The final episode of House of the Dragon can compete with crucial episodes from Game of Thrones ★★★★☆

In the final shot of the tenth and final episode of House of the Dragon the deeply hurt Queen Rhaenyra turns to the camera. This viewer at home thought: great, let’s start. House of the Dragon felt like a very long, extremely unbalanced prologue for much of the season (the struggle for power across all of Westeros) that finally unfolds in the second season. And that alternated with four bloody birth scenes, almost increasing in horror, with a scene in episode 10 that really deserves a big disclaimer.

The creators will no doubt have seen in those difficult births a metaphor for the equally brutal question of succession to the throne, with every child born as a threat to the entire existing order. But that doesn’t mean it’s all pretty free. We can have quite a lot in fantasy, because when a dragon turns an army into ashes it is quite easy to process, but that explicit realism when it comes to complex births is difficult to reconcile with that.

Apart from that episode 10 (The Black Queen) by far the best episode of this first season of House of the Dragonthe only one that came close to pivotal episodes of Game of Thrones. It was a bit of a letdown last season. Too many scenes of people engaging in Westeros politics at long tables or in dimly lit castle spaces. We want quests, majestic landscapes, thousands of horsemen appearing on a ridge. And speaking of that light: the seventh episode of House of the Dragon was much discussed, because it contained an eighteen-minute night scene that made many people turn all the buttons, because they heard everything, but saw hardly anything.

Unclear timeline

Another hurdle of the season was the not always clear timeline. Years passed within this season and we saw the two female lead roles suddenly being played by a bunch of adult actors from episode 5 onwards. With all due respect to their younger predecessors, the drama of two childhood friends pitted against each other as rival queens really took off with the entry of Emma D’Arcy as Rhaena Targaryen and Olivia Cooke as Alicent Hightower.

Another issue is the inexplicable age gap between the king and his brother. While Paddy Considine seemed to live for centuries as King Viserys and slowly rot (literally), the clammy climate apparently didn’t affect his brother, our favorite Westeros badguy Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith). Find the differences between his first and last scene: there aren’t any. Black magic or hard demand from the actor, who knows.

When the Rebel Queen Rhaena has to look for support after the death of her father, then the entire continent of Westeros is finally before us. Admittedly still as a large map, but there was the unmistakable feeling: winter is coming.