House of the Dragon's song of grief and guilt

"THERE IS NO WAR SO HATEFUL TO THE GODS AS A WAR between kin," a wise character observes in the second season of HBO's House of the Dragon.

- JUDY BERMAN

"And no war so bloody as a war between dragons." Sadly, by the time those words are uttered, both kinds of war have come to seem inevitable.

King Viserys I Targaryen (Paddy Considine) is dead, and his bratty son Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) has usurped an Iron Throne that rightfully belonged to his older half-sister, Rhaenyra (Emma D'Arcy). Season 1 ended with the spilling of first blood, when Aegon's brother Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) watched his dragon, Vhagar, devour Rhaenyra's son Lucerys (Elliot Grihault).

It doesn't matter that Aemond didn't intend to kill the boy. Lucerys' death, which came so soon after that of his peace-loving grandfather, sets off a wave of violence that mounts as the second season of the Game of Thrones prequel progresses.

As Rhaenyra's Black faction and Aegon's Green slide slowly toward all-out civil war, House of the Dragon cements its place in George R.R. Martin's dark universe by rejecting platitudes about honor and bravery that suffuse so many fantasy epics. Instead, this harrowing season exposes the unique forms of grief and guilt that result when one nation-and the family that leads it-declares war on itself.

In a welcome break with the relentlessly expository first season, which raced through decades' worth of traumatic births and deaths at a pace that made it tough to feel immersed or even invested in the palace intrigue, the first half of Season 2 unfolds patiently, in the immediate aftermath of Lucerys' fatal flight. His older brother, Rhaenyra's heir Jacaerys (Harry Collett), is at Winterfell, confirming the loyalty of the Starks.