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Editor’s Note: This story contains spoilers for the season finale of House of the Dragon.
CNN — The two massive fantasy series, which premiered within weeks of each other, shared enormous scope and scope. In terms of pacing, however, House of the Dragon moved erratically, sometimes literally in its multi-year leaps in time, while The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power trotted along. .
The season finale of “Dragon,” which premiered on October 23 and was subtitled “The Black Queen,” sort of brought this sometimes inconsistent but always interesting first season full circle. After being told by her mother before her death at the premiere that having children was the battlefield of queens, Princess Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) suffered another gruesome stillbirth amidst the preparations and planning for the upcoming battle.
Yet when Rhaenyra’s husband and uncle (this is the incest-ridden world of Game of Thrones, after all), Daemon (Matt Smith), was ready to unleash hell on newly crowned King Aegon and his henchmen, saying: ” Dreams didn’t make us kings. The dragons did it.” Rhaenyra seemed to want to be more cautious at first.
“I don’t want to rule a kingdom from ashes and bones,” he told him and his advisors.
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Diplomacy required reaching out to the other realms, however, and Rhaenyra sent her children as dragon-backed messengers to seek support for her cause. This led to the long-awaited climax, with a display of dogfights with dragons (at one point it looked a bit like the Millennium Falcon in action) and the brutal death of Rhaenyra’s son.
The future princess’ final look of hate and determination cemented the idea that season two will be dedicated to the war between rival factions, a conflict likely to be driven by Daemon’s no-prisoner stance.
After a somewhat slow start, House of the Dragon picked up momentum as the season progressed, spanning an entire generation with its then-confusing leaps forward. Still, the net effect was compelling, and provided enough major attention-grabbing moments for the show to become both a ratings hit and a regular trending topic, earning a place in the cultural ethos that “The Rings of Power” rarely seemed to achieve on Amazon Prime.
Some of that may have come from money raised by both Game of Thrones (despite all the complaints about its demise) and HBO, which like CNN is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery.
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The time jumps served a different purpose by establishing additional characters, an area where the series initially felt lacking. That includes Ewan Mitchell as the eyepatch-wearing Aemond Targaryen, whose mean streak played a crucial role in the finale while proving that flying dragons and taming them aren’t necessarily the same thing.
While there was no direct competition between Dragon and Rings, the parallels between the two series and the timing of their release made comparisons all but inevitable. Additionally, the first few seasons essentially served as lengthy prologues to the epic battles to come.
Neither has been perfect, but the final few episodes of House of the Dragon increased the distance between them and did a good job of whetting audiences’ appetites for what’s next.
Within the show, the Game of Thrones continues. But because of the opening salvo, he considers “House of the Dragon” an old-guard victory.