House of the Dragon season finale was a "gory triumph"

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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/hou...le-marred-one/

The scales seemed tipped against House of the Dragon (Sky Atlantic) when the Game of Thrones spin-off first swooped onto our screens.

Such was the backlash against the dreadful final season of Thrones, there were grounds for worrying that the viewing public had gone cold turkey on fire-breathing lizards. Plus, it was up against Amazon’s $1billion Middle-earth epic Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. In this struggle between dragons and hobbits, it was far from clear which would claim the spoils.

But with its series finale, House of the Dragon has emphatically seized the crown – even if none of its characters have quite managed to do so. It has taken Thrones’s ultra-violent and oversexed formula and amped it up into an eye-popping pantomime of vengeance, gore and platinum wigs. If you have the stomach – the farewell instalment was particularly grisly – it has proved irresistible.

All of House of the Dragon’s strengths, and a few of its flaws, were front and centre as the show signed off (a second season is already in production). The previous week, Alicent Hightower and her scheming father Otto had manoeuvred Alicent’s degenerate son Aegon onto the Iron Throne. And so the gauntlet had been thrown down to Princess Rhaenyra (an electrifyingly restrained Emma D’Arcy), usurped heir to the Seven Kingdoms. Rhaenyra and her husband/uncle Daemon (Matt Smith) – welcome to Westeros – weren’t taking this humiliation lying down. From their fortress in Dragonstone, they called a grand war council and ran tallies of potential allies.

Amid the military brainstorming, there was time, too, for a horrific depiction of Rhaenyra’s miscarriage – a sequel of sorts to the instantly notorious stillbirth scene from episode one. This verged on unwatchable and arguably strayed into sadism. It was another reminder of the George RR Martin universe’s suspiciously punishing attitude towards women. While the Thrones franchise has outgrown its early obsession with sexual violence, it appears to have struck upon a new way of making female characters suffer. Given that miscarriages are not at all uncommon, it is easy to imagine the portrayal of Rhaenyra losing her child upsetting viewers who had not signed up for maternity-ward body horror.

House of the Dragon felt on firmer ground when unpacking the toxicity of the Rhaneyra-Daemon relationship. Matt Smith has excelled from the very first episode in playing Daemon as a psychotic charmer. It turns out that he’s also an abusive spouse, as we discovered when he choked Rhaneyra for having her own ideas on how to proceed with the war against Alicent and her “greens”.

House of the Dragon has clocked up stellar ratings and impressed critics. That’s in contrast to the lamentable Rings of Power, which, if generating plenty of coverage for Amazon, has tumbled faster than a hobbit falling down a well. But if Dragon is to remain top it will need to make changes. In particular, it will have to address the distracting time jumps that have bedevilled its first season (and which involved the swapping out of several key cast-members).

There were signs here that it may already have learned that lesson. The finale took up the thread directly from the events of the previous instalment. In Dragonstone, Princess Rhaenys (Eve Best) and her husband Ser Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) pledged their allegiance to Rhaenyra. But there were tensions between Rhaenyra and Prince Daemon, who felt he should be running the show.

He potentially had a point. Rhaenyra’s impulsiveness has been a matter of record throughout the series. She erred once again by sending her wet-behind-the-years teenage son Lucerys (Elliot Grihault) south to firm up an alliance.

Waiting for him was Alicent’s cocky scion, Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) with his one eye and his gigantic dragon, Vhagar. Following a tense and haunting chase Vhagar devoured Lucerys and his steed, Arrax – disobeying a direct order from the horrified Aemond, who merely wanted to scare Lucerys, not kill him.

As Vhagar chomped on the prince, it was clear that Aemond had bitten off more than he could chew. House of the Dragon, by contrast, has effortlessly taken up on the baton from Game of Thrones. As the curtain came down on its debut season, it was confirmed that it has the potential to soar as high as Thrones at its finest.