House of the Dragon Is Back, and This Time, It’s War

This story is from Manual, GQ’s flagship newsletter offering useful advice on style, health, and more, four days a week. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

House of the Dragon, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel series, returns this Sunday for a second season. GQ’s Culture Editor Alex Pappademas talked to regular GQ contributor William Goodman about what we can expect as we return to war-torn Westeros.

Alex Pappademas: William, I’m curious what your experience was like with this show. I was a big Game of Thrones fan, and then, like a lot of people, I wasn’t. Also like a lot of people, I was skeptical about the idea of a prequel at first. It felt like not enough time had passed. Like, didn’t we just do this, and didn’t we all end up pretty annoyed at the end?

But over the course of season one, I came around on it. Part of that was the cool narrative tie they created between the original Thrones and this show—this idea, which you remind us of in the House of the Dragon refresher you just wrote for the site, that the Targaryens are motivated by a prophecy that says winter is coming and humanity is doomed unless there’s a Targaryen on the Iron Throne when this happens. I love that, because we, the audience, know that it’s going to come true, but that it’s not going to be the Targaryens or their descendants who save the world.

William Goodman: Yeah. The showrunners—Ryan Condal, along with Miguel Sapochnik, who left after the first season—teed up this cool bit of lore very early on, about the Song of Ice and Fire prophecy. To my understanding that’s not in Fire and Blood, the George R.R. Martin book House of the Dragon is based on. It’s something I think they got sign-off from George to include in this, as a way to give it some stakes.

So the audience knows what it means, and the significance of that lingers over the show and gives it this propulsion. Even when things are a little bit slower, you know that everybody is working towards this goal.

The other thing that really stood out for me was how much the first five episodes of season one were really a star-is-born moment for Milly Alcock, who I was completely unfamiliar with. Now she's going to be Supergirl as part of James Gunn's DC Universe, but she came from a mostly comedic background—she did a sitcom in Australia, but that was the bulk of her work prior to this. She was just absolutely commanding as the young Rhaenyra.

I was actually a little concerned about how the show was going to make the transition from the younger versions of the cast to the older versions, because of how strong her performance was as young Rhaenyra. Emma D'Arcy, who plays the adult Rhaenyra, is also very, very good. But in the early stages, as you're getting to know Rhaenyra, having a performer as magnetic as Milly in that role really brings you in.

And then you had this cast full of beloved character actors, whether it’s somebody like Paddy Considine, or Matt Smith, a guy that I’ve loved since Dr. Who, who I think has maybe struggled a little bit to find his place post Dr. Who and post The Crown. This part, Daemon, is a perfect merging of his asshole persona in both those previous roles.

For a spinoff, the first season asked a lot of the audience. The story didn’t gallivant all over a huge map like Thrones did, showing us different visually-distinct locales. It didn’t include many of the earthy, sweary low-born characters who made Thrones so colorful. The focus was pretty tight on a specific corner of Westeros and this specific group of upper-class blond people. And it seemed like every other week there’d be a pretty significant time jump, sometimes leading to actors being recast.

That’s one of those things I know some people got kind of hung up on that during the first season. It didn't bother me as much. It could be a little disorienting, but I think at the end of the day, especially as we move into season two, having that history associated with the characters makes it all feel a little bit more lived-in, because in theory, by the end of the first season, we’ve been with these characters for 20 years.

So those little things that were maybe slights in season one are coming back, and now they're not fresh wounds or scabs—they're scars. They’re deep-seated things, petty or not. And the show can then turn around and reference its own history. I think the fact that they were able to establish that within the course of a 10-episode first season is a really cool feature, even if some people thought it was a bug. And especially as we head into season two, that stuff becomes more and more prevalent.

Also, in season two, they do find ways to show us small moments where we get the perspective of ordinary folks. People that actually live in King’s Landing, blacksmiths, people who go out drinking on the Street of Silk. Having that ground-level perspective on this larger civil war helps show us the stakes of what’s happening.

You’ve seen the first half of the new season. Without spoiling it for anyone who hasn’t, including me, what else can we expect?

I think if season two is all about setup, then this is really all about execution. If you’re going to depict a civil war between two families, you have to really kind of care about all of the characters involved. If we start to see more and more battles and people are dying left and right and we don’t really care about them, everything feels a little hollow. So I was curious about how they were going to handle the kids this time around. One of the criticisms I had about season one, especially in the finale when they kill Lucerys, Rhaenyra's son—that death didn't feel like there was a ton of weight to it, because we hadn’t spent a ton of time with him. Like a lot of the kids, he felt more like an archetype than an actual character.

