'House of the Dragon' episode 9: In King's Landing, a king's missing
By the time it's done, HBO's House of the Dragon will have adapted a hefty, 225-page chunk of George R.R. Martin's 737-page 2018 book, Fire & Blood. Season one is on track to churn through roughly 75 pages' worth. If you do the math, factoring in five seasons, it doesn't square.
But of course adaptation isn't a function of strict, empirical mathematics. Choices are made to condense or breezily elide certain characters and events, while assiduously and deliberately unpacking others. Also, Fire & Blood isn't a conventional fantasy novel filled with fully dramatized scenes to reproduce — it instead presents itself as one historian's attempt to reconcile various conflicting accounts of discrete milestone events that occurred long before his time. Hence this season's time-jumps and actor re-castings, which attempt to account for the sweep of years.
I think it's safe to say we're done with the time-jumps now, as the civil war this show is fixing to dramatize — the so-called Dance of the Dragons — takes place over the course of just three years. So with the coronation of Aegon II, the triggering event of the Dance, these are our players for the duration.
The characters in Blood & Fire are a lot more...linear, shall we say, than those of House of the Dragon. More ruthless, more single-minded, less troubled by stirrings of doubt and empathy. But the two works still co-exist neatly, if you imagine House of the Dragon as the real events, and Fire & Blood as the history of those events that's filtered down to someone writing about them centuries later.
Take this week's episode, in which a split occurs among those who back Aegon's claim, the Greens. A reluctant Alicent vies with her more ruthless father Otto — not over whether to crown Aegon the Aess, they're completely united on that front — but over how to go about it and how to deal with Rhaenyra and her allies.
No hint of any such split occurs in , but
