“Dragon,” for all the money HBO has reportedly spent on it, is a more buttoned down and drab affair, a condition that carries into the second season. Besides Eve Best as the dragon-riding matriarch, Princess Rhaenys, and Ewan Mitchell as the fearsome Aemond, no one in the cast rises far enough above the show’s general level of dogged professionalism to make a significant impression. And when they do appear, its dragons look and sound more domesticated.
The new season begins with the truculent alpha Targaryens, Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney), plotting in their respective castles. Rhaenyra, the rightful heir to the Iron Throne — it’s just easier to use the jargon — is in exile with her uncle-husband, Daemon (Matt Smith). Her half brother Aegon sits on the throne and governs like a petulant child, to the consternation of his mother, Alicent (Olivia Cooke), who was Rhaenyra’s best friend until she married Rhaenyra’s father, the previous king.
(“Dragon” is a family saga with tangled, tortuously incestuous relationships, and it doesn’t go to much trouble to sort out who’s who for the less-than-obsessed viewer. For an extra fee, you can watch it on Prime Video and use Amazon’s helpful onscreen character and actor guides.)
The questions are political — who will end up with the crown, and how much blood will be shed in finding out — but the stakes are personal. The women are inclined to favor negotiation and compromise while the men are ready to unleash the dragons, but bonds between mothers and sons, dead and alive, complicate matters.
The heightened, blood-spattered domestic drama is intelligently framed, and some of it is moving. Glynn-Carney manages to draw a smidgen of sympathy for Aegon, who is in over his head to a tragic degree, and Smith communicates the mixed feelings of Daemon, whose sense that he, too, has been cheated of the crown tests his loyalty to his wife-niece.