Nothing but devices

Most historians will tell you that framing the topic at hand is of significant importance in how it's received. If you present the American Revolution as a bunch of hard-working frontier people angry about how they were treated as nothing more than a source of revenue by the English crown, it's a much different picture than saying it was a bunch of wealthy landowners who knew they'd largely escaped the grip of the king's tax collectors and didn't want that to change. There are degrees of truth to both of those, but the way it's depicted by the historian will have a huge effect on how it's remembered. Fiction is similar in many ways because the way that different characters and events are presented will leave the reader/viewer with a different impression of just what the story is about. Episode 3 of House of the Dragon told us more about what the previous episodes had been (e.g. nothing but preamble) and less about where it's going, which has been obvious all along.

One thing in its favor is that, three episodes in, we've finally reached a point where the story is actually moving forward to some degree. Daemon's solo assault on the Crabfeeder lurches us past the Stepstones side plot and carries with it some meaning for both him and the popular perception of whom should be king. The rest of it was the same dithering about Rhaenyra's frustration and Viserys' indecision and the generally corrupt nature of Westerosi high society. In many series', you'd call events like Viserys slaughtering the immobilized stag and Rhaenyra complaining to her sworn protector "character development." The problem here is that we already knew all of these things. We know Rhaenyra is frustrated with being passed over because she's a woman. We know that Viserys is struggling with his personal feelings about the succession and how he feels bound by tradition. This is just the same chorus in a higher octave. We don't really need these static positions "developed" any further. It's gotten to the point where the "Inside the Episode" segments that follow each offering are either pedantic or self-defeating, in that they're showing the motivations of the storytellers and how interested they are in getting their story points across to the audience when those points are patently obvious from the opening minute of the series. They're not offering any deeper insight. Instead, they're just showing how simple the story is and how it hasn't really gone anywhere until the last few minutes of this latest episode.

The story of the Crabfeeder is an interesting quandary from a theoretical perspective. Clearly, the character has some history with the Targaryens. Given the burns all over his body, one might assume that he's had an unfortunate encounter with a dragon and has decided to take vengeance on the rulers of Westeros in whatever way he can manage and with the tacit support of the Free Cities trying to knock a rival down a peg or two. That sounds like something that could have been built upon, even if it was an obvious distraction from what the real story is: the fight over the succession. But the amount of atmospheric build-up in the first three episodes which led to this three-year problem being dealt with off-camera by Daemon was kind of jarring. Yes, the whole fight on the beach was an example of Daemon demonstrating that not only did he not need his brother's help to do the job (a point emphasized by trying to literally kill the messenger) but that he was also the more appropriate "warrior king" that the Westerosi nobility might respect. But it was also a removal of a story element that had been sitting in both background and then foreground, with several moody scenes emphasizing the threat of said element, which was then eliminated in a few seconds, off-camera. This was something akin to the massive, years-long threat of the Night King being wiped out in a single battle of a single episode. In other words, the Crabfeeder and everything around it was a device and nothing more. No, we didn't need the end of Joseph Campbell's journey where we see a literal blow-by-blow depiction of the final battle, but it really rubbed our noses in the fact that all three episodes to date have been nothing but setup, which kinda makes one stop and ask: Why am I bothering?

What reemphasizes that dolor is anything involving Viserys and the court. It's tedious. Unlike the cut-and-thrust of Game of Thrones, where the interaction between people like Tyrion and Varys and Cersei was always loaded with potential and menace and actual good dialogue, everything involving Viserys' court is a chore. There is some sympathy for the king as a man in well over his head, but that's about the most emotion I can generate for yet another moment where everyone titters and looks uncomfortable about the king who's in over his head. There is no "game" happening here. It's emblematic of a society long removed from any kind of game or competition over who would rule, except for the obvious setup of this being a(nother) series about who is going to rule. This is history presented as a World Book encyclopedia, not as something that gives a real examination of who or what was involved and how their motivations can be interpreted in any number of ways. There are no "number of ways." There's just one, point A to point B, and it's mostly pretty boring. If we thought there was any possible variation on how this story would play out, all of this prologue might be worthwhile. But there really isn't. I'll give it another episode or two to see if that ending battle scene might take the story somewhere interesting but, if not, I'm giving up the ghost and moving on. (Rick and Morty was so good and so suffused with possibilities...)