All Of House Of The Dragon Until Now Has Been A Prologue

thegamer.com:

This article contains spoilers for all released episodes of House of the Dragon.

I was talking to a friend about House of the Dragon earlier this week, and he asked why the show started at the point in Westeros’ history that it did. Given that the series has already jumped forward in time on multiple occasions just five episodes in and that most of the season’s major developments have been resolved fairly quickly, I think that’s a fair question.

It’s an especially conspicuous issue given that House of the Dragon will swap out two of its leads in the next episode. Milly Alcock and Emily Carey, who have played Rhaenyra and Alicent for the first half of the season, will be replaced by Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke in episode six. The older actors will, presumably, continue to play the characters for the rest of House of the Dragon’s run. So, why did the show start when the characters were too young to be played by the actors who would be playing them for the rest of the series? Why introduce audiences to actors only to replace them when viewers are most attached to them?

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I don’t feel like we can pass judgment on the swap until we’ve seen D’Arcy and Cooke in the roles for a while. But, I do think that there’s a good reason that the show started when it did. It has become increasingly clear that the series’ first five episodes have been a prologue for the ground the rest of HotD will cover.

The series’ pilot set up the conflict that has been simmering throughout the first half of the season. King Viserys’ wife, Aemma, died in childbirth, and the infant son ripped from her womb in a forced C-section only lived a few hours longer. That left Viserys without a male heir,