House of the Dragon

House of the Dragon | Official Trailer | Max
Max  

Only now that I am writing this did I realize the title of the show was not House of Dragons, but rather House of the Dragon. I don't suppose it makes any difference.

The show started off this evening with the narrator speaking in Valerian or Targaryen, some made up language live Elvish or Klingon. He's droning along and there is a translator speaking at the same time, but softly. Then we get to the court and a couple of words pop out: 'princess' and 'cousin'. Okay, those two bits of information might be important. I'm not too worried, eventually they will feel the mood has been set and they can switch to English. But then we get to people speaking and they are still speaking this made up language so maybe we need the subtitles. Pop up that menu and what do we see? Audio is set to Polish! Well, that would explain why it sounds like gibberish, so I set it to English and we restarted the show.

Right off the queen is pregnant and she reminds her daughter that her battlefield is bearing children. She dies giving birth. In spite of all our medical advances, childbearing is still a risky business. The risk might be low,  maybe one death out of several thousand pregnancies, but it is not zero. Kind of weird that no one ever talks about it. I guess it's kind of like bad car wrecks, everyone knows they are awful when they happen, but usually they happen to someone else so they are not worth discussing.

It looks like they might take a closer look at the whole dragon thing. They start with a dozen dragons and some eggs. Beyond being cool and awesome, postulating the existence of dragons raises some interesting questions, like:

• where would you keep them?
• how much do they eat?
• what kind of metabolism must they have in order to support flight?

Enquiring minds want to know.

My previous explanation of dragons:

I prefer to think the dragon legends come down to us from a previous civilization that had mechanized, flying war machines like the A-10 Warthog. After that civilization collapsed and the art of heavier-than-air aircraft was lost, how would you explain something like an A-10 to your kids? "There were fire breathing monsters that flew through the air and destroyed everything in their path". That's how.

A related show: Damsel