House of the Dragon Has a Four Season Plan

House of the Dragon’s first season is racing in the direction of an inevitable climax: the breakout of civil warfare between the myriad factions of the titular House Targaryen. But the place does it go from right here? Well, the excellent news is that George R.R. Martin is aware of precisely the place, and the way lengthy it’ll take.

Discussing House of the Dragons’ myriad time jumps in its debut season on his Not A Blog personal site, Martin contemplated the time have to cowl the story of this fateful interval of Westerosi historical past. Acknowledging that there have been issues that the sequence had already selected to not cowl from the unfastened particulars of historical past we knew from Martin’s writing in Fire & Blood—like Alicent and Viserys’ fourth little one, Daeron, who’s “down in Oldtown, we just did not have the time to work him in this season,” in line with the author—Martin additionally mirrored on the shortening of TV seasons in his lengthy tenure as a author for the small display screen.

“When I was a boy, shows had 39 episodes a season. By the time I was writing for Beauty and the Beast, it was down to 22. 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),” Martin mused. “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.’ As it is, I am thrilled that we still have 10 hours every season to tell our tale.”

As such, Martin additionally confirmed that House of the Dragon will proceed to inform that story for one more three seasons, ought to HBO proceed to resume it. “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 concluded, earlier than including, ought to anybody be able to ask him about pages, “but right now, Ryan Condal’s focus is on HOT D season two, and mine is on The Winds of Winter.”

Aside from the truth that it’s completely pleasant that George R.R. Martin additionally calls the present “Hot D,” as a result of secretly deep in aspect we’re all kids, it’s a great and refreshing factor from the get go that it appears the creator and the artistic workforce behind House of the Dragons even have an settlement on simply how lengthy this present may, and will, play out. That’s one thing that clearly grew to become a sticking level on Game of Thrones because it drew in the direction of its divisive conclusion, and why Martin has spent his time since its finish both asking us to close up about The Winds of Winter’s launch date or letting us know that his books will do issues otherwise.

It’s exhausting to say if this plan for House of the Dragon could persist. So much may occur within the time it takes to make one other 3 seasons, the present has already made a grand job of expounding on the small print Martin shared of this era in Westeros in Fire & Blood, and it’s clearly been extremely fashionable thus far. HBO need would possibly extra, who’s to say. But for now at the least, it’s relieving that House of the Dragon is seemingly constructing to one thing its predecessor struggled with: an finish level it is aware of nicely upfront.

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