Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Paddy Considine, Rhys Ifans, Matt Smith, Emma D’ Arcy, Olivia Cooke, Milly Alcock, Fabian Frankel, Eve Best, Graham McTavish, Bill Paterson, Steve Toussaint, Jefferson Hall, Gavin Spokes, Sonoya Mizurio, Matthew Needham, Milly Alcock, Emily Carey, David Horovitch, Kurt Egyiawan, Luke Tittensor, Phil Daniels, Anthony Flanagan, Ewan Mitchell, Ty Tennant, Sian Brooke, Garry Cooper.
Power is not only in hands of those wield it in the moment, but to those who can claim lineage to its formation.
For the die-hards and uber fans the price of power was, for many, seeing the final stages of Game Of Thrones being destroyed from the inside was too much to bear. The sense of outrage was enough to have even those who had avoided the epic drama adapted from George R. R. Martin’s novels, seeking answers to other’s ire and near scandalous demands. Power, it seems, is only as good as those who understand its true nature, take it away, reduce it in the eyes of those who hoist their colours to its claims of righteousness and moral guidance, and it soon shatters, it becomes unrecoverable, it is destroyed completely…until it is resurrected in the form of another; one to whom looks oddly familiar to what went before.
It is a power reclaimed in the first series of House Of The Dragon, a prequel to the events that gripped television viewers across several seasons, and which from the outset matched, and in many ways, overtook the original.
This is where the machinations and trials can be found to take root, where what was to become was purely just the prelude to sheer destruction, and as with medieval Europe, the crimes of royalty are nothing compared to the way that they can resolved by killing off anyone who dares disagree with the outcome.
The audience, raised on the diet of beheadings, death by dragon fire, of virtue being slain, and madness stalking the very core of all in the guise of power, can sit back and feel the warmth of history repeating itself, or perhaps actually being made, for in one of the great performances in recent history, Paddy Considine as King Viserys I Targaryen is something to behold and savour, from first opening dialogue to one of the finest death scenes captured on screen, the actor simply captures the essence with illustrious passion.
The sum of the whole is always paramount, and yet without some of the more individual performances that the show encourages, it would surely descend into just another exercise of indulgence. The sublime surrounding of drama whenever Olivia Cooke, Matt Smith, and Ewan Mitchell as Prince Aemond Targaryan inhabit the screen is palpable, it is dramatic, fierce some, and as dangerous to behold, equal only in full madness as Lena Hedley’s Cersei Lannister in full rage.
House Of The Dragon lives up to its promise and potential, in one series it seizes the means in which to keep the audience in its powerful thrall, and one in which surely will refuse to suffer the same inglorious fate which befell its predecessor in its later stages.
Ian D. Hall