Bran Stark sees from a window at the top of a tower a couple practicing a dance that is not exactly dragons. Oh. The man approaches, grabs him. He asks her age. seven years old “Things I Do For Love” he says, resigned, while, without even looking at him, throws the child into the void. It is the end of one of the chapters of ‘Game of thrones’, the first book of the saga begun and not yet finished by George RR Martin. But it could be perfectly, without changing dialogues, rhythm or tension, the ‘story board’ of this same scene, which also wildly ends the first chapter of the HBO series, in which the writers only had to bother to change the age, from 7 to 10 years. Just three pages later, we can ‘read another image’ anthology, that of Tyrion Lannister slapping his insufferable nephew.
During the first seasons, the writers of ‘Game of Thrones’ played with a winning card. George R.R. Martin (with a past as a TV scriptwriter, by the way; in fact, he wrote the books because in his time, before the golden age of the series, the medium was not mature enough to take on the story he had in his head) he had already written the books on which the scripts were based: and the memorable phrases, the scenes that were fixed in the memory of the followers of the series, were already there.
What happened in the last four seasons? George RR Martin could no longer intervene directly (in a recent interview he complained bitterly that they had not fulfilled his desire to shoot between 10 and 12 seasons) and there was (and still is not) a way for him to finish the two books that were missing and on which they should be based.
Something just didn’t work: viewers lamented that the action lurched along, almost as if the characters teleported, chafed at the lunatic transformation of their beloved kaleesi, argued whether the role of the white walkers was enough, and missed characters from the books who faded into TV. But what was missing was something else. Martin’s dialogues. He left a narrative arc in the hands of the ‘runners’ of the series, which he transmitted to them orally in a couple of meetings… but, try to remember a memorable phrase like “the things I do for love” in the final stretch of the Serie.
With ‘House of Dragon’, or ‘The House of the Dragon’, Martin has once again been able to intervene more directly, and to have a scriptwriter of his strict confidence at the controls, Ryan Condal, and a good range of characters. Fans have noticed and appreciated it, but… The history of the Targaryens in the new series stems from ‘Fire and Blood’, a fictional story written by a fictitious maester in the pastiche style of a medieval chronicle. This is the tone: “Viserys Targaryen, the first of his name, was naturally generous and friendly, and was greatly appreciated by both lords and commoners.” We have Martin… but not his dialogue.
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So far, no phrase to remember. Instead, perhaps only the scene in which the script winks at the outcome of ‘Game of Thrones’, with the king entrusting his daughter with the role that his descendants will have when the frozen zombies come down from the North while she touch a dagger Yes, it’s that dagger!
Well, the scene shows that aside from killing and mating with each other, in the Targaryens the family dialogue fails and the order does not pass from generation to generation. And also that if something is missing from ‘La Casa del Dragón’ it is that touch. Some “what I do for love”. Or at least a “the night is dark and full of horrors.”
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What is missing from ‘The House of the Dragon’