House of the Dragon Season 1 is Nothing More Than a Build Up to Real Fun
HBO's House of the Dragon achieved a substantial success and earned interest of audience, obvious all over the Internet.
Several moments of less-than-stellar writing aside, this success is deserved, as the show, besides its other virtues, such as impressive production values and solid actor performances, provides us with fairly solid drama and court intrigue, perhaps matching early seasons of the Game of Thrones.
And its showrunner Ryan Condal promises Season 2 to be even better, saying that Season 1 was intentionally slow, to familiarize the audience with the numerous cast and that most of the real spectacle was saved for later (via Deadline):
"Series two will hit the rhythms people came to expect from the middle run of Game of Thrones, but it will have been earned, and viewers will feel the tragedies because we put the work in."
While it is only natural for a showrunner to promise that the next season of his show will be bigger and better, in this case Ryan is telling the truth. George Martin by now wrote several book versions of the story on which House of the Dragon is based, with the related section of the Fire and Blood novel being the latest and the longest.
But no matter at which of them you look, the part already covered by the show was only a prologue, with nearly everything interesting, whether story- or character-wise, happening later. In some places the show turned mere paragraphs into the whole episodes.
This probably was inevitable, when your literary sources are structured as in-setting historical writings, which provide only cursory descriptions of many events and characters. The show, to the contrary, took its time to flesh out personalities of its characters, and secure emotional investment from the audience – or, at least, to make the audience firmly remember who all those people are and what are their conflicts with each other!
Now, when the buildup part is over, and the war between the two opposing parties had officially started, is where the real fun begins – as the final episode of Season 1 already proves. From now on we can expect faster pace, with no more timeskips, more drama, more action, and even more spectacular scenes with dragons.