Warning: This article contains spoilers for House of the Dragon.
During its run on HBO, Game of Thrones was praised as one of the greatest shows in the history of television. But it also earned a notorious reputation as one of the darkest shows in the history of television. A little girl was burned at the stake. A man had his eyes gouged out in a trial by combat. A pregnant woman and her unborn child were stabbed to death. Game of Thrones shocked audiences on a weekly basis with its grim twists and turns. Going into each episode of Game of Thrones, fans had no idea how morose the story could get before the end credits rolled. But its new spin-off, House of the Dragon, is shaping up to be even darker.
The premiere episode delivered all the NSFW material that Game of Thrones fans have come to expect. Prince Daemon arranges a big, lavish orgy at a “pleasure house” for all his soldiers. In a series of gory jousting matches, knights are beaten and bludgeoned to the death. As their bodies are dragged away at the end of each match, entrails and pieces of skulls are seen falling off their remains. But the darkness of House of the Dragon goes far beyond the standard sex and violence of the Thrones-verse.
In just the first two episodes, House of the Dragon has featured an impromptu C-section, a baby funeral, and a grown man going on a date with his 12-year-old niece. If that’s where the show is willing to go from the outset, then it could end up going to even more depraved and shocking places than even Game of Thrones dared to.
When Queen Aemma was introduced in the midst of a pregnancy in the pilot, it seemed to set up a multi-episode arc. It seemed that Aemma would be a major player in the cast of the new series and that her pregnancy would be the backbone of the first season. But midway through the episode, she went into labor. During the delivery, the doctors told King Viserys that there was a chance to save the baby, then proceeded to describe an experimental medical procedure that sounded like a crude version of a Caesarean section. He warned Viserys that the blood loss would kill his wife, but he still allowed them to go through with it.
While Aemma begged for her life, the doctors ripped open her womb and went digging around for the baby. In true Game of Thrones fashion, the filmmakers left little to the audience’s imagination with an extended sequence of blood-soaked doctors going wrist-deep into Aemma’s womb. And despite taking such drastic measures to save the king’s much-needed heir, the baby still didn’t survive the procedure. Cut to the wrapped-up body of the baby being burnt on a pyre in a bleak memorial service. And that was just the first episode.
In the second episode, a few short months after losing his wife and child in such a horrific manner, Viserys is under pressure to find a new bride to impregnate with a new heir. With limited options for who his next queen could be, the king is set up on a date with his preteen niece. This isn’t quite as morbid as the gruesome deaths of a mother and her baby during childbirth, but it’s a different kind of dark. This scene has all the expected awkwardness of a first date with the added discomfort of one of the people on the date being a child promising to deliver many babies. Viserys even realizes how weird it is to be dating his niece, but he entertains the idea of marrying her and fathering her children anyway.
If the show is making the audience feel this level of distress and discomfort from the outset, then who knows how much worse it will get? It certainly won’t take a step backwards after such a bold opener. At the very least, the show will maintain this level of darkness going forward. But it’s more likely that the writers are building to even more shocking moments later down the line. Game of Thrones started out with a shockingly violent pilot episode and the subsequent seasons only got more and more shocking and violent from there.
Game of Thrones kicked off its run with an incestuous sex scene and a little boy being thrown out of a window. The season ended with the supposed series lead being publicly decapitated. Within a couple of years, the show delivered the bombshell “Red Wedding” episode with the blood-soaked massacre of many beloved characters and a fetus. If House of the Dragon is giving audiences a disastrous childbirth and the cremation of a newborn infant’s corpse in the first episode, it could be building to even darker events than Game of Thrones’ infamous “Red Wedding.”
House of the Dragon is airing on Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.