The new season of HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon is on course to be the best in the show’s history, at least according to fans reviewing the show on IMDb.
New episodes are currently airing every Sunday, with the first installment of the show’s third season arriving June 21 and the second following June 28.
That recent second episode, titled “Queen’s Landing,” has quickly become the best-reviewed episode in the show’s history with an aggregate IMDb score of 9.5. The first episode, “Salt and Sea, Fire and Blood,” also scored an impressive 9.2.
That means the first two episodes have outscored the equivalent episodes of all but one season of the original Game of Thrones series.
That was the much-loved fourth season, which scored 9 and 9.7 for its opening two episodes and went on to become the highest rated season in the show’s history.
The new episodes have continued a Game of Thrones trope of killing off major characters in shocking fashion, with two high-profile deaths arriving so far.
However, not everyone has been so impressed with the latest offerings from House of the Dragon.
In a three-star review of the new season for The Independent, critic Nick Hilton argued that one inevitability in life is that the series will be “compared unfavorably to its acclaimed progenitor, Game of Thrones. With the prequel back for a third season – and despite my genuine desire to say something new and interesting – that comparison once again looms large over a show that has never fully understood its own appeal.”
Hilton went on to say argue that while “House of the Dragon is perfectly watchable fare,” the show “exists in a strange limbo.”
“It is disappointing only in comparison with Game of Thrones, yet without the world-building and fanbase of its predecessor, it would not make any dramatic sense,” wrote Hilton. “And so, even though it is lazy to say it, the show remains darkened by the shadow of its forebear. 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.”
First airing in 2022, House of the Dragon was the original Game of Thrones spin-off to air on HBO. The more comedic A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiered earlier this year, while multiple other spin-offs are currently in development.
