My Review of "House of Dragons - Season 2"

House of Dragons - Season 2 has finished up. It was one of the hotly anticipated TV shows I've been waiting for in 2024. To my surprise I had a lot of ups and downs with this season. As usual they had a pretty slow start and get better closer to the end but in some ways it felt a little more lacking than I was hoping for. That's not to say it wasn't a good season. Maybe my expectations are too high.

The season started off after the crazy cliffhanger of an ending from the last season. Rhaenyra's baby boy was eaten by Aemond's dragon! I was expecting fireworks, but alas it wasn't meant to be. Instead what we got was the more logical direction a slow building war.

Rhaenyra being the chosen one has to be the good guy and try to keep the peace despite her rage. As a leader, she understands that her rage could cause the deaths of countless innocent citizens. No.. I was hoping for some sweet revenge in the most instantly gratified way. Luckily for us we do have Daemon. He likes to deal with idiots and well you deal with idiots you get bad results.

There's a back and forth situation where we have miscommunication and misunderstanding that snowballs into bigger events. I guess in a writing standpoint it makes sense because you get more material to give us. To me it felt totally unnecessary because Aemond made the ultimate error in killing Rhaenyra's son. Absolutely everyone knows it and yet here we are. Even as characters everyone knows that everything was started by this idiot and they allow him to make things worse.

In a sense that was driving me crazy about this season. I couldn't get over the fact that everyone was just so stupid. Maybe because this was based in the past they were dumber? I don't know. There were a few things that kind of made no sense as well. I saw them coming but I was thinking to myself why... They're probably going to have these elements in the story that will make sense in future seasons but they feel so weird in this season.

There is a new love interest with Rhaenyra that throws us in for a loop. They touched upon it but don't really dive into it. I'm sure it's all part of the plan for future seasons. They should have at least massage it if you're going to put it in there though.

I liked certain political aspects of the season like feeding the hungry and what not to make favor for Rhaenyra. Finding the dragon riders closer to the end was particularly fun. I really liked that aspect of the season as well.

The dialogue was a bit on and off. It felt like it wasn't consistent. Sometimes they sounded like everyday people instead of living in Westeros. That kind of took me out of the emersion of the world at times. I don't know how the editors could have skipped this.

Most importantly this season felt more like a tease than anything. They know they're going to have another season and they kept on baiting us to think this big fight was going to happen. From the very beginning we knew there was going to be a war but each episode was built for building that anticipation. I guess that's alright but man just let it happen already? How many seasons are there going to be for this?

I guess you can say that one fight with the king was a good fight. Maybe the timing of this battle within the season just felt a bit off. At this point the king doesn't even feel that important in the series. Well, he never really did feel important so maybe that's why the impact wasn't so great.

Overall, I still had fun with this season but all the teasing was like watching eight hour long long trailers for one big movie. At times I felt it was really dragging its feet but it really picked up closer to the end like the franchise usually does. As a season I would have to give it a 7 out of 10. Pretty good but nothing to write home about.