Is ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2’s Crawling Pace a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?
Is slow and steady winning this race?
We’re almost at the end of the road for House of The Dragon season 2, and both sides of the Targaryen civil war are still playing it rather civil, if you ask me. Apart from the Battle of Rook’s Rest, we haven’t gotten any big Black vs. Green clashes, and you can blame it on the show’s pacing.
Spoilers ahead!
Back in 2022, in a post on his “not a blog”, Fire & Blood author George R.R. Martin had said that four seasons of ten episodes each would be required to do justice to a proper telling of the Dance of the Dragons. Eventually, we got only eight-episode seasons. And keeping in mind the current pacing of the show, and how it plans to structure its pivotal moments, House of the Dragon could go on to have five seasons at the least.
Five seasons sounds like a decent number, but it will all depend on how the team behind the show uses these five seasons to pace the story. At present, one of the biggest critiques of HOTD is that it languishes in some places, taking its own sweet time to arrive at the major turning points. We’re two seasons in and the dance hasn’t even begun; we’re still warming up! There have been episodes that might seem like filler because no major moves are made, and yet, we have spent more time getting to know a character and their motivation, which lends a deeper emotional impact to their actions.
The show’s pacing, then, is clearly a double-edged sword. So let’s debate the pros and cons of what House of the Dragon is trying to do here.
House of the Dragon’s dawdling pace is dragging the show down
Many fans (including yours truly) expected season 2 to end with one of the major battles of the Dance of the Dragons—the Battle of the Gullet—in which the Velaryon blockade is attacked, and Rhaenyra’s (Emma D’Arcy) new dragonriders go to war. But the seeds have only just been sown in episode 7, “The Red Sowing.” With only one episode remaining, the show isn’t going to give us this highly anticipated battle this season, which means a wait of at least a year or two. Yawn!
This might’ve been fine had season 2 not spent precious minutes of their eight episodes devoted to repeated scenes of the Velaryons at the docks or Alicent going for a camping trip in the middle of literal war because her son insulted her. One of the biggest arcs this season, which is brilliantly acted yet feels dragging because of its repetitiveness, has been Daemon Targaryen’s haunting at Harrenhal. For the past several episodes, it has felt like Daemon is having executive dysfunction and has made no quantifiable progress in the pre-war prep efforts!
What these scenes do is dilute the potency of the war and break away from what should be a time of urgent action and utter chaos for both parties involved. Instead, the calm before the storm has been so serene that Rhaenyra’s anger over losing her son Luke seems to have fizzled out, and feels forgotten.
The Battle of the Gullet would have been a great turning point for season 2’s ending, drawing an interesting parallel with the tragic ending of season 1, but we’re moving at a truly glacial pace here.
Is House of the Dragon’s slow pace a lesson well-learned from Game of Thrones’ mistakes?
Back in season 1, when HOTD was doing these time jumps to show characters aging, fans were disgruntled about it. And now, funny enough, as it slows down and takes time to simmer before bringing it to a full boil, there’s still criticism about the pacing.
It does seem perhaps that House of the Dragon is not only learning from its own mistakes but those of its main series, Game of Thrones.
The final seasons of Game of Thrones have been criticized for their pacing being too rapid to process the characters’ aging and changing arcs. Take Daenerys Targaryen, for example, who was a messiah a minute ago, and the next, she had gone completely beyond the pale. Sure, the catalysts were spelled out (the deaths of Viserion, Rhaegal, Jorah Mormont, and Missandei), and there were hints since the early years. But the character progression was so quick that it left fans reeling from how soon she went from hero to villain and how quickly it all ended for a protagonist like her.
One the other hand, it is evident that House of the Dragon is avoiding time jumps that feel unearned, people traveling long distances over the blink of an eye, and a “Daenerys the Mad Queen” trajectory for her ancestor, their own dragon queen, Rhaenyra Targaryen. The show has spent its entire second season having Rhaenyra strive for peace as much as possible (in what appears to be a brilliant anti-war statement) before she finally sends her dragons to war and jumps into the fray herself in season 3.
Both the times she did send in a dragon, she lost a son (Lucerys Velaryon) and a staunch ally (Rhaenys Targaryen), along with two precious dragons. Rhaenyra, much like the show she is in, is treading cautiously and not burning through carelessly—at least not yet. And if we’re weighing the pros and cons, we cannot deny that the show is using its time well to really flesh out characters, including the dragon personalities, so that we may understand them better, and make the poetic parallels that the show seems extremely fond of even more impactful.
One example of that would be the characters of Hugh Hammer and Ulf the White, dragonseeds who claim the dragons Vermithor and Silverwing. We spend some time knowing who they are, what drives them, and their weaknesses. It makes Hugh claiming Vermithor rather poetic not only because that’s his mother’s father’s dragon, but also because Hugh is driven by vengeance. He wants a better life, not out of greed, but out of vengeance for what was done to him and his family.
As for Ulf, it’s tragic to see him—a man who, in the book, is a drunk, greedy, and a rapist—ride Silverwing, a dragon that belonged to a very good and fair Queen Alysanne, who actually championed women’s rights and helped her husband enact laws for the betterment of the smallfolk. Silverwing was a friendly dragon that simply said, “Okay, you’ll do!” to the first guy that walked up to her, and Ulf ended up taking undue advantage of becoming a dragonrider—much like Rhaenyra letting unknown men ride her god-like dragons and then suffering the consequences of it.
So is the House of the Dragon pacing a good thing or a bad thing? It’s all in the eye of the beholder. If you’re here just for the action and the major shock-value moments and battles, the pace might not work for you. I, for one, think it’s better storytelling because a good story is all about the details. You can always get the Cliff’s Notes version on sites like A Wiki of Ice and Fire. So, I say let them cook!
Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com
