The thrilling sequence of Thrones titles formed a map that zoomed around George RR Martin’s fictional world, fitting for a series that, in its pilot episode, traveled north to Winterfell, the Wall and the forest beyond. south to King’s Landing. and east to Pentos. From the beginning, the show’s canvas spanned continents and vast casts of characters and their families. But in its first episode Sunday night, House of the Dragon narrows its scope to King’s Landing throughout, save for an opening scene filled with expository narration. This is a comprehensive story about (mostly) a place and (mostly) a family, and an internal civil war rather than external strife. Dragon expresses this dynamic from the start: Instead of a large map, its opening title unfolds much more simply, as a three-headed dragon, Sigil Targaryen, appears in the center of the screen. The pilot episode of Dragon shows the power and majesty of the Targaryen dynasty at its peak, never losing that focus from the jump. Immediately after the family logo fades out, the camera pans skyward to watch a dragon ride by. Princess Rhaenyra, daughter of King Viserys I, flies to the top of her mount, Syrax – and the very design of her flight reveals a lot of new information about the world these characters inhabit, almost 200 years before the events of Thrones. In that show, when Daenerys’ dragons take to the sky, the crowds watch in wonder and horror because they’ve never seen a dragon before. when Rhaenyra flies over King’s Landing, the masses below are barely aware of the common, if wondrous, event above. And when she lands, the details highlight the difference from Dany’s time: Rhaenyra has a real saddle to ride in, and dragon guards to tend to Syrax, and a huge structure – the Dragonpit, thriving and active – for the dragon her to call home. In this day and age, dragons are not a miraculous rarity, but the reason for an entire infrastructure built around their unique abilities and needs. Viserys’ reign is “the pinnacle of Targaryen power in Westeros,” with more dragons alive than any time before or since, explains Fire & Blood, the historical tome that serves as the basis of the Dragon adaptation. Targaryen power is absolute, their ultimate weapons flourishing, their realm at relative peace for decades. “These knights are green as summer grass. No one has known the real war,” says Rhaenys, the so-called Queen Who Never Was, during a jousting tournament, harkening back to Catelyn Stark’s “summer knights” jab in Thrones. War comes eventually, of course. such is the premise of the show. But for now, the Targaryens are thriving, and their aesthetic—relatively new to the screen since families like the Starks and Lannisters dominated Thrones—overwhelms the pilot episode. Silver hair seemingly fills the screen and banners bearing the Targaryen sigil cover every wall. A more ornate Iron Throne looms over the Red Keep, and dragon statues dot the capital. The immense skull of Balerion the Black Dread – the greatest dragon in Westeros, the former mount of both Viserys and Aegon the Conqueror, and thus the symbol and source of Targaryen power – towers over the king and his daughter in a crucial conversation near the end of the episode. The episode also contains many reminders of the Targaryen origins in Valyria, their ancestral homeland—shared only by the Valaryons, among all the other Westerosi powers. The characters speak the High Valyrian language not just to issue the dracarys command (although that comes up as well), but to converse casually. They have Valyrian steel readily available, both for weapons and jewelry. And the dragons themselves date back to Valyria. even if the now-dead Balerion was the last to actually be born there, dragons are descended from the volcanic Fourteen Flames of Valyria, just like the human Targaryens. And just one episode of Dragon already offers a wider variety of dragons than Thrones – with similar appearances for Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion – ever. Just look at the beauty of Caraxes, the Demon Prince’s blood-red beast, with its serpentine design and slithering movements once it spreads its wings. Dragon isn’t just showing off all the trappings of a Targaryen crest to line up its HBO budget, which is significantly larger than Thrones had early on. Through its planned three- or four-season arc, this show aims to detail the Dance of the Dragons, the intra-family civil war that heralds the beginning of the dynasty’s (admittedly distant) downfall—thus showing that dynasty at its peak, The Dragon it implicitly shows how far the family will fall and how much they will lose in the process. This eventual death is perhaps best foreshadowed by the aforementioned conversation between Viserys and Rhaenyra near the end of the episode. Asked what she sees when she looks at dragons, Rhaenyra tells her father, “I guess I see us. Everyone says that the Targaryens are closer to gods than men, but they say that because of our dragons. Without them, we’re just like anyone else.” The end of this answer is almost a word-for-word echo of a scene from Season 7 of Thrones, when Daenerys says that the Targaryen dragons finally “grew small, and we grew small too. We weren’t great without them. We were like everyone else.” This similarity is just one of the many parallels Dragon draws between Rhaenyra and Daenerys in its first episode, and while both Targaryen women may end up in a similar place, with similar goals—namely, to break the patriarchy and to sit on the Iron Throne— Their divergent starting points are even more instructive. Rhaenyra already has a bond with a dragon and is familiar with flight, and begins the episode walking the halls of the Red Keep freely, serving as the king’s cupbearer, and sitting center stage in the joust. She ends it as her father’s heir, with oaths of loyalty from all the most powerful families in the Seven Kingdoms. Daenerys, by contrast, spends her life destitute and on the run, kept alive and comfortable only by the grace of foreign friends like Illyrio Mopatis of Pendus. Her family, except for Viserys, is dead. Her dragons only hatch when she is at her lowest point, with her husband dead and his khalasar crumbling, through an act of unexpected magic that sets her on a path to power. The differences arise because, in the intervening years, the Targaryens fall apart, proving that they really are just like everyone else. But the dynasty was great, oh so great, before it fell. Prequel stories are often fraught with the problem of insufficient stakes because the audience already knows where the story will lead. But in this case, that prognosis makes it all the more painful to see the Targaryens in all their glory, because of the inevitable end point waiting down the line.
