I’ll cut right to the chase. This first episode is pretty good. It’s far more focused than its predecessor (or should I say successor… narratively?). We have only a handful of characters we follow at the start, and we get pretty clear direction on their motivation.
It helps that the audience is, likely, already familiar with the universe, so there isn’t a massive dumpster fire of exposition to get things rolling. “Remember the other show? Yeah? Ok, this is that world, but like 170 years earlier, cool? Let’s begin…”
So far, the performances are fine. Nobody seems woefully miscast or confused about their role. The white wigs always look awful, but that’s less to do with the quality of the wigs and more to do with how unnatural that seems to the human eye.
These all sound like bland praise, but it’s hard to get super excited for a show that follows up on an epic narrative that was hilariously botched.
But on to the negatives… WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
How do we show that a character is a bad guy? Have him fucking whores. Not just fucking whores, but fucking whores in front of an audience. Mind you; this is the heir to the throne. This isn’t some forgotten bastard son, or disgraced former nobleman. This is a very publicly visible person having sex for an audience in a brothel.
I’m not about to go all “woke police” on this, but can’t we show he’s bad in other ways? Infidelity is a fine trait for a villain, but does it have to be infidelity with whores?
How about this… we start with Daemon in bed with an elegant lady, implied they have just finished copulating. They share some conspiratorial rumblings about how the queen may be giving birth to a son, upsetting his position as heir. Hint that he’s not too happy about this, but stop short of him saying he’d do something about it. His lady chastises him for staying out of the limelight. Even if he were to be king, who would care or notice?
He agrees with her and says he has something planned. His lady gets out of bed saying she doesn’t want to hear the details of any nefarious acts, for fear of being held accountable herself. He begs her to stay. She says “Some of us are married to people who will notice we’ve been gone too long.” Bam. Little bait and switch. We’ve established that he’s a philanderer, but not a hopeless degenerate. Maybe he has some genuine bond with this woman? We can later establish she is married to some high up muckety-muck. But regardless, we now know he has a wife he doesn’t care for.
All of this is par for the course with feudal politics. Highly visible noblemen fucking whores is not.
“But it’s Game of Thrones, you gotta have some raunchy T&A, that’s what the show is known for!”
Fair enough. Before Daemon’s city watch raid we cut to the whorehouse with some naked people and fucking. And Daemon walks in, disgusted, and calls upon someone, it’s his right-hand thug. “We’ve got work to do!” They leave.
Later on, during their raid of terror they return to the whorehouse and Daemon orders his right-hand thug to punish the prostitute he was fucking earlier for breaking the law. You can establish a lot with a scene like that. For starters, he has a twisted sense of righteousness. Infidelity is fine, as long as it’s him doing it. Also, he feels that his men can be above the law, but only if they obey his orders. Imply heavily that if his right-hand thug doesn’t dole out justice on the prostitute that he will be suffering her fate as well.
All good villain stuff.
However… yes, it perpetuates Game of Throne’s love of sex abuse and abuse of women, but if you cut around the actual violence you can still get your point across and vilify the right characters without relishing in it. Also, you’ve already established with the stories set in a later time that this world is brutal and misogynistic. It would almost make no sense if things were utopian and awesome in the past.
I have other general gripes about the total lack of understanding of how feudal politics worked, but that can just as easily be turned against the original series too. Feudalism was a complex system built upon power and trust of how that power is used. Game of Thrones has this idea that lords can betray each other all day and it’s fine, provided they win the fight directly in front of them. Case in point, Daemon cheats during the joust and takes out his opponent’s horse. That would be the end of his tournament. Even if the king was like “But… c’mon lads, he’s my brother. You gotta fight him! Do as I say, I’m the king.” Nobody would risk their life fighting him, because he can’t be trusted. And the king standing up for his cheating would be a sign of weakness that he, himself, supports untrustworthy behavior. More than likely the king would have him retired from the tournament “due to wounds” and everyone would nod and say “That is acceptable, let’s carry on.”.
Don’t mistake me. This is not some rose-colored view of feudal politics. These were all terrible, vicious, power-hungry monsters, but literally the only thing they had that was worth anything was their promise: their promise to defend each other’s property.
Final gripe; the action just looked terrible. The sword fight between Daemon and the unknown knight was cut to hell. Shoot it wide. Let us see the blows landing, it helps sell the brutality. It’s not like we can clearly see the actors’ faces. Use stuntmen trained in medieval combat. Well, we could kind of seen Daemon’s face through his Final Fantasy inspired helmet. Seriously, he looks like he stepped right out of a Yoshitaka Amano illustration. That’s not necessarily a complaint, but it does jive against the styles of the other characters.
Armchair Screenwriter 