George RR Martin has cleared up a character absence in House of the Dragon.
The author of the show’s source material, Fire & Blood, has praised the HBO series, the first season of which was overseen by Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik.
In a new blog post, he addressed the fact there is a substantial time jump between each episode, something that has divided fans since the series began in August.
Martin wrote about when TV shows used to have 39 and 22 episodes in a seasons, adding: “Cable shrunk that even further. The Sopranos had 13 episodes per season, but just a few years later, Game of Thrones had only 10 (and not even that, those last two seasons).”
He stated: “If House of the Dragon had 13 episodes per season, maybe we could have shown all the things we had to ‘time jump’ over… though that would have risked having some viewers complain that the show was too ‘slow,’ that ‘nothing happened.’”
Despite this, Martin says he is “thrilled that we still have 10 hours every season to tell our tale”, noting that Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series The Rings of Power “has only eight
Looking ahead to future seasons, he wrote: “I hope that will continue to be true. It is going to take four full seasons of 10 episodes each to do justice to the Dance of the Dragons, from start to finish.”
Martin did lament the scenes that have been lost to the first season’s time jumps, though, and in doing so, confirmed the existence of a character from the books many readers have been wondering about.
He wrote: “Do I wish we’d had more time to explore the relationship between Rhaenyra and Ser Harwin, the marriage of Daemon and Laena and their time in Pentos, the birth of various and sundry children (and YES, Alicent gave Viserys four children, three sons and a daughter, their youngest son Daeron is down in Oldtown, we just did not have the time to work him in this season), and everything else we had to skip? Sure.”
This confirms that Daeron, a character who many of martin’s fans felt had been cut from the series, will very much be a part of future episodes.
‘House of the Dragon’ continues in the UK on Sky Atlantic on Monday 29 August at 2am, before repeating at 9pm later that day. It is also available to watch on NOW.
