It's a soap opera

Despite episode 6 of House of the Dragon being, by far, the most interesting of the season, since episodes 1-5 were nothing but prologue leading up to the actual conflict, I didn't get around to writing anything about it because, honestly, the whole series just hasn't been that interesting. In episode 6, we finally got to see Alicent and Rhaenyra become fully-fleshed characters being driven by something other than youthful uncertainty and teenaged angst. That's definitely a step forward. We also got to see the conflict upon which the entire story is based become (almost) fully realized, in that the lines were clearly drawn and the questions loudly asked. We even got to see the emergence of a Master of Whispers in Sir Larys Strong; the role which would go on to produce the eternally wonderful Lord Varys in Game of Thrones. But through it all I was left with an overarching feeling of disappointment with the knowledge that the 5+ hours we'd sat through to that point could all have been condensed into a one-and-a-half hour film that would have dropped us into the situation with adult Rhaenyra and Alicent much more quickly and we could have gotten the show on the road. Well, with episode 7 the show has largely arrived and... it's as tired as anything that has come before it. Oh, sure, we're back to the grisly deaths and Valyrian incest and millions spent on dragon scenes. That's all well and good if you're into that. But we can't really rise into the realm of GoT because House has the problem of its essential nature.

It's a soap opera. With dragons.

The compelling feature of GoT was its sprawling nature. It was a story that was steeped in history, not only because of the setting, with the ancient Others being in the background of a land that had just had a massive political upheaval after centuries of Valyrian rule, but also because each house and family were their own entities, with histories of their own and cultures of their own. This was a conflict with many angles and many roots and, 'lest it not be said too infrequently, compelling characters. By confining the story to just the Targaryens and their hangers-on, we're missing all of that sprawl that gave the story of Game its massive identity that could draw audiences in to find any number of sides to root for. It also meant that the grievances driving the central conflict had bases in something other than "He hit me first-!", which is what you get when you reduce everything to an intra-family squabble that lacks any other compelling theme like race, religion, geography, or history beyond whom was screwing whom at the right time and which person had the right body parts to get pricked by the dangerous throne. There's nothing expansive about this story. It's like Dallas, but without the oil business. They've tried to add in elements of interest to the kingdom as a whole, but they've succeeded in making all of it a sideshow by pushing those elements back into the background after the death of the Crabfeeder and going back to circling around children swatting (or slicing) each other in the courtyard. It's not too far from history to suggest that wars could be fought over the question of a child's parentage, but it's a lot more interesting when they're fought over the fact that the lord of House Stark was beheaded because he couldn't trust a minor lord from the Fingers who was better at manipulation than anyone else in the kingdom.

I mean, sure, some people love soap operas and dragons, so I'm sure those people are thrilled. And there's no argument that a lot of dramatic fiction, fantasy or otherwise, does carry elements of modern soap operas. But that's because most dramatic fiction in the Western world finds its roots in Shakespeare. It's still possible to tell a story without reverting to the devices that made shows like All My Children and General Hospital appeal to the lowest common denominator. At the moment, House is using most of said devices with a little incest thrown in to spice it up. Something tells me that CBS in the 70s and 80s wouldn't have gone for that storyline. But what they would've done better than this latest episode is properly lighting a night time scene. People were complaining on Twitter because it was "too dark." What they should've been complaining about was the use of a technique that hadn't been seen since those 1970s: putting a gray screen over the lens to make it "seem" dark, when it's actually broad daylight which everyone can, of course, easily see. Modern lighting techniques removed the need for that primitive trick about, oh, 40 years ago. And, yet, despite the massive budget behind this show, we get this trip back in time to when the audience had to play along with the director informing them that it was "night." I'm amazed that they thought this was a good idea. That is unless Driftmark had, uh, drifted to somewhere near the northern pole of the planet and everyone was heading to bed at 10 PM in the land of the midnight sun. Or did all of the scenes with Vhagar tap the SFX budget for this episode? If that's the case, there will be some really unhappy fans when it comes to the battles that happen during this conflict that are supposed to involve multiple dragons and thousands of warriors. At this point, I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to bother to be disappointed.

Yes, if you're well-versed in the lore of Westeros, you perhaps can take pleasure in the idea of the Hightowers angling the conflict in their favor to take what they feel is their rightful place above the Tyrells as one of the oldest houses in the kingdom because of how they were cheated of mastery of the Reach when Aegon selected the steward house for the destroyed House Gardner. You could be tickled by the idea of Aemond mastering Vhagar, dragon of Visenya, sister-wife of Aegon the Conqueror 150 years before. But taking pleasure in those things occurring is an example of being a fan of world-building, not storytelling. Something that Rings of Power has been attempting to do (with very mixed results) is to tell stories about the characters at hand and not simply do a slideshow of the big things that happened in the appendices of Return of the King. But that's pretty much all that House has been from the very beginning (see: Fire and Blood) and if their only way to give it character of its own is to reduce it to which family member is irritated over the lack of respect from another's children, then we're really kind of wasting our time here, just as we were through the interminable prologue that got us to this point.