House Of The Dragon’s Time Jump And Recastings Are Pretty Jarring

Yesterday, it finally happened. While House of the Dragon had already covered four years in five episodes, the story being told here requires a much longer arc of time. And as of episode 6, that required a huge, decade-long time jump into the future, which required the recasting of at least four young actors from the first five episodes, including its two main stars.

Yesterday, Milly Alcock was replaced as Rhaenyra by Emma D’Arcy and Emily Carey was replaced as Alicent by Olivia Cooke. The Velaryon siblings were recast as well with older actors, each having gone through two other versions already.

I’m not sure how I feel about this, and in practice, I thought the time skip was pretty jarring. It’s not that the new actors aren’t doing a good job, it’s just that everyone is acting much, much differently ten years later, and it’s a little hard to play catch up.

Rhaenyra has been busy stupidly having royal heirs with the Captain of the City Watch, Ser Harwin Strong. This is even more blatant than the whole Robert/Cersei/Jamie situation with his blonde children, given that Rhaenyra has Targaryen silver blonde hair and Laenor is both black and that whole family has white hair, making her transgression extremely obvious to “everyone with eyes,” as the show says. She genuinely feels threatened by the rumors so by the end of the episode, she’s running away to Dragonstone after it’s clear Alicent won’t take her peace offering of a marriage between their children. It just doesn’t really feel like the same Rhaenyra we’ve spent five episodes getting to know.

Alicent has now morphed into a much more hardened version of herself, determined that her children will not be threatened by Rhaenyra’s pending inheritance of the throne. And it seems she is being led to the only conclusion may be that everyone needs to die that is not her and her children. I think I like this version of Alicent more, it’s just…wildly different than what we’ve seen from her.

Daemon, meanwhile, formerly cunning and ambitious has spent the last ten years essentially doing…nothing? Having a couple kids with his wife, who prefers to be cooked by her own dragon than die a boring death unable to give birth in a faraway mansion. I assume Daemon will be back on the hunt for the throne from here, but it’s weird to think of him essentially just being retired the last ten years.

Viserys…how is this man still alive?? I get that they still want to push the succession conflict, but if so, I don’t know what they were leaning so heavily on the idea that he was on death’s door a literal decade ago, and somehow he’s…survived all this time and has shown up in even worse health now, looking like the literal cryptkeeper.

Given that the full saga of Fire and Blood is supposed to take place over about 30 years total, this is probably not the last time we’ll fly through time like this. But I don’t know how I feel about how fast-forwarded this feels, how much these characters have changed, both in terms of their personality, but also their actors, as the show has lost some valuable assets.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.