Many eons ago, back in the show’s watercooler heyday, I hosted an annual Game of Thrones pub quiz. Every year, the most popular round was the same: Name That Bum. The round involved projecting giant screenshots of isolated arses – Daenerys Targaryen’s pre-bath buttock-flash, Khal Drogo’s ponytail-swishing full moon – on the wall and asking the audience to name the proud owner. Well, it’s fortunate that no one’s asked me to host a House of the Dragon quiz yet, because the round would last approximately 30 seconds and the answer would be Matt Smith.
Of course, we’re only three episodes in to this intriguing but thus-far rather pensive prequel, so anything could still happen and probably will. But by the third episode of Game of Thrones we’d already borne witness to an entire generation of rutting Lannister siblings, the ludicrously shag-happy alfresco wedding of Daenerys and Drogo and an absurd amount of background action at two pillow houses. So far in House of the Dragon, there’s been one decidedly awkward sequence in a house of ill repute, one brief moment of sexposition between Prince Daemon (Smith) and his paramour Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno), which seemed to exist solely so rabid Doctor Who fans could live out their dream of seeing the erstwhile Time Lord’s alien bumcheeks, and one pornographic tapestry hanging in the quarters of the irksome Ser Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans).
