House of the Dragon Season 2 Premiere Spoiler-Free Review - IGN (2024)

This is a spoiler-free review of Season 2, Episodes 1 and 2 of House of the Dragon; read on after the main review for thoughts on Episodes 3 and 4. Season 2 premieres on HBO and Max at 9pm ET on Sunday, June 16. Reviews of new episodes will post Sunday nights through August 4.

When House of the Dragon premiered in 2022, co-showrunner Ryan Condal promised a pace akin to the barnstorming middle seasons of Game of Thrones. More recently Condal (who’s now flying solo after longtime GoT hand Miguel Sapochnik stepped back) has said that season 2 will have a burning fuse running through it, setting off small charges before – presumably – a major, final blaze. The first two episodes of the new season are certainly a slow burn, and might have done with a bit more fuel on the fire in between their climactic moments.

We return to Westeros for an opening salvo that’s focused on personal grief and the looming prospect of hostilities between Targaryen factions. Neither mourning “black” queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) or guilt-ridden “green” queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke) is making optimal decisions following the killing of Rhaenyra’s son, Lucerys, by Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) in the first season finale. But they at least remember a time when they were friends, and while they’re both unrelenting in their battle for the Iron Throne, they’re consistently the cooler heads.

Around them, though, schemers and scoundrels jostle for power and revenge. Matt Smith’s Daemon remains the most interesting character, capable of ruthless murder one minute and unusual tenderness the next, but he's closely followed by his entirely devious but increasingly weary opposite, Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans). Tom Glynn-Carney’s King Aegon is given a few moments of humanity here to make up for his unrelieved venality last season, but he's still intensely unlikeable and very much in the same mould as King Joffrey Baratheon. The grieving Velaryons, Corlys (Steve Toussaint) and Rhaenys (Eve Best), remain the coolest and most charismatic pairing here, and though their granddaughter Baela (Bethany Antonia) looks like she could attain their level of badassery in time, the three have precious little screen time between them in which to display it.

House of the Dragon therefore remains a little short on people to truly root for at this point; you’d give Aemond’s eye for another Tyrion, another Brienne. Rhaenyra is sympathetic in her anguish, but isolated by her position and angry at a world that has turned against her – so much that it’s hard to deeply invest in her. Her eldest surviving son, Jacaerys (Harry Collett), seems promising, channelling a sort of Chalamet-as-Paul-Atreides energy as he completes the mission he was dispatched on last season and mourns his brother with his family. Then again, good heartedness is not necessarily a survival trait in this world, so perhaps it's best he not show much more depth.

It must be said that House of the Dragon still looks gorgeous. Location filming has largely shifted from Cornwall to Snowdonia and Anglesey in Wales, with a healthy dose of Spain for the warmer climates, but the shift isn’t jarring unless you know what to look for. We get a glimpse of the North at the start of the season, with a welcome dash of gritty Stark stoicism to leaven the impossibly messy lives of the Targaryen clan.

There are also new opening credits, which dispense with the blood and stone of Season 1 to bring us the embroidery of a Bayeux Tapestry-style history of the Targaryen clan and their various hangers on. The mechanism of its creation is less satisfying than the clockwork style of the original, with threads simply jumping through the base fabric, but it promises lots of spoilerific detail for anyone with patience and a pause button.

Fantasy fans, however, may be disappointed to learn that there’s not a lot of dragon action in these first two episodes, though enough of them patrol the skies and remain a topic in war planning to remind us that these weapons of mass destruction are still very much a factor. Still, the reluctance to dive into action makes the slow start to this season a little frustrating. These are long episodes (just under and just over an hour, respectively), but each one manages only a single truly surprising or dramatic moment. After the buildup of the first season, is it wrong to want some full-fledged civil war already? In the real world, war is good for absolutely nothing (say it again), but in a Westerosi context, surely it's meant to come standard. Thrones meted out its battles judiciously, but had enough surprising murder and twisting conspiracy along the way to keep us rapt.

These episodes have plenty of on-screen blood, but it comes from a relatively small number of donors, most of whom are easy to see coming. Perhaps there’s an egalitarian impulse buried somewhere in the way that the squabbling Greens and Blacks of the Targaryen family are plotting to kill one another directly, rather than fighting out their issues via huge armies of “smallfolk” – a.k.a. ordinary people who, it is remarked, are often the ones who suffer when princes lose their tempers. Still, it's a little underwhelming for a TV show that has been sold at least partly on the promise of mayhem and murder, and we’ve already waited so patiently.

