Editor's note: The below contains spoilers for House of the Dragon.
The first season of House of the Dragon will come to its climactic end tonight, and, by now, we can already get a good overview of Game of Thrones' first spin-off show for HBO. It's, of course, a huge success. It brought back most of what made its mother series a hit, including family intrigue and political suspense, while also doubling down on others — for example, instead of three, there were 17 dragons. There's no way it could go wrong, right?
But apart from what we came to expect from this universe in terms of plot, House of the Dragon also kept the traditional narrative mold that made Game of Thrones such a hit: ten-episode seasons. From seasons 1 to 6, that show got us used to this particular way of telling stories, and House of the Dragon's ninth episode, "The Green Council," followed that pattern perfectly and delivered a shocking moment to be further developed in tonight's season finale.
Still, House of the Dragon only fits the 10-episode season mold by sacrificing a good chunk of chronological time. Its first season spans a whopping 16 years and makes wide use of time jumps to cover all that. It's a rather excessive use of time jumps, to be honest. While the show has managed to keep us on the edge of our seat week after week, trying to fit such a large time period in so few episodes comes with a cost, and the show lost much of the appeal it could have had with more space in between.
Why Are There So Many Time Jumps?
Recently, George R.R. Martin himself addressed the time jump issue, mentioning the current cable and streaming landscape as one of the factors that forced the production team to opt for this tool. "There are only so many minutes in an episode, and only so many episodes in a season," he says, which is a valid argument... But not enough to fully justify the rush with which some plot lines were dealt. There were a lot of lines that Game of Thrones had the time to fully develop, including a few narrative cores that didn't really go anywhere, whereas its spin-off did the opposite, trying to bite way more than it can chew in just an episode.
Comparing House of the Dragon to Game of Thrones is inevitable in some (or most) aspects, but it's not really fair with a show that has just begun. Unfortunately, the memory of the last seasons of Martin's first medieval fantasy show is still fresh on most viewers' minds, and HBO was fully aware of that.
When its first season debuted, House of the Dragon hadn't yet been renewed. For most of us, this would've been a no-brainer from the start, but what if it went wrong? The time jumps would then serve as a way to compress the story and go straight to the meat of the show, thus avoiding any possible backlash while still giving us some fiery action. While it may have seemed like a good strategy at the time, now that the first season is nearly over and the second one is already confirmed, the viewers were left with a rushed story, many recasts to accommodate the time jumps, and barely any time to actually enjoy the performances the actors worked so hard to convey.
Martin also mentioned that the show would require four seasons of 13 episodes to fully do the Dance of Dragons justice, and that sheds some light on how the current industry landscape operates. For a show to be seen as a success, it needs to generate a lot of buzz in a short period of time, so House of the Dragon needed to impress right away. The time jumps, then, make explicit how the studio actually approached the show as a gamble. If the show was well-received, then good, everything may seem like a success. If not, well, at least we got some dragons, right?
What the Time Jumps Sacrifice in Terms of Story
House of the Dragon is based on Martin's book, Fire & Blood, which analyzes the history of the Targaryen dynasty in Westeros. Adapting a novel into a television series is a big enough challenge, but Fire & Blood isn't exactly a novel. Creative as he is, Martin wrote a book under the premise of an unreliable narrator (Archmaester Gyldayn, a famed historian of House Targaryen), without bothering to create a narrative or delving too much into the specifics of each event. It's a fictional history book, meaning that its focus is mainly on factual events.
For that to be brought to the screen, many gaps had to be filled in order to create something that deserves to be told, a story with a complete narrative and characters with well-established development arcs. House of the Dragon sure tries hard to give us that, but its main focus is still on the what, not really on the how. While this is important to bring us the action that we're all here for, it still leaves us wanting for more, and not in a good way.
What we get is the introduction of heavily important characters to the Dance of Dragons with very little context. Take Aegon Targaryen (Ty Tennant and Tom Glynn-Carney), for example. Apart from brief scenes and dialogue, the eldest son of king Viserys (Paddy Considine) and Alicent Hightower (Emily Carey and Olivia Cooke) is introduced to us as mainly a nuisance for Rhaenyra's (Milly Alcock and Emma D'Arcy) claim to the Iron Throne. We see Aegon as mostly an inconsequential boy, being pushed around by his mother and grandfather Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans). Of course, that's how he is described in Fire & Blood, but, had House of the Dragon had fewer time jumps, perhaps he could have played a more concrete role in his family's dynamics and how the Greens work, without damaging the book's impact. He's being compared to king Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) by fans, but we hardly get any time to see why, as he was convinced by his mother to wear the crown and become king only miles from the Dragon Pit.
It's clear that the constant recasting and changing of actors for these characters is a technical issue in order to better accommodate the look they are supposed to have at a certain age, but it could also have worked as a metaphor for character growth without it feeling artificial. The way it was done, though, they are exactly the same as they were with different actors — making those changes, in most cases, only about the look, as no growth was displayed. A good example is Aemond Targaryen (Leo Ashton and Ewan Mitchell). We meet him as the bullied kid in the family, embittered for not having a dragon of his own. When we see him years later in the following episode, not much has changed for him. We gather that Aemond sees Aegon as the legitimate heir to the Iron Throne, and that he resents his brother's attitude towards that, because of a very brief line, when that could have served a better purpose to explore how the Greens are not as in line as one may have thought.
Even more objective events could have been better explored if the plot didn't need to be rushed to fit all that into a 10-episode season. Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), for example, unceremoniously killed Laenor Velaryon's (Theo Nate and John Macmillan) lover at a royal wedding, and we see none of the aftermath of that. He was a member of the King's Guard, sworn to protect princess Rhaenyra, and, as far as we know, there was no consequence for him. He was actually promoted to sworn protector of Queen Alicent and given even more reign to murder indiscriminately, as we see with the death of Lord Beesbury in "The Green Council."
Tonight's season finale is likely to deliver the most crushing moment of the Dance of Dragons, and this is going to happen between two characters who were not there as the season started, and who barely had any development happening on screen. The changing of actors is supposed to be a metaphor for character growth, but with so many changes, it's hard to keep track not only of who's who but also of why they are the way they are at any given moment. It feels as if House of the Dragon's writers haven't yet decided if they want to tell a story of their own, or merely to portray events from the books that are deemed most important, sacrificing a natural sense of character evolution in the process. With a second season on the way, maybe the series will spend the uninterrupted time with these characters that they truly deserve.