Will House of the Dragon Take Notes from Dunk and Egg?

Will House of the Dragon Take Notes from Dunk and Egg?

Or is it time to say ’night-’night to the Seven Kingdoms?

The third season of Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon debuts this weekend. Across the internet, the collective point of view on this fact appears to be a resounding, “Should we be excited...?”

At this point, we don’t need to re-litigate why. The final season or two of Game of Thrones squandered nearly a decade of hype and good feelings so that the show runners could hustle along to make their Star Wars trilogy, and the rushed outcomes they created for multiple long-term story threads went over so poorly that, by all accounts, LucasFilm said, “Erm, actually, maybe you shouldn’t do a Star Wars trilogy after all.”

The first season of House of the Dragon, a prequel set a couple of hundred years before we learned that no one had a story more remarkable than Bran the Broken, did a lot to remediate all those bad feelings. Look past the bad wigs (sorry, Doctor Who, we’ll never buy you as a platinum blond) and House of the Dragon offered a grandiose view of Westeros at the tail end of its prime, a kingdom dominated by a powerful family in decline... but still powerful all the same. In a lot of ways, the show felt like it stuck the landing presenting a “end of the golden era” prequel that the aforementioned Star Wars didn’t quite pull off with its own chronicle of the Galactic Republic’s descent into empire.

House of the Dragon even got a warm response from franchise author George R.R. Martin, a man who got his start in fandom writing irascible letters to Marvel Comics and has never lost his knack for directing sharp-witted crankiness at deserving targets. For example, people who badly adapt his work for other mediums. Which, it turns out, is how he categorizes the team who took charge of House of the Dragon for its second season, which diverged significantly from Martin’s source material and generally felt a lot less like a home run than the premiere season.

If the second season of House of the Dragon were the most recent point of reference into the world of Game of Thrones, we could probably write off the earlier season as an aberrant blip and brace ourselves for a dire new season ahead. But fandom, like morality in the brutal world of Westeros, is never quite that simple. A few months ago, HBO Max aired another spinoff to Game of Thrones, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. And it was, simply put, phenomenal. Knight offered a completely different take on the Game of Thrones world from House of the Dragon; where the latter is an epic-scale multigenerational tale of war and political machinations between larger-than-life figures who command the loyalty of unspeakably powerful beasts, the former centers its point of view on Ser Duncan the Tall, a wandering knight who probably didn’t even properly earn the title yet who righteously (if naively) holds to the belief that knights exist to protect the powerless of the kingdom.

Where House of the Dragon depicts contents between the powerful, A Knight of the Seven grounds itself in the reality of those immense conflicts’ impact on the common folk. Again, not to keep bringing Star Wars comparisons into this, but it works on the same level as something like Andor or even Skeleton Crew: exploring the awful impact that fantastic events have on the people you normally see scurrying in fear or dying helplessly in the background. Not surprisingly, things are pretty bad for normies in Westeros!

It’s interesting to compare and contrast how the two shows handle similar situations, such as fear and disorientation for a lead character. In House of the Dragon, Daemon Targaryen spent most of season two trapped in a haunted castle experiencing a borderline mental breakdown. This portion of the story was drawn out, aimless, and left viewers wondering what the entire point was. By contrast, look at the fifth episode of Knight, “In the Name of the Mother”, one of the most harrowing half-hours of television ever broadcast. Overpowered, outnumbered, and betrayed in a grueling fight to the death, Duncan’s pain and disorientation are conveyed through first-person shots and contrasted against flashbacks that underscore his motivations as a knight.

Obviously, both shows aim to tell different kinds of stories in different ways, but A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has a been a welcome reminder that the world of Game of Thrones was always at its most compelling when it centered itself on the experiences and feelings of the individuals caught up in unspeakably vast events—not the events themselves. House of the Dragon’s second season fell into the trap of spending a lot of time moving pieces around the proverbial chessboard without really taking the time to explore what those movements meant to the (figurative) pieces themselves. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms offered a handy reminder that all of those big events only really matter to audiences when they’re anchored in relatable characters. The question, then, is whether or not House of the Dragon has space amidst its upcoming kingdom-wide conflicts to pause and put viewers in the heads of its characters the way the early seasons of Game of Thrones did. In a perfect world, Ser Duncan’s small-scale adventures would be the jolt that House of the Dragon needs to get back on the right track. And if not, well, at least they’ve renewed Knight for another season.