What remains strong, however, is the cast. Cooke and D’Arcy, their characters’ long-ago friendship almost entirely buried now under concern for their respective children, never set a foot wrong. Smith is excellent, and even Glynn-Carney, in a much less nuanced role, shows range. So there are well-performed characters to keep us interested as we wait for the real fire and blood to start; dozens of them, in fact, though the often sedate writing means that the cast can never make them as vivid as one might like. And amid the unrelenting doom and gloom of the coming dynastic conflict, there’s hardly any comedy either. Granted, that would be all too easy to overdo, but a little tonal variation – again, of the variety that Tyrion’s rapier wit brought to Game of Thrones – would help lift the whole thing and set House of the Dragon’s darker moments in stark relief. Instead we’re all stuck in a two-hour morass of grief, guilt, and looming conflict.

UPDATE: After this review was written, I was able to watch Episodes 3 and 4 of Season 2, and things do get more action-packed as the season gets into its stride. That’s a relief, after 12 episodes of (mostly) build-up. The end of episode four, in particular, may make a certain kind of fantasy fan (me) jump out of their seats and scream with delight and horror and sheer awe at the spectacle of it all. Long may this sort of scope and scale shape the entire show.

The third and fourth episodes see the kind of plotting and strategizing that have been going on for such a long time now result in some impressively large-scale action – but we also see at least a glimpse of the kind of mindless death and destruction that this civil war will inevitably unleash. One rural Eden is turned into a burnt-out, blood-scarred scene of devastation; bodies hang from the battlements of the Red Keep, a lasting reminder of the brutality of this world.

Impetuous, powerful men can sense battle in the air by this point, and they’re itching to get to it. Daemon, of course, rides off to get things started without much consideration of tactics or teamwork; Ser Cristen Cole, only slightly less impetuously, leads his armies out to meet the foe. Rhaenyra is still hesitant, casting about for any other way to meet her opposite number and broker some kind of piece, but this increasingly feels like a zero-sum game. Neither she nor her opponents, Alicent and Aegon, can really allow the other to live and feel secure on their throne. Rhaenyra’s reluctance to accept that is rather commendable from a moral standpoint – but strategically, at this point, she begins to accept that war is inevitable.

In these two episodes we also get a reminder that there are people in this world who are neither noblemen or courtiers. While Game of Thrones had a smattering of commoners and smallfolk throughout its run, House of the Dragon has so far been almost completely focused on the movements of people in King’s Landing, Dragonstone, and Driftmark. It’s a welcome development therefore to see a couple of characters who are named in the book given some time to shine. Kieran Bew plays a smith called Hugh, who we see petitioning King Aegon for prompt payment of Crown debts but also in a scene with his family that hints at a bigger role to come. Love And Friendship’s Tom Bennett, meanwhile, appears as Ulf, a hard-drinking man of the people who also claims illegitimate descendency from the Targaryen family. These two may offer a slightly different perspective on the war than we’ve had to this point, which is welcome.

For readers, it’s interesting to see how this is all being drawn out and adapted from George R.R. Martin’s very fast-moving faux-history book Fire and Blood, and how these characters are being brought to three-dimensional life. If we can keep adding this sort of depth to characters who, on the page, are sometimes rather one-note, House of the Dragon may rise to match its predecessor.

These episodes also bring us back to fantasy territory. That’s partly because the great castle of Harrenhal, which one of our characters visits, appears to be quite severely haunted – though that might be due to the machinations of another newcomer, the mysterious Alys Rivers (G.L.O.W.’s Gayle Rankin). More importantly, it’s because those Targaryen dragons finally come out to play in a big way. Short of Jon Snow and Tyrion turning up after accidentally time-travelling back a couple of hundred years, it’s hard to think of anything more likely to make a fantasy fan’s heart burst with excitement. We’ve had lots of “House Of”; now this season is delivering on “The Dragon” part of its title. Dragons, in fact, in all their fierce and fiery glory. This is what we were waiting for, and by whichever gods you like, it’s glorious. Fire extinguishers at the ready, because this war is about to get seriously uncivil.