On we go into House of the Dragon episode 7! Remember me? It’s me from just last week! If you don’t remember me, that’s OK. You can’t see me, probably. I’m there, lurking on your very black screen. I used to be bright, but then I was inexplicably shadowed in post-production. As you remember (or in case you cannot see my beautiful face), every week, for each new episode of HOTD, I’ll be deconstructing the multitude of reviews out there, boiling them down to one short summary sentence that will perfectly encapsulate what the original author was saying, no questions asked…and by that I mean that I will deconstruct whole essays down to one sentence apiece, often quoting them verbatim.
What I will do is attempt to summarize the original review as best I can, and if my tease whets your appetite for their style of review, you are encouraged to head over to their site and let them know…after of course letting us know your thoughts in the comments below. At the bottom, I will summarize my review of the reviewers’ reviews.
All squared? Jolly good, let’s dive in.
What did the Internet think of HBO’s House of the Dragon episode 7, “Driftmark?” Hey, here’s a recommendation: Before you dive into any of these other critics I’ve rounded up (pfft – boring! Who would do that/write about that/etc.?), why don’t you check out Sue’s recap of last night’s episode? Once you’ve done that, here’s what the rest of the Internet had to say about last night’s episode:
Alec Bojalad, Den of Geek – In which Westerosi funerals turn out to be just as dramatic as Westerosi weddings on another excellent HOTD.
Belen Edwards, Mashable – In which the ways by which Fire & Blood was changed on its journey to the screen as HOTD are broken down, most notably in this episode, Alicent’s frustration and rage getting the best of her in an explosive scene that’s one of the show’s best so far.
Daniel Van Boom, CNET – In which it feels like we’re just waiting for the king’s death for the Dance of the Dragons to begin in earnest.
Glen Weldon, NPR – In which he admires the show’s trust in its actors’ ability to convey what we need to know through expression and gesture, instead of through thick, wordy clots of exposition.
Hillary Kelly, Vulture – In which Laena’s funeral is a mirthless party, where everyone casts side-eye at friends and enemies alike, and the camera mingles among them like an acutely aware guest.
Jamie Broadnax, BlackGirlNerds – In which Larys is the seed sower of discord.
Jeremy Egner, New York Times – In which the recognizable family dynamics can make all of the objectively bonkers goings-on feel almost relatable.
Jenna Scherer, AV Club – In which the slow-moving “Driftmark” feels positively soothing—but not, unfortunately, all that interesting.
Kim Renfro, Insider – In which this episode showed the largest gathering of dragons fans have ever seen, with at least five dragons from the Targaryen and Velaryon families all hanging out.
Kimberly Roots, TVLine – In which there’s a lot of dragonriding, if you’re into that sort of thing!
Lauren Sarner, NYPost – In which the episode features child violence, a fake out death plot twist that’s a major change from the book, a secret wedding, and sex on the beach.
Meghan O’ Keefe, Decider – In which the first Daemon and Rhaenyra sex scene is shockingly sweet.
Rob Bricken, Gizmodo – In which the funeral itself is practically a “previously on House of the Dragon” because it so efficiently summarizes everything you’d need to know, even if this was your first episode.
Sean T. Collins, Rolling Stone – In which you should feast on these relatively low-stakes, low-body-count hijinks while you have the chance, because it’s likely to get a whole lot nastier.
Tyler Dean, Tor – In which the episode takes advantage of the locale, not just as a central set-piece where nearly all of the show’s characters can gather for a pressure cooker of a funeral reception, but as a gorgeous setting whose forlorn stretches of coast and wind-ravaged dunes convey the yawning emptiness of the mourners, all reckoning with uncertain futures and sudden losses.
Summary: Episode 7’s Driftmark has been very well received for its twists, turns, and emotional catharsis, if still a bit hurried in parts, and dimly lit in others.
My Review: Thanks for asking. Call me Crabby Pants over here, but this was my least favorite episode of the season. The fact that no matter what setting I tried on my [truly very nice, high quality, state of the art] TV, I had difficulty seeing hardly anything for half the damn hour, my enjoyment factor plummeted no matter what I thought of the episode alone. As for the content itself, I continue to be saddened as to why they didn’t do one full season with the childhood and teenage years of the characters. We’ve been shortchanged so many characters’ arcs (namely Laena and Laenor) in service of moving quickly through time to get to the “emotional” beats…only for those beats to not land because we’ve barely known many of the characters to begin with. Filmmaking is as important to me as storytelling. The book can say one thing, and the show can say another. I don’t want to care about these characters because they were written names on the page; I NEED to care about them because I SEE what they endure on the screen. In its hurry to blaze through history toward the eventual “Dance of Dragons,” the show has emerged on the other side by telling rather than showing, and that is really starting to trouble me.
