If House of the Dragon Season 1 was the slow burn of the fuse leading up to the Dance of the Dragons, then Season 2 is the powder keg finally going off. Dragons will battle dragons, kin will slay kin, and thousands of soldiers and smallfolk will lose their lives in the oncoming war between Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy) and her half-brother Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney). Yet as explosive as the Dance is, House of the Dragon Season 2 is more interested in the cost of war than the epic scale of it.
The first four episodes made available to critics are certainly, by definition, spectacular. Dragon dogfights are officially on the table, after all! More often, though, the season lingers on the characters' grief in the face of atrocities, and their fear of escalating the conflict to even greater heights. It's these intimate moments of hesitation that make House of the Dragon Season 2 such a brutal, affecting watch, as members of Team Black and Team Green move inexorably towards bloodshed.
House of the Dragon picks up in the days following the death of Rhaenyra's son Lucerys (Elliot Grihault) at the hands of Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) and his ferocious dragon Vhagar . Much of Rhaenyra's inner circle — including her husband/uncle Daemon (Matt Smith) — urge her to retaliate in kind, but her grief is all-encompassing, and she fears that an all-out war will do irreparable damage to the kingdom she's sworn to protect. Over in King's Landing, the situation is reversed.
.
