‘Like it was lit with a single tea light for a bet’: House of the Dragon has a terrible problem
Usually, when it comes to writing about House of the Dragon, the agreed etiquette is to place a spoiler warning near the top of a piece, to ensure that no important plot details are ruined for anyone a few episodes behind. But there’s no need to do that here, because I’ve watched the most recent episode of House of the Dragon, and, with a gun to my head, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what happened in it.
If you saw the episode, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Things definitely did happen in the episode, I’m sure of it. At one point, a yellowy brown smear may have got imperceptibly closer to another yellowy brown smear, and then there was the bit where a grey thing wobbled about on a background that was almost exactly the same colour. There might have been a castle in it but, even though I squinted at my screen so hard I dislocated my face, there’s a good chance that it was actually a person, or a shrub, or a vase or something.
Which is to say that, I’m afraid, Game of Thrones is at it again. For all the brickbats hurled at that show’s final season – for the wholesale junking of a carefully detailed world in favour of a scramble to a stupid end – it’s important to remember that one big criticism at the time was that some episodes were so ineptly lit that nobody watching had the foggiest idea what was going on.
In particular, there was the episode entitled The Long Night. This was meant to be the episode the entire series had been building towards, where the army of the living faced off for the final time against the army of the dead. Viewers had been looking forward to this for years, since it promised to be a spectacle unheralded by anything that had ever been televised. But then the episode came out, and the lighting was so sludgy and poor that for all anyone knows the production team made it by shutting a camera in a filing cabinet and making a load of “YARR” noises in the background.
It was so impossible to watch that, when HBO Max introduced an HDR viewing option to its service this summer, the main reaction from the public was “Great! Now I might be able to see what the hell happened on that Game of Thrones episode from three and a half years ago!”
Until now, House of the Dragon has been careful not to replicate the failings of its mother show. Even with the built-in time jumps, it has developed its world slowly and methodically (arguably too methodically, as anyone who has spent the last month waiting for Paddy Considine’s Viserys to die will attest).
Foolishly, I thought that might also mean that all its episodes would be properly lit. But oh no. This week’s House of the Dragon feels like it was lit by a single tea light for a bet. There were times when the proceedings were so incomprehensibly murky that watching it felt like being in a coma. You could recognise voices, but you sure as hell couldn’t open your eyes to see them.
As ever, the powers that be maintain that the episode looked like that on purpose, due to an “intentional creative decision”. But others think differently. Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk is under the impression that the episode was actually shot day for night, in a violently inept way.
And this just after a comprehensive cast change, too. It was bad enough last week, working out who each character was supposed to be now that they’re being played by brand new actors. And now you’re making us do it blindfolded? House of the Dragon, what on earth are you playing at?