Firing back up

Westeros is back! Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon is here three years after the world’s TV love affair with the battle for the Iron Throne went all bitter and twisted at the end there. Can this new entry win back our affection? Ben Allan has a look.

Is it, somehow, only three-and-a-bit years since the last episode of Game of Thrones aired? The extravagant fantasy show based on George R.R Martin’s ongoing, long-running, how-is-the-next-book-not-out-yet (11 years and counting, George) ‘‘A Song of Ice and Fire’’ novels managed to achieve a rather remarkable double. Firstly, in the age of splintered audiences and intense competition for leisure-hour eyeballs, it became a show so huge that seemingly everyone you knew was watching and talking about it; a true television juggernaut. Then, somehow almost more spectacularly, it stumped up with an ending that was such a disappointment to so many of its fans that it crashed almost instantly out of the collective cultural consciousness. It was almost as if everyone had made an unspoken agreement to pretend that the whole thing had never happened.

But while the wheels might have come off a bit at the end there, one group of people very definitely did not forget about all that interest, and more importantly the squillions of dollars that came along with it: television executives. As some of all those real-life children that got named “Daenerys” back in the day start nearing their 10th birthdays, HBO have been quietly beavering away on any number of spin-offs (by some counts, as many as eight), hoping that we might all yet be as interested in the going-ons in Westeros as once we were.

And so here’s House of the Dragon, first of that large stable out of the gate and on to our screens. Telling a story first set out by Martin in his prequel “history” book Fire and Blood, it turns the clock back the best part of two centuries before the events of Game of Thrones, when dragons were relatively plentiful and the Targaryen family - the eponymous house, and the ancestors of Game of Thrones’ dragon queen Daenerys - ruled over a rather more united Westeros than the one we saw in Game of Thrones. Are we here to see orderly transfers of power and even-handed, non-eventful kingdom administration, though? No! And just as well, since things are about to get messy.

Paddy Consedine rules the land as King Viserys, a monarch in the midst of a stable reign who really only has one major headache; the lack of a son to act as heir to the kingdom. His 15-year-old daughter Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) is in rude health, but is regarded -even by herself -as something of a family spare part, because the idea of a woman on the throne is regarded as essentially an abomination by most of the kingdom. This is despite the fact she has her very own dragon to ride around on - a Targaryen family trait that, given their potential destructive power in Westeros’ world of mud-and-blood combat, is abit like walking around with the keys to your own little personal nuclear arsenal.

This seems like a perfectly acceptable state of affairs for the king’s younger brother Prince Daemon (Matt Smith) - also dragoned up - who assumes he’ll be getting the nod as regent if his brother shuffles off the mortal coil without a son.

But that’s a terrible thought for most of the king’s advisers, especially the king’s trusted Hand Lord Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), who has pegged the prince (fairly accurately, it turns out) as an extremely loose cannon (or perhaps, to better match the available level of technology, a loose catapult). Hightower is up to a bit of political manoeuvering himself though, ensuring he keeps his daughter Alicent (Emily Carey), Rhaenyra’s BFF, extremely close to the royal family.

But Viserys isn’t overly worried about his brother’s vague designs on power, as his beloved queen Aemma is once again pregnant, and he’s supremely confident that this time around he will get the healthy son he so desperately longs for. Aemma herself is, after several failed pregnancies and infant deaths, thoroughly exhausted by having to perform the duty of royal baby-making machine, but as she tells Rhaenyra, the restricted role of women in this medieval world is such that “childbirth is our battlefield”.

This juxtaposition is about to get very on the nose as the king organises a knight’s tournament to prematurely celebrate the presumed birth of his son -an opportunity for the show to demonstrate early-on that the franchise hasn’t discarded its love for unflinchingly depicting extreme violence inflicted with pointy bits of metal. As carnage ramps up on the lists, it’s happening in the queen’s bedchamber too as her delivery goes wrong, a rather affectingly horrible sequence that reminds us of the perilous position women face in Westeros, and leads to Viserys makes some fateful decisions that will send events spiralling off into a contest for power.

Cue marriages, more births, rivalries, murders, orgies, Mexican standoffs conducted with dragons, the odd battle, some very unpleasant close encounters with crabs and more of those creepy Targaryen incest vibes, as events progress and all and sundry jockey for position. The peaceable but overly wishy-washy Viserys prevaricates as he tries to hold everything together, while the mad, bad and dangerous to know Prince Daemon (played by Smith with a sort of petulant, leering magnetism), who reckons you can solve any problem if only you chop enough limbs off, swans in and out of events looking for exciting new things to screw up, in the classic manner of black sheep younger siblings everywhere. Meanwhile, relations, rivals and hangers-on scheme all around them to get what they can. It’s all, in other words, very Game of Thrones.

In fact, for awhile, with many early scenes of the same sort set in the same locations as the original show, viewers may well find their brain fully expecting Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion to walk through a door at any minute and start insulting people. But House of the Dragon is its own thing, too. While the various great houses we learned about in Game of Thrones are kicking about, and name-checked, they are largely mere background players, and the show (at least in the six episodes provided for review) stays tightly focused on the Targaryens and their immediate circle. It’s a much less sprawling affair than its predecessor.

This tighter focus makes for a faster pace, too -in fact, House of the Dragon does not hesitate to time jump multiple years between episodes, and eventually even suddenly recasts several characters with older performers, making for a bit of disorientation as you re-work out who everyone is. Whether this will go down well with Thrones fans who appreciated the languorous world-building of that show in its heyday remains to be seen, but it certainly makes for a propelling sense of rushing towards Things Being About To Go Down.

It perhaps all feels a smidgeon less epic than Game of Thrones did at this smaller scale, with fewer characters in fewer locations, but maybe it’s unsurprising that HBO is testing the appetite for more Thrones before spending truly enormous dollars on legions of extras on horseback and six separate castle sets. What is here still looks great, too, with dragons all over the place and a wig budget that seems like it probably exceeds the GDP of many countries.

Thankfully, the show also seems to have learned a few lessons from some of the criticism Game of Thrones received, too, because while Very Adult content remains in House of the Dragon, nasty sexual violence of the sort that Game of Thrones became a bit infamous for seems to be off the table.

Does it hit the heights of Game of Thrones yet? No. But am I hooked? Yes. It’s hard to look away. Imagine all the political infighting, backbiting and scheming the National Party went through in recent years, then add Judith Collins leaping on to the back of a dragon every so often to fly off to set fire to an army. Now that’s compelling television.

• The first episode of House of the Dragon is now streaming on Neon, with new episodes arriving each Monday.