. If we're going to use the David Simon analogy: he was planning six seasons for the Wire. But when it was restricted to five (and the fifth only had ten episodes instead of the usual thirteen), he wrapped things up as best he could. Some of it was rushed, sure. But he didn't punt it down the line, hoping that in five years HBO might pick up the Wire again and that all its actors might miraculously be available. Since I've read the later books, I know the story and the ending. But if I were a TV only fan, I would not be happy (my girlfriend, who hasn't read any of the books and doesn't plan to, is at this stage). And even as someone who's read the books - I've always enjoyed the show far more, and would have really appreciated seeing it tackle the long term Romans vs. Goths stuff. Oh well. It's still quality sci-fi TV, which is unfortunately rare these days, given how many sci-fi shows are out! I'm excited for the finale. Fingers crossed Drummer gets to punch Marco in the face.