The episode gives us glimmerings of interesting character development: Alcock does a masterly job of conveying Rhaenyra’s intelligence and her conflicted position as a capable but underestimated princess Considine gestures toward a Ned Stark-like warmth and strength, alongside mild regal ineptitude. (Crustaceans are to this series as leeches were to Melisandre in “Thrones”: revolting and pivotal.) Aw, heads on spikes-how we’ve missed you, Westeros! Inside the palace, Rhaenyra and her friend Alicent Hightower visit the hugely pregnant queen (“This discomfort is how we serve the realm,” she says, proud and grim), and then Rhaenyra zips off to a meeting of the king and his advisers, where, as she pours water for them, undercover-Arya style, she listens to the proceedings: reports that begin “We’ve all been poring over the moon charts” a discussion of a pirate-punishing madman called the Crabfeeder. “Every time that golden beast brings you back unspoiled, it saves my head from a spike,” he replies. “Try not to look so relieved,” she tells a grizzled old knight, tossing her blond braid and removing her driving gloves. The king’s teen daughter, the sharp-featured and extremely Daenerys-like Rhaenyra Targaryen (Milly Alcock), has just borrowed the family car, a dragon named Syrax she dismounts with plucky nonchalance. The action skips ahead, nine years into Viserys’s reign, when, after a charmingly familiar credit sequence-no maps, just an amulet, and the comforting pounding of drums in classic Ramin Djawadi style-an aerial symphony of clouds and the flap of leathery wings bring us swooping over the Red Keep, in King’s Landing. The show opens not with a grim ice-monster sequence, as “Thrones” did-hat tip to that-but with the announcement, in a grand hall, of Prince Viserys (Paddy Considine) as the next king. “Dragon” swiftly provides some of the old “Thrones” pleasures. (Too occasional, perhaps-the show’s ratio of violence to debauchery would do well to be adjusted.) As ever, there’s a succession crisis, and, when an HBO series is driven by a succession crisis, just sit back and observe the infighting: we’ve got hours of high-powered treachery to enjoy, or endure. Life in year 172 B.D.T., as I call it, looks familiar: dusty-colored cities and palaces, chandeliers that resemble bonfires, eerily towheaded ruling families, the occasional orgy. Martin’s “ Fire and Blood,” tells the story of House Targaryen in an era well before our old friends showed up-a hundred and seventy-two years before the death of the Mad King, the opening titles inform us, and the birth of his daughter Daenerys Targaryen. Do we want to go where it’s taking us? “House of the Dragon,” HBO’s lavish prequel series based on George R. A new “Game of Thrones” show, in the year of our anxieties 2022, has arrived to ferry us away from our long winter of “ Thrones”-lessness.
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