Be honest: It hasn’t been easy out there in the wilds of streaming. This era of competent, if only small-screen offerings was recently diagnosed as “ .” It annoys me a bit, that sobriquet, but it’s hard to dismiss; there have been amusements in 2024 ( ), pretty things to look at ( ), and at least a couple bonafide hits ( , ), but I, like you, have been scrambling for the truly escapist transports of old.
A , a , a...
well...
. Which is maybe why I devoured S2 like a starving man at a wedding buffet. Mid TV, this ain’t: The four episodes made available to critics are brisk, action-studded, hugely lavish, and as effortlessly watchable as anything I’ve taken in this year.
Does that last point sound like faint praise? when it debuted two years ago; the prequel seemed like a try-hard facsimile, violent and expensively mounted but inert. I stand by that assessment—but I’ll also say that the season picked up steam as it went (jumping ahead decades, exchanging some cast members for new ones). The finale gave us a pretty thrilling cliffhanger: an airborne dragon duel, the killing of a young prince, avowals of all-out war.
I had to refresh my recollection of all of that, and you might want to too before you start the second season, which debuts this Sunday night on Max. The action picks up in the immediate aftermath of Season 1, and the engine of plot is a rather serious difference of opinion about the deathbed pronouncements of the late king Viserys Targaryen (played in.