A few days after The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, it’s House of the Dragon’s turn to unveil the finale of its first season. With the experience gained on Game of Thrones, but with less resources than the colossus Amazon and a much less family program, has the serial blockbuster managed to impose itself? SPOILER WARNING! SPOILERS WE SAID! THIS IS THE FINAL BARBEUK The first season of House of the Dragon has therefore ended, not without having escaped with honors from a complex situation, not to say inextricable. Descendant of the Game of Thrones phenomenon, a series that surprised, fascinated and ultimately revolted, even its most devout fans, this new production had to reconnect with the passion of yesterday, without attracting the same wrath, while remaining constrained to renew itself in depth, at the risk of appearing to be a pale copy. So many difficulties, which will have turned into successes, particularly visible in this final episode, which manages to form an almost perfect loop with the pilot of the series, the themes it proposed, while opening up fabulous avenues for the future. . We bet that the whole will still have to deal with a few fixed opinions sometimes quite far from reality, or manifestly tinged with irrelevant emotions, when it is not the object of a non-sensical comparison with its model. For real, the table is beautiful Thus, those who have been grieving for weeks about the quality of the special effects will undoubtedly find reason to complain, the episode which interests us being, even more than those which preceded it, an amplitude of visual mastery almost unheard of in contemporary serial production. We are once again seized by the funereal photography of the whole, alternating between the golden hues of rotting residences or the icy reflections of fortresses beaten by the rain, as well as the plethora of details, and the desire of the series to always retain a strong meaning. Witness this table of stone devoted to strategic reflections, which the Targaryens nourish with flames, so that it reveals the information which has been engraved on it. Like its owners, it is only in the combustion and the blaze that it reveals itself. Each scene brings its share of nuances, of mise-en-abîme, as if the small theater in the process of being transformed into a game of massacre unfolded in front of us was indeed the plaything of ancient gods, who would have disseminated, here and there, the clues of their involvement. A sense of fatality and tragedy that multiplies the strongest elements of this final chapter. The only boss THE MIDNIGHT DAEMON Fearsome, devious and willingly enraged, Daemon must face several trials, perfectly arranged by the narration. While his unborn child suffers the fate of a forgotten stoma on a pierrade, he must partly take the reins of an aristocratic and military alliance aimed at restoring his wife to the throne, without replacing her, nor let his penchant for chaos obliterate his chances of success. Once again, the character is remarkable for its nuances and thwarted passions, so many contradictory lines that the staging and its interpreter capture wonderfully. Smith’s increasingly twisted facies is articulated perfectly within a visual grammar that always plays on scales, alternates high and low angles, effectively increasing both the character’s confusion and its eruptive nature. “Do you think they’ll talk about the table on Widescreen?” At his side, the cutting unfolds naturally to make us feel how the situation threatens with each word uttered to become uncontrollable. It is that alongside this lineage, life itself seems to have to die out. A curse that closes on Rhaenyra, who, like her mother before her and as she already did in the middle of the season, must face a painful motherhood. The scenario will not have the stupidity to make him know a fate similar to that of Daemon’s previous wife or his own progenitor, and his family will only be more tested. It is therefore to a premature and stillborn child that she gives life, and the Queen is prevented from being thus consecrated like a terrible womb, over which hovers the shadow of death and betrayal. Betrayal that she imposed on her first husband by bearing other descendants than her own, death that she spreads henceforth, when her title and her marriage should finally ensure her happiness. The Unknowns took fare WATCH THE MEN FLY After the expected coup, consecrated by Episode 9, we awaited the response of the legitimate branch of the dynasty, discarded by the Hightower clan. Certainly we glimpse the beginning of a strategy, we guess possible battles, but the portion of drama and adrenaline that we were entitled to claim will come from a rather unexpected narrative arc, which carries within it the potential for lasting revolutions within of the franchise. Game of Thrones had imposed itself in the last moments of the end of its first season, completely switching to fantasy thanks to the image of a freshly hatched dragon. Her descendant manages to reinvent them. They who were until now only interchangeable weapons and almost devoid of personality, saw their role considerably increased during the 10 episodes of this inaugural season. A very beautiful family, perhaps a little too large For the first time, we discover them disobedient, when Lucérys and Aemond face each other in the heavens. The second having doubled the first in the game of diplomatic alliances, here are the two enemies clashing on the backs of dragons… until their mount disobeys them. During this technically quite breathtaking scene, composed to perfection, according to a tempo as intense as it is brutal, it is the legacy of Game of Thrones which is intelligently transfigured. House of the Dragon had striven to put dragons back at the heart of not martial issues, but rather symbolic issues. The creatures have thus become synonymous with honor, power, until the last moments of episode 10, where they are now able to fully embody the passions that devour their masters until they seem uncontrollable. We feel that these two are going to get along well And when Vhagar’s jaws close on Lucerys, the series does not pretend to seek to move us, we have spent far too much time with the young prince for the seeing it crushed by a scaly monster is a profound emotional issue. On the other hand, it is a surprise and a total conceptual shift. The strength of House of the Dragon was to reinject humanity into a universe that its success had larded terrible weights. Not only HBO achieved this goal, and this from its pilot, but its success will have been until concluding its first season on a promise of an extraordinary tragic spectacle, and on the advent of its central figure, the dragon, finally elevated to character status. Season 1 of House of the Dragon is available in full in France since October 24, 2022 on OCS