‘House of the Dragon’ review: Worthy ‘Game of Thrones’ successor is an excellent fantasy series in its own right

If you’re worried about House of the Dragon after getting burned by the final season of Game of Thrones, don’t be. HBO’s epic new series is excellent through and through, juggling memorable characters, high fantasy, and intense emotions with practiced ease. You’ll be sucked in faster than you can say “Dracarys.“

Set almost 200 years before Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon is a prequel series that focuses on the Targaryen dynasty at the height of its power. King Viserys (Paddy Considine) rules over a peaceful Seven Kingdoms, but trouble looms on the horizon. With no sons to his name, the issue of Viserys’s successor is of utmost importance. Will he make his daughter, Princess Rhaenyra, his heir, placing a woman on the Iron Throne for the first time in Westerosi history? Or will he name his brother, Prince Daemon (Matt Smith), instead? This dilemma sets the stage for a familial struggle of epic proportions. It’s a conflict that evolves from episode to episode, bringing in new players, new surprises, and new devastating deaths. But what else would you expect from a show set in Westeros?

House of the Dragon is a family drama on an epic scale

The questions of succession and who gets to sit on the Iron Throne have already been covered at length in Game of Thrones. However, in House of the Dragon, this same question gets put under a microscope. Whereas Game of Thrones followed several families in their quests to retain power, House of the Dragon fixes its sights on just one: the Targaryens. Other families — such as the Hightowers and the Velaryons — figure into the Targaryens’ story as well, but they’re linked to the Targaryens through marriage, creating one big, silvery blonde family with a lot of issues.

House of the Dragon deals with these issues in a variety of ways, ranging from the intimate to the epic. The Targaryens don’t discuss their gripes at family dinners, but rather debate them at council meetings, argue about them in court, or even fight over them on the battlefield. If none of that works, well, they can always send in the dragons.

Our main anchor in this family is Princess Rhaenyra, who is played as a teenager by Milly Alcock and as an adult by Emma D’Arcy. She struggles with the fact that while she is her father’s eldest child, she is a woman, and a woman has never sat on the Iron Throne. Princess Rhaenys (Eve Best) came close but was passed up for her younger, male cousin Viserys — Rhaenyra’s own father, and the current king. With that precedent set, would the people of Westeros even accept Rhaenyra, should she be named heir?

House of the Dragon focuses on the women of House Targaryen

House of the Dragon interrogates women’s roles in Westeros better than Game of Thrones managed to. To be clear, the show’s treatment of women is by no means perfect. Much of its commentary tends to be fairly on the nose — Rhaenyra’s mother straight-up tells her that a woman’s battlefield is childbirth — and some of the female characters, such as Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno), are thinly drawn. However, the show’s central and most compelling relationship is between two women who have come to power in different ways.

One of these women is Rhaenyra, and the other is her childhood friend Alicent Hightower, who is played as a teenager by Emily Carey and as an adult by Olivia Cooke. The two start as fast friends who grow close due to proximity; Alicent’s father Otto (Rhys Ifans) is Viserys’s Hand. However, when Alicent marries Viserys and begins to present a threat to Rhaenyra’s succession, cracks form in their friendship. Their falling-out is the show’s greatest tragedy, expertly drawn out from episode to episode, and the actors who play these two characters — Alcock, D’Arcy, Carey, and Cooke — are all tremendous in their roles.

Rhaenys, too, is a fascinating character, having already petitioned for — and lost — the position of heir to the Seven Kingdoms. As the Queen Who Never Was, Best is delightfully acerbic in her scenes with a young Rhaenyra, practically taunting her that a woman will never sit on the Iron Throne. Equally delightful is Steve Toussaint as Rhaenys’s husband, Corlys Velaryon. Corlys is a formidable sailor and warrior, but he’s also a firm supporter of his wife in what must be the healthiest relationship in Westeros. He and Rhaenys may not get the most screen time, but any time you see them you can count on them to deliver great scenes — and some excellent side eye concerning the shenanigans happening around them.

Does House of the Dragon learn from Game of Thrones‘s mistakes?

As much as I love Game of Thrones, it was far from a perfect show. Its pacing in later seasons was scattershot, its massive scope made for an unwieldy conclusion, and it consistently used sexual violence as a plot device. While I have only seen the first six episodes of House of the Dragon, which were made available to critics ahead of the show’s HBO premiere on Aug. 21, I was excited to find the prequel avoids many of the missteps of its predecessor — so far.

House of the Dragon, which is adapted from sections of George R.R. Martin’s House Targaryen history Fire & Blood, moves through a lot of material at just the right pace. Time jumps between episodes get us to the important meat of the story, so we never feel like we’re treading water between big set pieces. The focus on the Targaryens and their inner circle also helps keep the story more contained than that of Game of Thrones. There are a lot of plates spinning, plot-wise, but they’re all closely connected.

While House of the Dragon does fall into some classic Game of Thrones pitfalls, such as gratuitous nudity and violence that appears to be more for shock value than anything else, it doesn’t even come close to the levels of sexual violence in Thrones. While there are four more episodes I haven’t seen in the first season, my hopes that House of the Dragon would not rely on rape as a plot device have been met so far. It’s a shame that those are hopes I even have to have in the first place, but I am glad that House of the Dragon has seemingly learned from Game of Thrones‘s most upsetting mistake.

It just feels great to be back in Westeros

Full transparency: I teared up not even five minutes into the pilot of House of the Dragon. Ramin Djawadi’s soaring score combined with the image of a dragon flying over King’s Landing gave me a massive dose of fantasy nostalgia. It immediately threw me back to watching Game of Thrones every Sunday night, then obsessing about each episode until the next one came out.

Will House of the Dragon reach Game of Thrones-level hype? It’s definitely deserving of it: The show is as immersive as its predecessor, with obsession-worthy characters, costumes, and production design bringing you back into a rich fantasy world. If you loved Game of Thrones‘s political machinations, House of the Dragon has that in spades. Brace yourselves for whispered face-offs in dark corners of the Red Keep, tense Small Council meetings, and shouty showdowns in the throne room.

If you’re more of a fan of big fantasy set pieces, House of the Dragon also has you covered. Celebratory tourneys and lavish wedding feasts are staged with the weight and flair of battle sequences. The show’s actual battle sequences are equally exciting: A plot involving the fight to regain control of islands known as the Stepstones results in an exceptional sequence centering Prince Daemon. Matt Smith nails Daemon’s cruelty and arrogance, but in this scene he gets to go full action hero mode — and it’s a pleasure to watch.

As if that wasn’t enough, House of the Dragon is chock-full of — you guessed it — dragons! And unlike in Game of Thrones, these babies are fully grown. They’re gargantuan and gorgeous, sparking awe whenever they’re on screen. It’s all too easy to get swept up in their glory, just as it’s deliciously easy to fall back in love with the epic world of Westeros. With mythical creatures, political backbiting, sumptuous sets, and more, House of the Dragon unquestionably captures the magic of Game of Thrones, while adding quite a bit of its own to the mix.

House of the Dragon premieres Aug. 21 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, with new episodes airing weekly.