“We do not choose our destiny… it chooses us.”
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And so, House of the Dragon ends its first season much as it began – with multiple scenes of nobles gathered in dark rooms discussing strategy, punctuated by a graphic, horrific birth scene and the occasional bit of jaw dropping violence.
Continue reading “House of the Dragon: season 1, episode 10 – The Black Queen”“It is our fate, I think, to always crave what is given to another.”
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The King is dead, long live the…. ?
The death of a ruler without a clear succession is one of the most dramatic events a nation can face, and one of the most treacherous. The land is left without a ruler, while squabbling factions gather their forces to cement their claims. There is a name for a time like this, a name which sounds more solemn than the frantic consolidation of support that inevitably fills it. It is an interregnum.
Continue reading “House of the Dragon: season 1, episode 9 – The Green Council”“Exhausting, wasn’t it, hiding behind the cloak of your own righteousness? But now they see you as you are!”
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It seems weddings aren’t the only royal occasions prone to disruption and drama in Westeros. As we see in this ep, funerals can be equally as difficult, as Lady Laena’s memorial on the Velaryon stronghold of Driftmark further draws the lines of alliances between factions that will (presumably) soon be openly at war.
Continue reading “House of the Dragon: season 1, episode 7 – Driftmark”“What are children but a weakness?”
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And just like that… it’s ten years later.
This is a shame, as I’d grown rather attached to the actors playing the younger parts, who now must necessarily be recast; though the older characters often don’t seem to have aged at all. So, it’s out for Milly Alcock as Princess Rhaenyra, replaced by Emma D’Arcy; while Queen Allicent, her former friend and now deadly rival, is incarnated by Olivia Cooke, replacing the perfectly decent Emily Carey. Theo Nate, meanwhile, has been replaced as husband-in-name-only Laenor Velaryon by John MacMillan, who, as of this episode at least, looks strangely about the same age.
Continue reading “House of the Dragon: season 1, episode 6 – The Princess and the Queen”“We are the realm’s second sons, Daemon. Our worth is not given. It must be made.”
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After the season opener’s rather lengthy scene-setting and exposition, the showrunners of House of the Dragon hit the ground running in the second ep with the beginning of an actual plot. So keen are they to get the plot up and running that we get plunged into it without any explanation, as the opening scene pans across a beach full of carnage, with voracious crabs feasting on the bodies of the dead (and the not-so-dead).
Continue reading “House of the Dragon: season 1, episode 2 – The Rogue Prince”“The only thing that could tear down the House of the Dragon was itself.”
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Roll up, roll up, for the Big Autumn Battle of the Fantasy Epics! In the blue corner, Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, reportedly the most expensive TV show ever made! And in the red corner, it’s HBO’s younger upstart, House of the Dragon, a prequel to their ratings juggernaut Game of Thrones!
Continue reading “House of the Dragon: season 1, episode 1 – The Heirs of the Dragon”“Love is the death of duty.”
“Sometimes duty is the death of love.”
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So. After 8 years and 73 episodes, the biggest TV show of the last decade has finally come to a conclusion. It’s fair to say that, even with the last couple of years admittedly reducing and simplifying the show’s multifarious convoluted plotlines, tying up every loose end satisfactorily was always going to be a tall order. Expectations for a series finale have rarely been higher – and harder to meet.
Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 8, Episode 6 – The Iron Throne”“Men decide where power resides, whether they want to or not.”
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Dracarys indeed. Lots of it. If Missandei’s final word was an instruction, this week saw it obeyed to the letter, and gave Game of Thrones fans the spectacle they’d always wanted from the final battle for King’s Landing.
Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 8, Episode 5 – The Bells”“I’m here to free the world from tyrants. That is my destiny. And I will serve it no matter the cost.”
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After all the storming excitement of last week’s episode, I think Game of Thrones showrunners Benioff and Weiss thought we needed a bit of a breather before moving on to the remaining battles for Westeros. So this week we got The Last of the Starks, a satisfying but curiously schizoid episode which came across as nothing so much as two individual eps glued together.
Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 8, Episode 4 – The Last of the Starks”“The Night King is coming.”
“The dead are already here.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Been waiting for a battle? Well, this week’s Game of Thrones should have satisfied, delivering the show’s longest ever ep, and it was pretty much all battle, all the time, from beginning to end. Exciting though that sounds, it does run the risk of being pretty one note; even carnage gets dull after an hour or so.
Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 8, Episode 3 – The Long Night”
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