"House of the Dragon" season 2 is over, and some fans want to send it back for a refund. Our take? It's not all bad, but it's not all good, and in retrospect, there are a couple of red flags about where this was all going that we really should've noticed.
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00:00What's up, everybody?
00:01Griffey here.
00:02The eight-episode-long trailer for House of the Dragon
00:04season 3 just had its finale.
00:06And unsurprisingly, it was a huge pile of dragon s***.
00:10But it might be George R.R. Martin's beef with season 2
00:13that may point to more red flags in the future
00:16of House of the Dragon.
00:18Red flag number one, what the hell was that?
00:21This might be the most uneventful episode
00:24of television in the history of the tiny boob tube, right?
00:28We have essentially the longest, weirdest episode
00:31of Scared Straight, where Damon is just seeing ghosts
00:34all over Heron Hall, which are scenes that we've
00:36already seen on the show.
00:38And instead of making him a cooler, more deranged Damon,
00:40it just makes him go, you were right,
00:43and now I just want to be a good husband.
00:44So Damon essentially gets scared into becoming Ned Flanders.
00:48That doesn't do it for me.
00:50Two, we have a ton of new dragons.
00:52We spent the second half of the season
00:54seeing more dragon riders being added to the roster.
00:58What's not in the finale?
01:00Any cool dragon riding.
01:01No dragon anything.
01:03I felt like Jeff Goldblum, right, tapping on the camera.
01:06You are going to have dragons
01:07in your Dragon Show finale, right?
01:09So Prince Regent Aemond has one dragon, Vhagar,
01:12the biggest dragon, right?
01:13He might be the fiercest dragon warrior in Westeros, right?
01:16By the time we hit the season finale,
01:18the queen has so many dragons on her side,
01:21it is impossible to understand,
01:24short of we just need this to last longer,
01:27why they don't just fly to the Riverlands
01:28and melt all the armies,
01:30why they can't beat Vhagar in a seven
01:32or eight on one dragon fight,
01:34why they can't go to King's Landing
01:35and make everyone bend the knee.
01:37And I guess pirates are something we're supposed to pretend
01:40that seven or eight dragons can't just clear out.
01:43That's how easy this is to solve
01:45in the shows pretending that that is a hard choice for us.
01:48Your Grace, this is the last thing any of us
01:51wish to discuss at this dark hour.
01:53They put a lot of weight into the Rhaena, Alicent reunion.
01:58So these two have Princess Jasmine their way
02:00into each other's lives so many times
02:03to keep asking if we can not have war
02:06when all they do is tell us the show is going to be war.
02:09The second half of season one was the moment
02:13for these two queens and the capital at whole
02:16to imagine if war was worth it,
02:18if fighting and the bloodshed and the carnage
02:21that would come with this battle for the throne
02:23was worth it.
02:24We did that for many episodes of season one.
02:27By the time you get to episode four
02:30and the two dragons start murdering each other,
02:33that's off the table.
02:34We should not be spending the last four episodes
02:37questioning if there's a better way out.
02:40The blood is already spilled.
02:41Kristen Cole told us, we gave this world to the dragons.
02:45If the worst, most hateable character in the show
02:47can see that we're done with that phase
02:49and we need to move on in the story,
02:51the people making the show should see that as well.
02:54Do not think I have no shame in me, sir.
02:57There were two things in the show.
02:58The only two things you can say the finale actually gave us
03:01was one, we got a Lannister mud wrestling
03:04a female pirate captain,
03:06and then getting asked to bang all of her wives
03:09so they can make tall, kind of skeletal-like children.
03:12That was cool.
03:13I'd never seen that, so I'm gonna give that a thumbs up.
03:16I am pro mud wrestling and wife swapping.
03:18Another thing the show gave us, which we might not want,
03:21but might find out we secretly needed, right?
03:24Aegon, what's left of him after the battle, is left in bed.
03:27He's injured, he's hurt, he's morose.
03:30His friend comes to him and says,
03:31hey, I wanna save your life.
03:32Let's run off.
03:33I've got a secret stash of money.
03:34We can live out our days.
03:36His response to this world-ending plea for him,
03:39hey, did you know my wiener split open
03:41like a brat on a spit?
03:43And then I paused and I said,
03:44in a show that offers me so little to occupy my mind,
03:48this is the thing that I'll now think about
03:50for the next one hour of the show.