Well, anyway what do you make of these reviews/recaps? Sound off in the comments below, politely, but with a firmly gloved hand. Just don’t throw any gloves.
To be honest, I don’t think spending a full ten episodes before the big time skip would have been a good idea if they wanted to hook people; I feel like it would have lead to the opposite problem of them having to create too much filler, and the onset of the actual central would have to be delayed to the second season. What they’ve done so far has worked well enough for me, but it would have been more ideal if the season was given two or three extra episodes to develop characters like Laenor, Laena, and Harwin.
I think if they’d dragged the beginning part of everyone walking in slow motion and eyeballing everyone else out any more, I’d have been tempted to get rid of my own damn eyes.
Jenna Scherer of AV Club is a waste of space as she doesn’t appear to be paying any attention. Every week she has made mistakes, missing vital points or getting things mixed up. The only part worth reading is the BTL comments.
I still think the first episode was the best one of all! It developed character and still moved at a nice pace. I absolutely think the show could have been fleshed out more, not just with character, but also with action if that’s what they wanted. The fight at the Stepstones could have been an actual fight, not just a montage. There could be something like a Dornish invasion (weren’t there like 3 of those?) I feel there are so many ways they could have told a 3-6 year story of Rhaenyra and Alicent as teenagers/young adults, hooked an audience right in, and then, like GOT, increase their audience year to year as people slowly catch up.
Season 2 could have taken place during the 10 year gap, then season 3 could have taken place at the 10 year gap, or a little after, and then season 4-5 or so could be the climactic 2 year battle. I think that would have worked just fine. The writers can get inventive and don’t have to hew SO closely to the text, given the text is basically an encyclopedia and not an actual series of dialogues/stories. I dunno! I just feel they seem very constrained and I’m not sure why.
Yeah she doesn’t seem to be too keen on it.
Sorry you didn’t like it. I really liked the first couple episodes and thought that pace was nice!
Oh, so did I. I meant the beginning of Episode 7. I was starting to wonder if things were going to start happening. 😄
David Rosenblatt,
I’m sorry, and with all due respect, but that sounds like an awful idea…
I’m glad they are not dragging the show too much and hopefully, the showrunners will flesh out the conflict all around Westeros and not just KL and Dragonstone.
David Rosenblatt wrote!
“The fact that no matter what setting I tried on my [truly very nice, high quality, state of the art] TV, I had difficulty seeing hardly anything for half the damn hour, my enjoyment factor plummeted no matter what I thought of the episode alone.”
I agree with you entirely. Some people in this group say its because the settings need to be adjusted, but that make no difference. FFS – Last year I brought a new 43″ Telefunken 4K HD TV and no matter how much I play with the brilliance and contrast settings, many scenes were so dark I couldn´t see fuck all!
Probably on the professional studio grade equipment (costing thousands of bucks) used to make and edit this show it looks great, but piss poor on a normal ´off the shelf´ TV 🙁
Black Raven,
It’s not your tv that is the problem, it’s your eyeballs lol, you need to visit your local optician’s.
Black Raven,
Does your set have an Eco Mode, Energy Saving Mode, Eye Saver Mode, Power Saving Mode, or something similar? TURN IT OFF!
Otherwise crank the Backlight rather than the Brightness setting.
spacechampion,
Not sure, I´ll check it out. As you say, it could be the Backlight setting.
Hehe, I did! A few weeks ago and now have a new pair glasses. So no problem there 🙂
I honestly completely disagree with this and I think it would have been a terrible idea. If the premise from very first scene is war for succession, then you can’t spend like 3 seasons having a prologue to it. It’s like first 2 GoT seasons spent all on Robert’s Rebellion and another on Robert’s rule and then S4 would start the actual GoT story. Where is the escalation in HotD that is related to the war of succession? Where is any firm escalation at all, considering things are still very much “stable” in episode 6 after the big time jump? I do feel a 13-episode season may have benefited, but certainly not being split into 3 seasons. Also, I believe having entire season with young actors can be a double-edged sword because it may be harder to get used to new actors next season after spending entire season with young ones.
