Such was the backlash against the dreadful final season of Thrones, there were grounds for worrying that the viewing public had gone cold turkey on fire-breathing lizards. Plus, it was up against Amazon’s $1billion Middle-earth epic Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. In this struggle between dragons and hobbits, it was far from clear which would claim the spoils.
But with its series finale, House of the Dragon has emphatically seized the crown – even if none of its characters have quite managed to do so. It has taken Thrones’s ultra-violent and oversexed formula and amped it up into an eye-popping pantomime of vengeance, gore and platinum wigs. If you have the stomach – the farewell instalment was particularly grisly – it has proved irresistible.
All of House of the Dragon’s strengths, and a few of its flaws, were front and centre as the show signed off (a second season is already in production). The previous week, Alicent Hightower and her scheming father Otto had manoeuvred Alicent’s degenerate son Aegon onto the Iron Throne. And so the gauntlet had been thrown down to Princess Rhaenyra (an electrifyingly restrained Emma D’Arcy), usurped heir to the Seven Kingdoms. Rhaenyra and her husband/uncle Daemon (Matt Smith) – welcome to Westeros – weren’t taking this humiliation lying down. From their fortress in Dragonstone, they called a grand war council and ran tallies of potential allies.