If you wanted to identify the stage in the golden age of television that we are living through right now, I think we’re in the prequel phase. Or, what happened before what happened.
The star of the prequel phase is House of the Dragon, the prequel to arguably the greatest fantasy TV series ever, Game of Thrones.
Who was the first dragon queen? Why are there ongoing feuds amongst the great houses of Westeros? What happened before Hodar, before “Winter Is Coming”?
(For what it’s worth GoT scored 9.2 out of 10 on IMDB, to its prequel’s 8.3. IMDB may be an inaccurate measure, some argue, but its scoring out of 10 is easy to understand and use.)
Set 200 years before Thrones, House of the Dragon tells the story behind the story, behind the reason everyone hates each other. And why you have to have blonde hair to succeed as a Targaryen.
It’s safe to say we are also living in the age of spoiler alerts. We know the dragon-ruling Targaryen return to the Iron Throne, only for Jon Snow to <spoiler alert>. I’ll leave it at that. But, let’s be honest, you probably wouldn’t be watching the House of the Dragon if you hadn’t lived through – and I mean lived through – Game of Thrones.
In season one of Dragons, we meet the dysfunctional Targaryen clan, led by King Viserys (Paddy Considine), whose wife is cut open during the breach birth of his only son, who still dies after only being “heir for a day”. Without telling his daughter Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) that he gave the order for her mother to needlessly die, he names her heir. What a family.
Scheming by his advisor Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans in fine mettle), sees Viserys fall for his daughter’s best friend, Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke). She obviously bears him sons with the correct white-blonde hair.
Where Game of Thrones was essentially about multiple families fighting, Dragons is all about one family’s internal feribels. This is the Yiddish word for grudges, the kind people hold for 50 years, even when they can no longer remember why they’re angry with the other person.
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Of course, being the world of “Ice and Fire” and it is gloriously entangled and complicated to the point where, by season two, mother (Alicent) and daughter are having an affair with the same man, the very brown-haired Criston Cole (played by Fabien Frankel).
But that’s not all – as they say in the soapies – he previously fathered children with their now sworn enemy, the other queen, the white-blonde Targaryen queen, Rhaenyra.
Her children are clearly Cole’s kids, as you can see, quite obviously, because they have his brown hair, and it’s the eldest who Rhaenyra spends most of the second season searching for.
Thankfully, the sides in the Targaryen family – led by unfathomable tongue-mangling names that are unpronounceable to non-GoT fans – are identified by a TV-friendly colour-blocking system: The Greens and The Blacks.
Goodbye Montague and Capulet. (That’s Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet. Even Shakespeare knew exotic names are part of the tale.)
Alicent’s sons King Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) and one-eyed Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) have the right shade of hair and regal good looks. They obviously also ride dragons, as do the other Targaryens.
Rhaenyra remarries herself in season one to her uncle Daemon Targaryen (played by Matt Smith, who you will recognise as a young Prince Phillip in The Crown). Their kids have the right hair colour too. (By Game of Thrones it’s just golden blonde.)
Read More: Why do we mix up faces? Game of Thrones might help us find the answer
So, you have to ask yourself, how much family intrigue, factions fighting, court drama, plotting and scheming, spiteful, petty and hateful backstabbing can people stomach?
Well, seemingly a lot. They’ve watched eight seasons of Game of Thrones just to get here. There are now two seasons of House of the Dragon, which George RR Martin, the genius creator of this glorious fantasy universe, said would “take four full seasons of 10 episodes each to do justice to the Dance of the Dragons”.
In season two, Rhaenyra declares: “War is coming, and neither of us may win”. Winter is so last season.