Oh wow! You weren’t kidding about the AV Club review being a mess. The character motivations are very clearly laid out. The lack of media literacy is concerning.
Also I have no idea what the supposed problem with light was… I watched it on my stationary computer monitor from 2009 (computer itself from 2013) and I had zero problems with seeing what was happening. Same with Long Night in GoT.
The biggest impediment to spending the first 10 episodes before the first big time skip is literally the source material. Fire and Blood details years where essentially nothing happens, so the show would have had to drag out certain storylines or even invent things to keep the audience interested.
I think that what they’ve done so far is truly the best they could have done given the source material.
“We’ve been shortchanged so many characters’ arcs (namely Laena and Laenor) in service of moving quickly through time to get to the “emotional” beats…only for those beats to not land because we’ve barely known many of the characters to begin with. Filmmaking is as important to me as storytelling. The book can say one thing, and the show can say another. I don’t want to care about these characters because they were written names on the page; I NEED to care about them because I SEE what they endure on the screen. In its hurry to blaze through history toward the eventual “Dance of Dragons,” the show has emerged on the other side by telling rather than showing, and that is really starting to trouble me.”
Agree 100%.
I said something similar to my wife recently. It’s an ok show, but it tends to “tell” rather than “show” a lot of the time.
Given everything that they are willing to skip, the argument for starting with Episode 6 is getting stronger in my mind. The last 2 Episodes told us everything we need to know about the character dynamics. It was only during the knife standoff that I finally understood Alicent. We can quite clearly see that she is manipulated by her father and trapped in a marriage to a decaying old man. They didn’t bother to introduce Harwin properly, he’s gone. They barely bothered with Laena, they didn’t show her claim Vhagar, she’s gone. They didn’t get into the intricacies of dragon binding, where the f*ck is Mysaria? Daemon makes no sense as a character anyway. This halfway measure hasn’t worked for me at all, and that is main complaint about the show. Luckily, everything else is good, so I have no concerns about it moving forward
I think Alicent is poisoning Viserys. She really wanted him to drink that wine last episode.
Mr Derp,
I kind of love that theory, I mean, why wouldn’t she want him dead?
As much as I’m enjoying the show in general, let me put that to the side as I’m writing this
You know, when HotD casting started to come out and only Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke were announced for Rhaenyra and Alicent, I was sure the show will start at some point when Viserys is already married to Alicent, Rhaenyra already being declared heir and tensions already existing with everything happening prior being “The Robert’s Rebellion” of this TV show. And I remember several people disagreeing with me that HotD definitely needs to go in time of child Rhaenyra. And even when the two young actresses were announced, I thought we’ll maybe only get an episode or two of them to maybe cover some important moments the show would want to “show not tell”. I really didn’t think they’d be such a major deal for half of the season. It was only when the promo photos started coming out when it started to become obvious we’ll spend time in the past much longer.
And if someone asked me now where do I feel the show had most “room for improvement” compared to what aired, I would definitely say the episodes prior to the big time jump. And for me, I see two options… either extending the season for 2-3 episodes as I wrote in my comment above in order to provide some more “gluing scenes” to characterize certain characters better, especially secondary ones… or maybe not visually adapt the pre-episode 6 era at all.
Honestly when I think of it, I don’t think those 5 episodes were that “crucial” for the upcoming civil war itself. It’s something I kind of feel it could be covered in dialogue in a way how Robert’s Rebellion, Greyjoy Rebellion, Littlefinger’s duel with Brandon etc. exist in GoT, having prominent impact on present-time events but not important in a way that we would need to see them unfold on screen.
Imagining that HotD would start in similar time as episode 6 or maybe a few years before it. What would need to be firmly emphasized:
– Rhaenyra is the announced heir but there’s tension existing because of Alicent’s son Aegon being the likely heir for people.
– Alicent’s position and relationship with ser Otto. Ser Otto would be introduced as this “former Hand” who was discharged from duty due to his scheming. Lord Lyonel would be this “stable Hand” at the beginning of the story.
– Rhaenyra would be married to Laenor, it would need to be covered that he’s gay and that their marriage is purely political. Consequently, her relationship with Harwin Strong could be introduced and obvious hints her kids are not Laenor’s.
