Review: House of the Dragon, "King of the Narrow Sea" | Season 1, Episode 4
A queenly parallel bears the challenges of a patchy timeline in the series' early episodes
When they first announced they were adapting A Song of Ice and Fire into a TV show, I wrote a piece reflecting on rereading the books with that in mind, and pondered at how the show could use themes to connect its disconnected stories together. And while there were certainly Game of Thrones episodes along the way that embraced this potential, I can think of very few episodes where the entire episode boiled down to a single idea. There was just always that outlier of needing to check in with Daenerys, or moving along a story that doesn’t really have much thematic material to grasp onto.
House of the Dragon has, thus far, been heavily committed to thematic storytelling, mainly because there’s nothing the show needs to be addressing at any given time. In telling this period of history, jumping months or years between episodes, the story is what the writers determine the story to be, and thus if they choose to let a character or a story be sidelined for an episode, so…