House of the Dragon Season 2 Review & EPIC Breakdown: Everything You Need to Know

What’s up, guys? Carmine here, and finally, we have another House of the Dragon Season 2 trailer, possibly the last big one we’ll get before the start of the new season.

House of the Dragon Season 2 vs. Rings of Power

And, of course, before we get started, I am aware that Amazon chose to release their Rings of Power teaser a few hours before this trailer, and I got to say props to them for announcing the release of their show after House of the Dragon ends. For those of you who don’t know or don’t remember, two years ago, both Amazon and HBO released both shows around the same time in some friendly competition, and it was clear that House of the Dragon was going to come out on top, and it did. This time, Amazon has learned their lesson, kind of, and will wait until House of the Dragon season 2 ends on August 4th. Though something tells me that House of the Dragon will win this year once again, but who knows, stranger things have happened. As always, if you’re a fan of movies or web series, then bookmark TV Talk Today for more coverage on everything related to Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon. Let us know your thoughts and what you think about the trailer in the comments below! But for now, let’s dive in.

Damon’s Return: Intriguing Beginnings

HBO’s House of the Dragon Season 2 trailer starts off with Damon back in King’s Landing in the throne room. At first, I thought this was a scene from season 1, and they were putting in some stock footage, but no, I can’t find a scene from season 1 where he has on this outfit in there, so it’s either a dream sequence, a vision, or he legitimately snuck back into King’s Landing for some nefarious reason. Though, I will say it’s kind of weird that he doesn’t have his signature cloak if he’s sneaking about, as we all know, in House of the Dragon, the mystical cloak allows almost any character to get away with almost anything because of its insane stats.

Dragon Eggs and Character Changes: Intriguing Clues Revealed

Next up, we get some quick shots of Jace with Krian Stark over at the Wall, Allison in the field somewhere, and what appears to be dragon eggs, and possibly Daenerys’s dragon eggs. That’s definitely the implication they were going for here, and we’ll have to see how far Shunner Ryan Condell wants to include that storyline in this because in the Fire and Blood history book, we know that a character sells some eggs to the Sea Lord of Braavos for a ship to sail around the world, and the idea is that eventually these eggs would petrify and be given to Daenerys as a wedding gift almost 200 years later in Game of Thrones. Since Condell is connecting Targaryen history to the White Walkers, it’s possible he’ll try to connect and insert the mystery of where Daenerys’s eggs came from in this season.

Damon’s Strategy: A Bold Move Towards Victory

Next, we get several shots we’ve all seen before, and then we land on this one here of Rira picking up a sword. For those of you who don’t know, in the books, Rira doesn’t really do much during the opening stages of the war, so it’s possible that they’ll change that to give her a more active role in the fighting or even directing armies on the front lines. This is a change we’ve seen previously with Baya in the other trailers, where characters who aren’t really active in the books are having their storylines altered to give them more to do.

Marching Armies and New Alliances: The Spectacle of War House of the Dragon Season 2

Right after this, we see Damon trying to get Ry to go with him to King’s Landing, possibly to bring the war to a swift end by attacking quickly. Both Damon and Rainer are older and more experienced than Aegon and Aan, so it’s reasonable that Damon wants to take advantage of this inexperience and launch a full-scale assault on the capital. If you’ll recall, this is something Daenerys wanted to do in Game of Thrones but was cautioned out of it by her advisers. So, it’s possible that the first scene in the trailer isn’t a dream, but Damon doing his own thing, which we’ll get back to in a minute.

Foreshadowing Battles: Rook’s Rest and House Stokeworth

Next up, we see that the Green Council has come together, and Egon wants to know how they should proceed with the coming war. Everyone has differing opinions, but he wants revenge. As far as we know, nothing crazy has happened yet against him and his side for him to want that, but we do know that if Damon is sneaking into the Red Keep, some terrible stuff has had to happen to the Green side, possibly some revenge for what the Greens did to Luke in the season finale.

Royal Tensions: Rira and Damon’s Dynamic Unveiled

Next, we get some beautiful shots of the Lannisters marching to war. Even though I like the original Lannister armor from Game of Thrones, I got to say I love their precursor armor too. It’s absolutely stunning. Apparently, they hired the same costume designer from Thrones, and honestly, I think they nailed it. Kudos to them for that. This scene here is part of the War of the Ravens, which kicked off in the last episode of season 1. Basically, the Targaryens are calling all of the great houses to see who will join them. Of course, Ravens aren’t enough, so we’ll see that Baya and Jays are also going out there as well. A good chunk of the trailer is armies coming together and marching, and it really puts the reality of war in perspective for us, and I really like that. We didn’t get much of that in Thrones with all the armies coming together, so I’m all here for it.

