‘House Of The Dragon’ SFX Error Is Almost As Bad As That ‘Game Of Thrones’ Starbucks Faux Pas

Well it was bound to happen sooner or later—it’s just too bad it happened sooner!

House Of The Dragon is a great show and one of the things that sets it head and shoulders above most every other television show out there is the attention to detail when it comes to costumes, sets and special effects.

This is a slower, more deliberate, perhaps even a bit more grown-up version of Game Of Thrones, if not yet quite as relatable. It’s grim and dark and complex. You can tell that all kinds of love and attention went into crafting each and every scene.

But even then, sometimes mistakes can slip between the cracks. In this case, one of the show’s wonderful little details also ended up being its first oversight.

King Viserys I Targaryen (Paddy Considine) sits the Iron Throne nearly 200 years before the birth of Daenerys. Being king doesn’t look like a particularly rewarding job, especially for someone as affable as Viserys who just wants everyone to get along. He doesn’t like to make hard decisions or face hard truths, and he often ends up upsetting everyone and pleasing nobody.

But the Iron Throne has other perils beyond politics. It’s made out of swords, for one thing, and Viserys keeps cutting himself. Some of these wounds become infected. At one point he loses a finger. Later, after a two-year time-jump, eagle-eyed viewers noticed he’d lost another digit and was now walking about with only three on his left hand.

And here is where the SNAFU happened. Considine had to wear a green screen glove of sorts in order for his fingers to be edited out during post-production. During a brief scene when Viserys was handing a sealed message to one of his royal messengers, as he passes the scroll over you can see his green fingers still intact:

You can see it in action here:

This takes place at about the 46-minute mark in Episode 3 “The Second Of His Name” (read my review of the episode here). As you can see it’s . . . actually pretty hard to see. I think the Twitter user above either has a much brighter/higher contrast setting than I do because mine is a lot dimmer.

This is clearly not as bad as the Game Of Thrones Season 8 faux pas in which a Starbucks coffee cup could be seen clearly on the table near Daenerys and Jon Snow, but it’s still a bit worrisome given how new this show is and how much money they’re throwing at it to succeed.

Of course, I wrote a list of ten major problems with that specific episode of Game Of Thrones not including the Starbucks cup, that’s how bad Season 8 was. Fortunately, Season 1 of House Of The Dragon is infinitely better—even if I’m still not sure I really love any of the characters yet. Maybe I’ll never love them, but I sure do enjoy how complex and well-acted they all are!

I can forgive the odd SFX slip-up if the rest remains this high-quality. Hopefully HBO goes in and edits out the fingers, much like they eventually did with the wayward latte.