Since its début, in 2022, “House of the Dragon,” the first and more epic of two current “Game of Thrones” spinoffs, has brought viewers back to Westeros with many of the familiar features of its beloved forebear: Ramin Djawadi’s jolly-sombre cello theme, schemers named Targaryen, the chopping off of body parts, incestuous power couples, dragons incinerating the hapless. As adapted from George R. R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood” by Martin and the series’ showrunner, Ryan Condal, what the show lacks, too often, is fun—nary a clever Tyrion or plucky Arya (Oysters, clams, and cockles!) to be found. But there’s plenty of fire and blood. “Dragon” ’s opening-theme sequence evokes “Thrones,” but more aunciently, camera panning over a kings-and-dragons-bedecked tapestry that seems to bloom with blood. Fifteen years on, our happy “Game of Thrones” days themselves seem like a distant prequel. In 2011, we expected life, and “Thrones,” to be pretty great; in 2026, we expect little, and shruggingly make the best of whatever weird shit is lying around. Like “Thrones,” “Dragon” requires careful attention, but instead of joy and sorrow about the fates of our onscreen friends, we’re rewarded with watching dozens of characters we’ve painstakingly kept track of—many with platinum hair, most with interchangeable fantasy names like Aegon, Aemond, Daeron, and Daemon—suffer or die in disgusting, tedious ways. Characters sometimes talk in inadvertent meta-commentary. “No, no, no!” Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) cries, while trying to humiliate an enemy. “I was supposed to enjoy this! What’s wrong with you?” A question for the ages.

In the just-concluded third season, set about a century and a half before “Thrones” and a century before the friendlier “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” the fighting between the Greens and the Blacks (or, if you like, the Blonds and the Yellows) rages on, in the seemingly endless Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons. (The Targaryens have dragons; in their House, apparently, dancing is a drag.) This season, Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy), the show’s closest approximation of a hero, finally claims the Iron Throne, many years after having been named heir to it, controversially, by her father, King Viserys I (Paddy Considine), in Season 1. Her faction is the Black Council; her rivals include her half brothers Aegon II Targaryen, supported by the Green Council, and Aemond (One-Eye) Targaryen, whose other eye was a casualty of a childhood family squabble. Children are often casualties, in fact, including, at the beginning of Season 3, Rhaenyra’s teen-age son Jace. He dies like a true Targaryen: during a huge power battle, amid friendly dragonfire, at the hands of a relative and an army.

Rhaenyra is an essential character to care about, and the series has succeeded in making her fairly sympathetic. At the beginning of the first season, she’s a young teen, played with sensitivity and intelligence by Milly Alcock. In those more innocent times, she bonded with her best friend, Alicent Hightower (Emily Carey), zippily piloted a dragon, coped with the loss of her mother, endured her father remarrying, to Alicent—what the hell!—and was named heir to the throne, in a land that doesn’t want a female ruler. The births of Aegon and Aemond further confused succession plans. By this season, she has long been married to her second husband, her creepy, calculating, and sporadically decent uncle, Daemon (Matt Smith). Rhaenyra has always shown signs that she could be a good ruler, and the series skillfully portrays the legitimate difficulties she faces, from empty coffers to a local rat problem to dealing with everybody’s issues while having menstrual cramps. In one inspired moment, she invites wealthy noblemen to dinner, serves them cooked rats, and cheerfully announces that teams of royal enforcers are right this minute visiting their houses and confiscating their hoarded food. This is the kind of stabbing-free content that I wish “Dragon” would further explore, especially if leavened with the humor it’s capable of. 

In Westeros, everyone always fights about the Iron Throne—a chair like an iron cowlick, constructed with actual swords seized from vanquished enemies, jutting every which way. One female visitor describes the Iron Throne as “a hundred sharp little cocks all vying for attention.” (To be fair, they’re not that little.) While his half sister does her best at King’s Landing, Aegon, agitated, dragonless, presumed dead, and on the loose, roams the countryside in venerable “Thrones” style, disguised as a peasant and dealing with peasant problems, which he resents. This season, Aegon often has the sort of characterization you’d expect of a lovable underdog poised for eventual triumph—physical challenges (burn scars, perma-scowl); soulful-looking travelling companion (Matthew Needham); time spent in a shabby, charming caravan—but he’s horrible, and eventually everybody starts telling him so. He’s got “once and future mad king” written all over him.

Other major players include good old Alicent Hightower (in adulthood, Olivia Cooke); the legendary seaman and royal adviser Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), a.k.a. the Sea Snake, and his family; Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin), a classic “G.o.T.”-style spooky lady in a desolate castle, who helps Aemond and sees the future; and my personal favorite, the awful Ormund Hightower (James Norton), Alicent’s cousin, who has a Littlefinger-like handsome, meddling eccentricity, and who, despite the fact that he lives in Westeros, helplessly swoons at strong odors. Ormund is trying to maneuver his ward, Daeron Targaryen, Alicent’s son, onto the Iron Throne, not completely out of altruism, and can’t always get to his smelling salts, so he does things like yell, “I will cleave the bitch from crown to cunt!” and then double over barfing, because something smells bad.

Where does it all go? Aegon, strikingly, does manage an underdog’s comeback, atop his resurrected dragon, Sunfyre. He triumphantly begins a vengeful spree and starts Dracarysing his enemies (“Screaming continues,” the subtitles read), and, blasting into Harrenhal, makes a big entrance in front of Aemond, who thought he’d killed Aegon last season. “I’m alive!” Aegon shrieks. Aemond responds with humble contrition, which enrages Aegon—and which, I admit, is quite funny. Escalating Green-on-Black fighting dominates the finale. “I don’t want the best of you—I want the worst!” Daemon happily hollers to his troops. In a series distinguished by copious disgusting battle scenes, Ormund co-stars in one of its very grossest—a gross-on-gross-on-gross flambé—and almost gets in one last barf. The series shows us one Pyrrhic victory after another, and this whoop-de-doo battle is no exception. The Targaryens have an unfair advantage in the realm, but with great dragons come great responsibility—and great opportunity to self-destruct.

The ever-expanding HBO George R. R. Martin-verse, which gets baggy on the fringes, reminds me of an idea in Michael Chabon’s “Wonder Boys.” The book’s professor hero is writing a two-thousand-page novel that he can’t finish, because he doesn’t want to leave his lovingly created world: he’s got too many “buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming.” For HBO and viewers, Westeros can feel like that, elaborately constructed, endless with possibility, and hard to escape—but, instead of chiming clock towers, in “Dragon” we get heads on a spike. There’s little lightness, little love, and sex seems like a device to create more characters to kill, with blood and fire galore. ♦