The good news – apparently; I haven’t seen it yet so this may just be a false rumour – is that House of the Dragon episode 6 is really exciting, full of incident and drama and intriguing, well-drawn characters. But the bad news, as I can personally testify, is that in order to reach that point you have to wade through five whole hours’ worth of ball-breaking tedium.
Admittedly, even the original Game of Thrones used to do this a bit on occasion: episode after episode of characters talking to apparently little purpose, then suddenly the Red Wedding. But the difference was, you never doubted that the story was going somewhere, and that the whole was underpinned by the mighty creative vision of an obsessive world-builder who had mulled over every detail for eons.
Dragon, on the other hand, feels very much like the late-career coasting of a spent creative force. There’s no hunger or passion or daring.
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