And so the first four episodes of Season 2 do a really good job, I think, of better establishing those kids, especially on the Hightower side, the “Green” side. We get a lot of insight into how Aegon II is ruling, Aemond's mental state after what happened with him and Luc, and we get to know Rhaenyra's kids a little bit more as well.

The battles are the other thing. There’s a big set piece coming up, I won’t say exactly when, that is up there with some of the greatest battle sequences in Game of Thrones history. It's very, very impressive. And well-lit, so there's no concern about you not being able to see what's happening. But the kicker here is the dragon aspect of it. Everyone involved in this has their own dragon, and these things are basically walking nuclear weapons with a mind of their own. So the real fear and scale of the dragons, and how they come into play, is one thing the show picks up on this year that is different from how they worked last year.

Dragons are around in the first season, but not with the same size and significance that they are this time around. When a dragon enters the playing field, it's a scary moment. It is one of those things where you feel the power of that happening, and because everybody has one, the tides shift back and forth as these things appear or don't appear throughout the course of a sequence. So I think those are the things that really stand out as we head into season two. And then just how propulsive it is—with so much setup having been done, we can really just go pedal to the metal here and get into the war aspect of it. Those are the things that I think really, really pop.

The source material on this is George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Blood, a fictional history of an era hundreds of years before the Song of Ice and Fire novels take place. Assuming this show roughly follows the canonical narrative of Westeros history, where are we going from here?

That’s one thing I'm curious to find out. House of the Dragon, moments before we had this conversation, just got renewed for a third season—but the civil war only lasts for a certain amount of time. There's a cool moment in the immediate aftermath involving one of the Stark ancestors, which could be cool if they decided to do that. But to me, if I had to guess, this is probably going to be just about a very specific slice of time. In Westeros, there’s always battles, but this one is particularly egregious because of all of the kinslaying that happens. That is a cardinal sin within the Seven Kingdoms and the fact that it was just sort of generally accepted, that there was this civil war that caused so much death between family, is a big deal.

It’s also a big deal because it significantly reduces the amount of dragons in the world. That’s part of the reason why it’s such a big thing when Daenerys comes back with hers—they've been gone for such a long time. I know they're working on other potential spinoffs. But the Targaryen civil war is one of the few things that just naturally has that epic sprawl similar to Game of Thrones, which I think is part of the reason why this one was more fast-tracked than some of the other spinoffs—because it was a more direct, one-to-one copy-paste of what we saw in Thrones.

Right. It’s easier to turn Martin’s history of the Targaryens into a Game of Thrones-type show than it is to crack the story on a new Jon Snow show.

Or something like Blood Moon, which was the Naomi Watts show that they were doing, which I think was going to focus almost exclusively on how the White Walkers came to be. I think having to create new lore within George R. R. Martin's world is a little bit tough, and we saw some evidence of that in the way the show stumbled as they kind of went off book in the later seasons.

I think, if I had to guess, more and more of these spinoffs will continue to focus on areas where there’s an established text to draw from, while we wait for George to figure out whatever it is that he's going to do moving forward. I think if you start to deviate too much from the book canon, people are going to have a strong, visceral reaction to it, as we saw with Thrones.

I haven’t read any of the books, but I guess there’s a moment in between the HoD and GoT timeframes where the Targaryens try to conquer Dorne? Dorne is cool. Maybe that’s a show?

There’s Dorne, yeah. And there are a bunch of, like, mini-rebellions. I was doing some digging yesterday. Like I've tried not to go too far down the line because if I'm going to continue to review the show, I want to be surprised on some levels to what's going to happen.

I think the one show that they could do, which might get into maybe too-prequel-y territory, is the Robert's Rebellion show, which people have always wanted to see, because that's a young Ned Stark and younger versions of some of the other older Game of Thrones characters we first see. That story, in particular, plays a key role in everything that we’d see in Thrones. So that might be something that we’ll potentially see.

But I think the only spinoff I know that they're working on is A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: Hedge Knight, which is a travelogue of sorts. And then I think they're working on another one, another travelogue, but it's more sort of nautical-based. It's a sailor's story of some sort.

But yeah, I mean—more Dorne, sure. I'd love to spend a ton of time there. I get why the Dornish people all look so beautiful. They get a lot of sun.

Originally Appeared on GQ