03:51So did I need to know the state
03:53of his wiener post-Dragon Fight?
03:54Probably not.
03:55Was it a welcome relief to the boredom
03:57and tedium of the episode?
03:59You betcha.
04:00Aegon, the realm's delight.
04:03Red flag number two, George R.R. Martin
04:06falling out of love with the series.
04:08How depressing.
04:09That's depressing.
04:10Yeah.
04:11So one of the biggest red flags
04:13is George R.R. Martin's seeming shots
04:16he's taking at the show.
04:18At the conception of this show, right,
04:19after Game of Thrones ended so poorly,
04:22it was a big deal that HBO took a gamble
04:24and rolled the dice on another show.
04:27George R.R. Martin, from the start,
04:29was a pivotal voice in helping shape the show,
04:31craft the story based on his books.
04:34He was very, very involved.
04:36So on his blog, not a blog,
04:38eventually he begins to take not-so-veiled shots
04:41at House of the Dragon.
04:43He specifically says,
04:44you won't find dragons hunting the Riverland
04:46or the Reach or the Vale
04:48or roaming the Northlands of the Mountains of Dorne.
04:51Like we see in the finale of House of the Dragon season two.
04:54There's just a wild dragon in the Vale
04:57that anyone can just go out and claim
04:59if they have the stuff, right?
05:01So it's not a good sign when the mind behind Westeros,
05:04the creator of the Game of Thrones,
05:06and House of the Dragon,
05:07clearly does not like what you're doing with said dragon.
05:11It's also another red flag that George R.R. Martin
05:14felt he needed to publicly tell us
05:16that he wouldn't be in the writer's room anymore
05:18attending meetings for House of the Dragon season three.
05:21While this could be for a myriad of reasons,
05:23he's a busy, rich, old guy, right?
05:25There's better things to do
05:27when you're a busy, rich, old man.
05:29I get it.
05:30But why do you need to make
05:31a big publicity statement about it?
05:33It feels like he wants to control the narrative
05:36on why he's not there.
05:37I'm imagining George is starting to get flashbacks
05:40to the last time that the show
05:42was running a little ahead of him, right?
05:43That the show was like, we got it.
05:45We'll just kind of tell the story
05:46we think you would have told.
05:48And we all know how that ended.
05:50He's bringing all the dead people back to life,
05:53and they put the women and children in a crypt
05:56with all the dead people.
05:58So, rah.
06:00Red flag number three,
06:02ghost of terrible finales past.
06:06The Westeros universe has had no shortage
06:08of kind of unfulfilling ending to characters we like, right?
06:12Who can forget Tywin Lannister on the toilet?
06:14Who can forget Jon Snow coming back to life
06:17to do nothing except kill his aunt who he had sex with
06:21and then return to his kind of
06:23middle management job at the wall?
06:25How about the hound and the mountain
06:27finally coming to blows just to fall off the stairs
06:30like they're my grandparents?
06:32And it might be unfair.
06:34I agree.
06:35Game of Thrones has given me more
06:36best thing I've ever seen on TV moments
06:39than these bad moments.
06:41But the bad is what you remember, sadly.
06:43House of the Dragons season one
06:45did an excellent job of reaffirming our faith
06:49and our commitment to the show
06:51that they could fix this problem.
06:52We don't want to invest again
06:55in these deep, lore-heavy shows, right,
06:57with all these names we gotta remember
06:59and all these places
07:00and all of these slow, slow, slow episodes
07:05if we're not gonna have it paid out at the end.
07:07So, I think a lot of us were having flashbacks
07:09to ghost of dog-shit finales past
07:12when we saw that, yet again,
07:14they dropped the ball on the last episode.
07:17You'd think that the people running these spinoffs
07:19would be hyper-aware
07:21that if you're going to get one episode right,
07:24it better be the last one of the season.
07:26You cannot risk spooking all of the people
07:29that tried this again
07:31that were heading to another calamitous disaster.
07:35Fans are mad.
07:36George R. R. Martin is mad.
07:37That could mean a lot of disaster ahead
07:40for House of the Dragon.
07:41I, myself, am optimistic
07:42because since season two chose to do nothing,
07:45that means there's a lot of great stuff
07:46we can hope for in season three.
07:49And me, personally,
07:50as long as there's dragons fighting
07:52and wieners getting traumatized,
07:54I will not miss it.