House of the Dragon, season 2 episode 7 review Ponderous and hammy, but at least there’s dragons

No more can you sit back and idly watch House of the Dragon (Sky Atlantic) and day-dream at the same time. Not for high-brow story line, confusing plot or interwoven family trees, but in that Walford is, at heart frankly, very daft. Similar to Game of Thrones, it has a great ensemble cast composed primarily of British actors acting smart scripts with layers and complexity, and a sufficient amount of money for magnificent shootings, special effects and costumes. 
 
Es gehört schlichtweg zur Defintion von Prestige-TV. But it is also a show that could be a fag paper away from Dungeons and Dragons, those medieval live-action roleplays, or those fantasy books where on the hard cover jacket there is a sexy half-naked muscular knight with an enormous battle axe sexually harassing a half-naked beautiful woman with big natural boobs. Andrey has got characters like Hugh Hammer and Humfrey Bracken while Hobert Hightower and Walys Mooton are also characters that are found in this book. Well, I guess it is kind of uncomfortable. 
 
More often than not, it gets by on it, on the continued thrust of the story and the development of personality. But once the pace slackens - and, boy, has this second series ambled - you begin to let in unhelpful thoughts such as “Is Christopher from Phone Shop really going to ride a dragon?” (spoiler: yes) or you start to mentally add a “Parklife!” to the end of Phil Daniels’s lines (“He appears to be a A shipwright, my lady” - Parklife!) American audiences, who are often strangers to Channel 4 sitcoms and early Blur don’t have these sorts of problems. 
 
This penultimate offering was okay at best, slow-burning for the most part and overly dramatic, or hammy for the most part as well. Alicent (Olivia Cooke), who was just relieved by her son and shaken by rioting serfs, felt it appropriate to frolic in the lowland’s fog like the Scottish Widows woman, engage with glamping, and wild swimming (Apparently, daft people are supposed to become emotionally touched by her scenes of self-reflection, but I found them utterly unimpressed and longing for something more enthralling than Addam of Daemon (Matt Smith) may be doing his ‘teenage defiant’ thing in the remains of Harrenhal and he might be a bit happier this week cutting off someone’s head and being scolded by a 12 year old. Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) was only concerned if commoners are allowed to ride her dragons and since aristocracy is already depleted she had no other choice. She was soon doling out dragons to the C’s more or less randomly. 
 
We did at least get some dragons (at least the CGI did a good job on those giants the aura of authority you can barely feel them breathing through the screen at you), although one scene where a particularly large dragon (called Thermidor I think, though I may be wrong) picked its rider from a host of illegitimate heirs to the throne was a farce given that of the about half dozen princes only two got back stories. Oh, Hugh Hammer (Kieran Bew) and Ulf White (Christopher from Phone Shop, aka Tom Bennett) became Rheanyra’s bastard dragon squad with Addam of Hull (Clinton Liberty). 
 
Which build up to next week’s finale – an all out dragon fest that should make any fan of the creatures happy. Except, likely, it won’t be since the series is just at the end of its second season, thus having arguably less content to adapt than it will in later seasons. And the show has been hyping up a dragonfest for what has felt like weeks now. Like jam tomorrow, come to mind Obviously, such expressions were not meant to be taken literally since people knew that they could not get a tomorrow as well as the jam.