House of the Dragon brings back the long travel times of Game of Thrones

Among the many notorious shortcomings of Game of Thrones‘ last two seasons on HBO, one of the most illustrative and important to the fandom was how long it took for characters to get from place to place. Early in the show, when they had the books as guides, travel around Westeros often took weeks, if not months, especially if someone was traveling with a large group. As the show went on, however, the travel time began to get shorter and shorter, with characters crossing most of the continent in mere seconds of screen time, and armies teleporting across land in what seemed like moments.

After the excellent first season, House of the Dragon didn’t really need much to continue to distinguish itself from the mediocre last seasons of Game of ThronesBut if there was any doubt, the travel times we saw in Season 2 should prove it. House of the Dragon is definitely more like Game of Thrones at its best.

(Editorial note: This post contains spoilers for House of the Dragon season 2 episode 4.)

No character in House of the Dragon makes the show’s long journeys more apparent than Rhaenyra. The head of the Black contingent has spent most of Season 2 somewhere other than her seat at Dragonstone for one reason or another, mostly flying around on her dragon Syrax, mourning the loss of her son. But the tipping point for everything was when she decided to sneak off to King’s Landing.

Other characters, like Daemon or Arryk Cargyll, can have a fairly easy time flying over Blackwater Bay to move between King’s Landing and Dragonstone, but in any version of Game of ThronesSmuggling the most important person in all of Westeros into the greatest city on the continent was always going to be a slow, careful process. We see her approach the city via a small boat, fully disguised as a Septa, something that had to be done patiently and methodically so as not to arouse suspicion.

But instead of just letting her hop in and out of town, House of the Dragon turns the inertia of Rhaenyra’s plan into a full-fledged plot point. Not only is she not at Dragonstone, but her absence has real consequences — just like Catelyn Stark’s journey south in Game of Thrones‘ first season. As we see in episode 4, her council is growing restless without its leader. They still support the queen, but without her to truly lead them, the power vacuum is becoming too much for many of them to stomach, especially now that Daemon is also out of the castle and only Corlys and Rhaenys can keep the peace.

Photo: Theo Whiteman/HBO

This may all sound small and perhaps even unimportant — after all, it’s just a plot point about waiting. But for many Game of Thrones Fans, the questions about travel time in the original series were a clear sign that the show was making concessions. The realistic nature that initially set the show apart from all other TV shows was sacrificed for cheap drama and contrived encounters.

At its core, the Game of Thrones series is one that is built around treating fantastical situations and settings with honesty and often grim (quasi)realism; Eddard Stark loses his head and his children by making bad decisions, whether he is the main character or not. Part of that is that traveling across a continent is time that cannot be spent governing it. When Game of Thrones those little details lost, it lost some of the grounding that made it special. Thank God House of the Dragon is here to bring back the soul of the franchise – one long journey at a time.