Family Dynamics: Dragons, Conflict, and Love

Of course, for all our book nerds in the comments, we have House Stokeworth, Darkland, and Ros, all houses from the Crownlands, so we can expect a Rook’s Rest battle this season. But the most telling part of the trailer is the drama forming between Rira and Damon and whether or not he respects her as Queen. And I’m kind of glad they’re addressing this because if you’ll recall, Damon was originally Vas’s Heir in episode one, and then the whole Prince for a Day Joe came out, and well, yeah. Damon is always someone who has his own ambitions for the throne. And while I’m not saying he has plans on betraying her, he is called the Rogue Prince for a reason. I think the big question this season between these two will be is fighting his enemies or their enemies. We’ll just have to see.

Introducing New Faces: Key Players in the War

Next up, we finally get a good look at Aon’s Dragon Sunfire and him flying around King’s Landing in his custom armor while Allison and Aman’s relationship breaks down. Allison, even in the Green Council episode last season, has never wanted the High Tower takeover to be through bloodshed, which is why she wanted to get to Aegon first. But now, it’s just unavoidable. What I like about this is it’s just like Viseras told Rira in episode one about the idea of them controlling the dragons being a lie. And you can kind of extend that to the Targaryens as well. In this season, we’ll see a lot of this. Allison can’t stop her sons from becoming awful murderers, and Rira, well, Rira can control Damon in his. It really does infect all of these people one way or another.

Teasing Intrigue: Msarya’s Return and Political Maneuvering

Now we finally get to what the other trailers have been lacking: new characters. First and foremost, we get a great look at the resident Stark for the show, Krian Stark, played by Tom Taylor. I love how he has the Stark ancestral sword with him and the direwolf pin. Nice touch. We also get a great look at Allen of Hall, played by Juac Car Saleem. If he looks familiar, he previously played Father on Raised by Wolves, and honestly, he was my favorite character on that show, so I’m glad to see him here. I’m not used to him being bald, but I’m excited that he’s joined the cast on the Valyrian side. And on the Green side, we see Alice Rivers, who according to Entertainment Weekly, will be behind some crazy stuff happening in Harrenhal and will affect Damon in many ways. The quote here from writer Sarah Hes is Alice served as a wet nurse to many of the babes born at Harrenhal over the years, but like Melisandre from Game of Thrones, she courts the Supernatural, and no one knows her true age. However, because Melisandre and the Supernatural are mentioned, they had to clarify that nobody’s giving birth to a smoke baby, let’s put it that way. All this is meant to do is bear down on Damon and make him question things when he arrives at Harrenhal. He can’t sleep, there’s weird going on, he’s not sure if it’s real or if it’s in his own head. We just wanted to have unexplained things and then use that as a conduit to lay him open a little more than he would be in normal life. So basically, Alice is the diet coke version of Melisandre, just without any magic, which is perfectly fine. Magic has always been a part of the series, and I get that some people don’t like it, and that’s fine too, but even a sprinkle of it here will be okay.

Closing Moments: Meleys’ Flight and an Ominous Warning

Once again, honestly, I’m just glad we’re getting a look at the new characters, especially now that the show is opening up to a lot of Westeros with the war looming. So this is good. I like this. And now, before we close out the trailer, we see that Aan is in bed with someone, and he’ll likely be getting a love interest. We also see Rainer, who appears to be in another location than she would be normally in the books. I’ll expand on this in another video, but it does have to do with Ryan Condell expanding character storylines. And of course, we also see a return of Msarya, who has been noticeably absent in a lot of the new trailers. First and foremost, her accent is considerably better, and she mentions the other side of the Game of Thrones, the game part where you can play it in more than one way, which leads us to some quick shots of subterfuge in the season, backstabbings, bribes, assassinations, and inciting revolts, the usual CK2 stuff. We also see some shots of dragons fighting because of course, we do. And finally, we see Rya on her Dragon Meleys. If you pause at the correct moment, you can see that wherever the green army was marching towards in the first half of the trailer, she is there as well. We close out the trailer with Rira standing in front of the Dragon Vermithor. We know this because he has the spikes around his jaw, which is taken directly from the Fire and Blood history book. And as we fade to black, the words “war is coming, and neither of us may win” is heard.

Trailer Review and Fan Reactions: The Verdict is In

Overall, I really enjoyed this trailer. It gave us everything we’ve been wanting and then some. We got the armies marching, appearances from new, well-known Book characters, conflicts from each side among their own forces, dragons fighting, some nice teases here and there, and good old-fashioned Game of Thrones intrigue. It’s all here, and it delivered. 10 out of 10. And not to rile up the fandom rivalry, but I think ours beat out the Rings of Power one. But who’s keeping track? Let me know what you guys thought of it. I really liked it, maybe you didn’t. Let me know if you agree or disagree, and did I miss anything you might have caught?