– Ser Criston’s story would in such situation already begin with hostility towards Rhaenyra. Certain dialogue between them could cover the background why it exists in first place.
– Daemon is probably the toughest one to imagine how his story would begin. But I imagine him already being in Pentos with Laena. Dialogue would need to cover he was exiled by Viserys and that he’s an unpredictable person. His murder of Rhea could be hinted as well.
– Viserys would already be in very poor health, being obvious his days are numbered. Dialogue would probably need to cover his loss of his first wife, his initial desire to get a son and naming Rhaenyra as heir. The whole prophetic dream thing… that could be either kept or removed but I don’t think it would change the story much either way.
And I feel this pretty much covers the major characters. When I look at my points above, I don’t think those pre-E6 scenes would be that hard to adapt off-screen if it would provide proper characterization for all listed characters. After all, GoT also needed to “cover” a lot of backgroud without actually showing it.
But as I said above, I’m going with the flow and I’m loving the show a lot so far. But I would definitely say that E6-onwards seems to be higher-quality-story flow/characterization than first 5 episodes in my opinion.
I agree that having a 13 episode season would’ve aided so much for characterization and fleshing out beats that just came and went: The Stepstones war, Harwin’s relationship with Rhaenyra, Mysaria and Laena as people, Larys willingness to kill his family, and Criston Cole’s anger towards Rhaenyra.
And I also do agree in a way that there has been a lot of telling and not showing (Alicent’s dress significance for example).
But I’m very thankful to have seen Rhaenyra and Alicent growing up, since that’s the building block of their entire relationship and allies in the present (even if it wasn’t perfect).
I wouldn’t begrudge anyone that has gripes with characterization or pacing this season, but this is the first season, but I feel like we can hope it will get better. Succession had for most of its first season some messy pacing and structure and is now one of the best shows on TV. Maybe HOTD’s screenplays will get better in the future since they won’t be dealing with time jumps by then and can just play the story out.
That being said, I didn’t have the lighting problem that a lot of people had with Driftmark. I watched it on HBO Max and I could see clearly what was happening. Sounds like maybe HBO didn’t prepare for the TV signal image compression and it did a disservice to the episode (when I watched the Inside the Episode on YouTube the lighting quality was actually very poor and I imagine that’s how a lot of people saw it).
But…instead as spent 2 episodes with young actors, and then new ones came (Laenor and Laena). Then we spent 3 episodes with them and half the cast changed. Then, we’ve just spent episodes 6 and 7 with new kids…only to lose them AGAIN for the final 3 episodes. How could this possibly be “easier” to get used to? Half the season has been preamble anyway, and we’re still barely at the surface of the actual conflict yet, with 3 episodes to go. Why not have just made 10 episodes of preamble with the same story, but changed the ages at which many story beats happened? I think they stayed TOO close to the text and didn’t let their imaginations run wild enough.
Again I just go back to letting them invent stuff. A Dornish invasion or a more drawn out triarchal conflict where Viserys needs to actually do something. Just cause the book doesn’t spell it out for them doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting story beats to parse.
But as I said above, the whole premise of HotD is the CIVIL WAR FOR SUCCESSION, not following the childhood of Rhaenyra and Alicent. Just like War of Five Kings had to start at the end of GoT S1, this civil war pretty much needs to start at the end of S1. It can’t be left on the side for 3 seasons for the sake of spending more time with young actors pretty much not doing anything outright relevant for the civil war. I would rather have the story start with episode 6 than dragging S1 across three seasons.
I agree that the constant changing of the cast makes it more difficult to reach a level of comfort/familiarity with some characters.
However, I’m not sure we’d like the characters anymore had we drawn any of this out further. Simply put, I just don’t think many of the characters in HotD are particular likeable people.
For example, I liked Tyrion, Jon Snow, and Arya after about 2 seconds. It’s easy to like them. It didn’t need to take a long time to warm up to them. There just has to be something likeable about them.
On the other hand, we never had to deal with Tyrion, Jon Snow, or Arya changing actors after a few episodes, so I guess I can’t really say for sure. HotD in particular would probably benefit from letting us get used to the actors a bit more before pulling the old switcheroo. I imagine there will be less actor switching after the first season is over and all the major players are adults, so it should get better.
Maybe it would’ve been better to use the younger versions of the characters in flashback sequences.
That way we could get used to the main versions of the characters from the beginning while also getting the same events that took place when they were younger through flashbacks.