Entertainment Desk, Bangladesh Global: There's no-one to root for in this nihilistic spectacle about the horrors of war, as the characters "march towards annihilation".
"Perhaps all men are corrupt," says Ser Cristen Cole in the House of the Dragon finale. "And true honour is a mist that melts in the morning." It is, as his fellow concerned knight offered, "a bleak philosophy" but it is one that felt fitting for a season of television primarily concerned with exhibiting the human cost of war.
While the marketing campaign for the second series of the Game of Thrones prequel urged fans to declare for either Team Green or Team Black, the show's warring factions, the series itself seemed determined to make the case for neither. Its final episode concluded a season of sacrifice: of hopeful bastard dragonriders, of firstborn sons and of principles. The bar for ethical behaviour is low in Westeros but still few people clear it, so locked are they in mutual destruction.
It is in the rich tradition of Game of Thrones for people to be terrible but the former had both characters you could just about call "good" (Davos Seaworth, Samwell Tarly, Brienne of Tarth) and characters that engendered love despite their flaws (Arya Stark, Tyrion Lannister, The Hound). Since House of the Dragon sent Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best), the Queen Who Never Was and arguably the show's most easily backable character, plunging to her death from her decapitated dragon, it became clear that heroism would not be rewarded here.
As Team Black's ever more fanatical exiled queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy) shifted from a woman devastated that her misinterpreted words led to the brutal beheading of a child to one comfortable with barbecuing scores of her illegitimate relatives in an attempt to find new dragon riders, Team Green's spiralling Dowager Queen Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) was relieved of almost all her power by a procession of disappointing men (several of whom she has unfortunately given birth to).
Instead it was the words of doomed Rhaenys that came to define this second season: "Soon they will not even remember what it was that began the war in the first place." Her correct prediction of a self-perpetuating cycle of destruction was both a nod to the source text Fire and Blood (written as a series of retrospective scholarly histories that do not always concur) and a sign that despite ostensibly mirroring its predecessor in being about who should (and who actually will) sit on the Iron Throne, this series is actually about a long, slow and brutal descent into the nihilism of war for war's sake. Early on, we saw how the Rivermen used the Targaryen infighting simply as a convenient excuse to escalate an ancient feud, and by the finale, we had Cole cooly accepting: "We march now toward our annihilation".
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