Here’s my belated review for House of the Dragon S3e07, and I really felt some of the weird choices the series has made come home to roost here. Let me start by saying, yes, I know I’m a week late, but I was on vacation with no chance to watch, so since I got back I’ve been catching up and my finale review will drop today also.
I’ll keep this one fairly brief as it’s a week late, but will maintain the spoiler free mode of delivery.
Weird Choices
The showrunners have taken a skeletal framework from the books and made some seriously weird choices to flesh it out into a series. Yet, like creator George R. R. Martin they have come victims of their own gardening style. We are now at the point in the story where some of these choices and the endgame of them are starting to hit. A good example of this I will leave for the finale itself.
However, we could use the decision in Season 2 to have Daemon spend far too long in Hareenhall dreaming of having sex with his mother and being spooked by a witch. Now we see this was entirely to provide a mirror to what Aemond goes through in Season 3 and it was in my opinion a waste of screen time in both seasons, but more so in Season 2. It’s a cheap trick to use the same eexact story, simply as a device for them to change initial character traits.
Allicent as per usual gets the short ned of the writing stick and this follows on from last week. Meanwhile, we finally get to the Hightowers trying to convince some notable people to join them. We should have been into this plot weeks ago.
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Aegon’s storyline remains the strongest, though I’m not sure I completely buy the character arc planned for him at this point, nor his reaction to meeting someone for the first time in a while.
As always there are little bits that work and bits that do not. I always feel that since Season 1, House of the Dragon tries to set up big dramatic shock moments like Game of Thrones had. The writers don’t quite have the skill to pull it off though, or at least not every time. Thus, it feels forced too often and loses some of the impact even when the moments do land.
I’m not sure what happened to this show, did the showrunner start huffing his own fantasy urges after the praise for Season 1? Too much of the writing has been pointless filler, which just takes time away from the real stories at hand.
GRADE: C
Looks and pretends to be the same quality as Game of Thrones, but strip off the gloss and actually it really feels like a cheap copy of the format. If it wasn’t for dragons no on would b watching this series, because the rest just isn’t that engaging. It’s a case of more dragons, more pointless violence, more pointless sex scenes, more shock moments and sadly far less character development and true drama.
Occasionally there’s a glimpse of what this series could have been with a bit less rush and a different writing team. Sadly this is just inferior to what most fans imagined when they filled in the gaps themselves. This is Ryan Condall’s vision of filling in those gaps and it’s just not how many fans would do it.
As always, leave your own review for House of the Dragon S3E07, or critique my review in the usual spot below. Now for the finale…
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