The time jump was handled with the delicacy of a lobotomy and lost me when the last episode ended on completely unanswered cliffhangers:
- Did the king just fucking
die on the floor (that they couldn't even be arsed to mop up the queer blood)? Even though I saw the actor's name in the opening credits, I was still surprised when his ancient ass strolled in.
- What did Alicent say to Christen to stop his sepukku? Maybe she should have been there to talk Demon's wife out of immolation.
- How did a light bit of flirting between Daemon and actress #2 or 3 that seemed more like trying to make his niece jealous turn into full blown marriage and child bearing? At least he has a rock solid alibi this time with another dead wife.
- To the point of genetics, especially Targaryen, how is Alicent the bad guy here? Corlys' gay son? White blonde hair. Rhaenyra? White blonde hair. Sons? Brunette as fuck. Yes, the king is clearly in denial, but everyone with eyes knows what's up, so Alicent isn't exactly in the wrong for noticing as well that a culture entirely focused on the importance of genetic lineage and purity is being passed on by the most plainly obvious bastardization humanly possible. And Corlys should be right pissed when the whole point of the marriage was to bring his line back to the forefront despite the gayness of his son, when the throne is really just leapfrog going one Targ to a Targ + bodyguard's bastard.
- I can't tell how the show is approaching age in relation to the source material because the first and only time prior that we saw Laena, she was 12, yet she is supposedly
27 when she dies. The thing is, I can actually believe both of these ages based on the different actresses, but it's everyone else who feels completely off kilter with the aging up or not aging at all, e.g. Daemon, Criston, or the new Hand.
- All of the rapid casting changes make it even more difficult to connect with anyone. Take Gayleron for instance: had
Goatface not mentioned the casting change, I wouldn't have picked up just
why he seemed off since we last saw him. We went from
this to
this, and come the start of this episode, it seemed as though Rhaenyra was married to a different person. The first actor actually fit in during the battle scene, but the second guy played such a dandy that it was next to impossible to imagine them as the same person. I guess the people behind the show figure all black people look alike.
- Not only do I already miss Milly Alcock as Rhaenyra, you can already tell that Nu-nyra is going to be insufferable, jaded bitch mode all the time with none of the spirit. I bet she'll even manage to make "drakarys" sound like she's bored and tired while the show tries to get us to root for her.
That brings me to the rest of this episode, which equally felt like a jarring drop off a cliff in terms of quality.
- Alicent has a legitimate reason to feel jaded since she
was used as Viserys' pin cushion to pop out a son... and then another, and even more kids. But Nu-nyra? She has a gay husband who would rather go out literally and figuratively sword-fighting than be around her, so she only has herself to blame for being unable to stop fucking the guard and getting preggers.
- How did a woman struggling with every fiber of her being to give birth manage to noclip through an entire castle all the way to the beach to have the dragon drakarys her? Throw in the extra time allowed by the dragon giving her the uwotm8 look. And of course they had to kill off an
attractive woman.
- I'm getting the impression that they think that by killing off characters that it's some return to form to the early seasons of Game of Thrones "where
anyone could die!," but that's not what made them engaging. Killing off characters that we don't even get to know and are barely attached to, let alone get the chance to re-associate who they even
are because they've gone through 2-3 actors, is not impactful.
Daemon losing his
first second wife means nothing no matter how hot she was because she was given all of the character building of an NPC in a side quest.
Cripplefinger enacting a plot to off the second Hand of the King is not the dramatic event they think it is when the average viewer would have already forgotten that Viserys fired the first one because he warned the king that his daughter and heiress was seen cavorting with his brother/her uncle (only to still give her some "tea" anyways).
- One of the death knells towards the end of Game of Thrones was how out of the blue they kicked the timescale into overdrive, and this show is already giving me flashbacks of breakneck pacing. On one hand I can understand due to a different source material that is not nearly as deep or as involved as GoT/ASoIaF, but on the other,
this particular show is at odds with itself by starting off seeming to want to build up characters, only to hit the fast forward button as soon as we're getting settled in with them.
- Maybe the writers and directors should a smidge of their own condescending advice and remember that this is a medieval fantasy show with fucking dragons, so they should stick to writing for
that instead of trying to do so through a lens of modern politics.
