Critic Reviews
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
More dragons did not have to mean less humanity, and yet the balance remains off in a show that is dazzlingly bombastic but disappointingly shallow.
-
These first four episodes might as well be an encapsulation of the series as a whole – disjointed, thrilling and maddening at any given moment, yet inescapably compelling.
-
The show tries desperately to stay aloft, and sometimes reaches brilliant heights, but it just as often sinks beneath the water, dragged down by the as-yet-unfulfilled promise that all these characters and plots will eventually pay off.
-
It is essentially a historical retelling of fictional events, made for a crowd of geek obsessives who know the granular details that fill in the larger sandbox in which the war between Alicent and Rhaenyra’s loyalists is fought. .... There’s a sense of cloudiness about the bits and pieces of each of the show’s plotlines–even in its third season, when clarity should be at its sharpest.
-
It tries its best, even giving Rhaenyra a speech about having the “weak and feeble body of a woman”, which borrows almost word for word from Elizabeth I’s famous address at Tilbury before the Spanish Armada arrived. But this points to an essential difficulty I have with this show: all too often it feels so old hat, so reheated and, well, so, so boring.