As Thanos said, “Perhaps I treated you too harshly.” With a few weeks now between the season finale of House of the Dragon and today, I can see that I was a little too harsh on the series as I put way too high expectations on it.
Now, I’m just going to say it upfront: House of the Dragon IS NOT a bad show as one may have been lead to believe with my reviews of the final few episodes. In fact, the majority of the episodes House of the Dragon were some of the best moments of television I’ve ever seen and should be considered on par with the show’s predecessors, Game of Thrones.
Yet, therein lies my problem: House of the Dragon as a whole IS NOT Game of Thrones and should never have been compared to it as I foolishly did.
Foolishly, I put way too much pressure and expectations on this show to replicate the success and magnificence of the original as I was such a massive fan of GOT. In my opinion, the first six seasons (yes, I’m including Season 5 and 6) of Game of Thrones makes for one of the Top-3 best shows of all-time, let alone being the greatest fantasy show to have ever existed.
Even with the abysmal final two seasons of the show, GOT should still rank as one of the greatest shows to have ever been created. And I stupidly (and wrongfully) put those expectations on House of the Dragon.
House of the Dragon is a good show with compelling characters, plots, motivations, set designs, acting, cinematography, etc., but I think we can all agree that it is not one of the greatest shows to have ever been made. Currently, I would give House of the Dragon an 8.4/10 for the series as a whole, which is a great score compared to the thousands of T.V. shows in existence, but it is not in the echelon of Game of Thrones and the great T.V. shows.
(HBO-House of the Dragon-Official Trailer)
In other words, I didn’t give HOTD a chance to be its own show separate from the legacy of GOT coming into the season, thus skewing my enjoyment of the show for what it was. And that was unfair and unjust on my part, so I feel compelled to say sorry to the HOTD cast and crew.
But, I’m going to give myself a little bit of leeway here as those first four episodes of HOTD were just as good as GOT.
Unlike other fantasy shows that were running at the same time as HOTD (cough…Rings of Power…cough), HOTD maintained a quality of excellence that rivaled the first four seasons of Game of Thrones for nearly a whole month straight. Plus, the show had two more great episodes after that to push the total number of ‘great’ (in my opinion) episodes to six.
So, I’m not going to take total responsibility for scoring some of the final episodes of HOTD as low as I did as they were, by comparison to the beginning episodes of the series, substantial worse in plot and character motivation quality.
In my opinion, I think a huge reason why some of the latter episodes did not work was because of the MANY, MANY, MANY, MANY, MANY (I could keep going) actor swaps from week to week. Personally, I loved the portrays of the characters by the younger cast (ex: Mily Alcock, Emily Carrey, Theo Nate, Nova Foueillis-Mosé, Savannah Steyn, Ty Tennant, Leo Ashton, Evie Allen, Harvey Sadler, Leo Hart, etc.), and had grown to associate their characters to them.
Thus, when the cast was rotated in and out like how a football team subs in fresh players for tired players after each snap, I became disinterested in the new portrayals as I was still attached to the other actors. Perhaps I was the only one with this annoyance, but I can safely say that was a major reason why I disliked the later episodes of the season.
Though, I will say that I still liked most of the performances by the older cast, but it was difficult to link characters portrayed by the older cast with their younger counterparts when they had such different personalities, quirks, performances, motivations, etc.
(HBO-House of the Dragon-Official Trailer)
Anyway, I’ll be a little more specific in my full Season 1 breakdown. I just had to get those thoughts out there before I did that.
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